It was the Asian Scholarship Foundation's ASIA (Asian Studies in Asia) Fellows Program that brought me to the very doorsteps of PSSC, which is ASF's partner institute in the Philippines.rnFor someone who fancied poems and whose day-job zvas literature, the entire universe was the size of a reading room. The favored company meant Shakespeare and Europe's feisty, existential novels, the oeuvre and absinthe of the French symbolists, and reams and more reams of photocopied essays.rnBut even literature was changing. From Althusser to Zizek, there were Marxists and total strangers on the reading list. The buzzwords included political economy, postmodernism, and paradigm shift, with frequent references to color, class, gender, and ethnicity, a passion for global sisterhood and the riveting pride of gays and lesbians! Critics were constantly looking for the nation in the pages of literature, probing their figures of speech to be in the service of revolutions and social change, raving about allegories that buttress discourses of heroism and radical ideology, carping about how Balagtas, Rizal, and Gregoria de Jesus have soldered their modern nation into being.
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