The voluminous book provides a range of international theories and methodologies in analytical folklore investigations, and a classification scheme based on genre is offered as the system of taxonomy for Philippine traditional materials. Lopez counts on the regional folklorists to refine the classification according to the texts of their respective areas. The different genres, too, are explained and examined in another part of Lopez's study. The reader will definitely find interesting and useful, the illustrative examples for each genre.

An exhaustive study that may well be the first attempt to analyze and systematically classify traditional Filipino games, an important aspect of the Filipino traditional heritage.

A young man's journey through the Philippines' most unlikely obsession: basketball. In Pacific Rims, Rafe Bartholemew, journalist, New Yorker, and veteran baller, ventures through the Philippines to investigate the country's love of basketball. From street corners where diehards fashion hoops out of old car parts to the professional league where politicians exploit team loyalties to win elections, Pacific Rims gets the story-and gets in the game.

""Playing with the Big Boys" traces the development of basketball in the Philippines from an educational tool during the early period of American colonial rule in the early twentieth century to a ubiquitous national pastime"--

War and Resistance in the Philippines, 1942-1944 repairs the fragmentary and incomplete history of events in the Philippine Islands between the surrender of Allied forces in May 1942 and MacArthur's return in October 1944. No book has comprehensively examined the Filipino resistance during this crucial period. Here, James Kelly Morningstar provides for the first time a comprehensive history of the protracted fighting by 260,000 guerrillas in 277 units across the archipelago. Beginning with the Japanese occupation, the collapse of the United States Forces, Far East (USAFFE), and the simultaneous rise of the complex, diverse Philippine guerrilla movements, Morningstar exposes the inadequacy of MacArthur's conventional plans while revealing his inchoate preparation for guerrilla resistance. Morningstar then recounts in detail the impromptu resistance led by refugee American and Filipino soldiers, local politicians, and social revolutionaries left to battle the Japanese--and each other--with emphasis on how Japanese, American, and Filipino actions influenced and proscribed each other. From a distance, MacArthur contacted select guerrillas and organized agents to deliver supplies and radios to them by submarine. In this way he empowered some to gain power as part of a united framework under his leadership. This not only kept alive the resistance that denied the Japanese exploitation of the Philippines while setting the conditions for MacArthur's return, it also ensured that no one guerrilla leader could challenge America's supremacy. MacArthur's selective support to guerrilla groups that encouraged continued Filipino dependence on the United States would prove fatal for the incipient Maoist social revolution on Luzon. Even so, the Filipinos' shared sacrifice in their act of resistance fueled a national consciousness that created a sense of deserved nationhood. War and Resistance in the Philippines, 1942-1944 concludes with a brief discussion of legacies of the guerrilla resistance. MacArthur's return reestablished the power of American and Filipino political elites. Guerrillas and other citizens who had experienced exceptional hardship now had to fight for recognition. However, the war had resulted in a more united Philippine national identity along with new political institutions to repair the divisions between the formerly exiled government, the collaborationists, and the members of resistance. These momentous years of struggle in the Philippines changed the tide of history and challenge our understanding of war and resistance.

"Wurfel presents a full examination of the island republic from independence to the present, placed in the context of the Philippines' long and rich history. . . . [He] has taken advantage of new research and publications, and has devoted more than a third of the study to the Marcos and Aquino administrations. . . . This is an important book--a study no student of Philippine politics and society can ignore."--Choice

In this wide-ranging cultural and political history of Filipinos and the Philippines, Vicente L. Rafael examines the period from the onset of U.S. colonialism in 1898 to the emergence of a Filipino diaspora in the 1990s. Self-consciously adopting the essay form as a method with which to disrupt epic conceptions of Filipino history, Rafael treats in a condensed and concise manner clusters of historical detail and reflections that do not easily fit into a larger whole. White Love and Other Events in Filipino History is thus a view of nationalism as an unstable production, as Rafael reveals how, under what circumstances, and with what effects the concept of the nation has been produced and deployed in the Philippines. With a focus on the contradictions and ironies that suffuse Filipino history, Rafael delineates the multiple ways that colonialism has both inhabited and enabled the nationalist discourse of the present. His topics range from the colonial census of 1903-1905, in which a racialized imperial order imposed by the United States came into contact with an emergent revolutionary nationalism, to the pleasures and anxieties of nationalist identification as evinced in the rise of the Marcos regime. Other essays examine aspects of colonial domesticity through the writings of white women during the first decade of U.S. rule; the uses of photography in ethnology, war, and portraiture; the circulation of rumor during the Japanese occupation of Manila; the reproduction of a hierarchy of languages in popular culture; and the spectral presence of diasporic Filipino communities within the nation-state. A critique of both U.S. imperialism and Filipino nationalism, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History creates a sense of epistemological vertigo in the face of former attempts to comprehend and master Filipino identity. This volume should become a valuable work for those interested in Southeast Asian studies, Asian-American studies, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies.

Revealing glimpses of the Philippine Revolution and the Filipino writer Jose Rizal emerge despite the worst efforts of feuding academics in Apostol’s hilariously erudite novel, which won the Philippine National Book Award. Gina Apostol’s riotous second novel takes the form of a memoir by one Raymundo Mata, a half-blind bookworm and revolutionary, tracing his childhood, his education in Manila, his love affairs, and his discovery of writer and fellow revolutionary, Jose Rizal. Mata’s 19th-century story is complicated by present-day foreword(s), afterword(s), and footnotes from three fiercely quarrelsome and comic voices: a nationalist editor, a neo-Freudian psychoanalyst critic, and a translator, Mimi C. Magsalin. In telling the contested and fragmentary story of Mata, Apostol finds new ways to depict the violence of the Spanish colonial era, and to reimagine the nation’s great writer, Jose Rizal, who was executed by the Spanish for his revolutionary activities, and is considered by many to be the father of Philippine independence. The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata offers an intoxicating blend of fact and fiction, uncovering lost histories while building dazzling, anarchic modes of narrative.

"A bravura performance."—The New York Times Histories and personalities collide in this literary tour-de-force about the Philippines’ present and America’s past by the PEN Open Book Award–winning author of Gun Dealers’ Daughter. Two women, a Filipino translator and an American filmmaker, go on a road trip in Duterte’s Philippines, collaborating and clashing in the writing of a film script about a massacre during the Philippine-American War. Chiara is working on a film about an incident in Balangiga, Samar, in 1901, when Filipino revolutionaries attacked an American garrison, and in retaliation American soldiers created “a howling wilderness” of the surrounding countryside. Magsalin reads Chiara’s film script and writes her own version. Insurrecto contains within its dramatic action two rival scripts from the filmmaker and the translator—one about a white photographer, the other about a Filipino schoolteacher. Within the spiraling voices and narrative layers of Insurrecto are stories of women—artists, lovers, revolutionaries, daughters—finding their way to their own truths and histories. Using interlocking voices and a kaleidoscopic structure, the novel is startlingly innovative, meditative, and playful. Insurrecto masterfully questions and twists narrative in the manner of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, and Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Apostol pushes up against the limits of fiction in order to recover the atrocity in Balangiga, and in so doing, she shows us the dark heart of an untold and forgotten war that would shape the next century of Philippine and American history.