[csaa-forum] Mother-Tongue Education and the Question of "Regional Literatures": Professor Neil Garcia Public Keynote

[Timothy Laurie]

MOTHER-TONGUE EDUCATION AND THE QUESTION OF "REGIONAL LITERATURES": THE LIMITS OF MINORITY DISCOURSE IN THE PHILIPPINES

Professor J. Neil Garcia | University of the Philippines, Diliman
9.10am, 2 December 
Elizabeth Murdoch - G06 (Theatre A)
The University of Melbourne

In this public keynote hosted by the Minor Culture conference, Professor J. Neil Garcia will discuss the various and complex issues in the Philippines' national education policy, especially in the light of the impending overhaul of the public education system. This has involved not only large-scale changes in language-based teaching practices from kindergarten to year 12, but also a shift from bilingual (English and Filipino) to 'mother tongue' pedagogy for the first few years of primary school. These issues are both clarified and confounded by the practices and politics of the kind of minority discourse (with its centre/periphery or national/regional binarisms) that currently obtains in Philippine 'institutional' culture." 

In Professor Garcia's keynote, he will focus on the privileging of Tagalog and English as languages of instruction, as evidenced in the nonexistence of translations of the Hispanic novels of Jose Rizal-enforced as the country's official myth and required by law to be read by all Filipino high school and college students-in the other Philippine languages. This privileging is dissimulated by the nativist claim that Tagalog, euphemized as "Filipino," is already minor compared to the dominant medium of English and therefore suffices in allegorizing-in actuality, superseding-the interests of all other local languages, as well as in postcolonially addressing the opposition. 

Finally, Professor Garcia will argue the point that these national educational questions need to viewed against the backdrop of a linguistically plural and imperilled country, in whose far-flung regions many indigenous communities are currently being displaced because of destructive mining activities and the state-sanctioned militarization of their ancestral lands.

J. Neil Garcia is a renowned poet, literary and cultural critic. His celebrated recent essay collections The Postcolonial Perverse (2014) and Homeliness in Unhomeliness (2014), provide energetic critiques of identity-based approaches to literary cultures in the Philippines, and as keynote speaker for Minor Culture and leading speaker for 'Global Sexualities in the Literary Imagination' (7.30pm, December 3, Hares & Hyenas Bookshop), Garcia will draw from his formidable research portfolio as author of fifteen creative and critical books on literature, poetry and sexuality in the Asia Pacific.