(re)reading and (re)writing social relations under duress of the world order
Reading class relations in Philippine society, and explicating the middle-class problem in the urbanized postcolonial South.
Experimental lecture by Carissa Pobre
Readers in chorale: Creative writing students (Akemi Elgar, Joanna Fabricante, Laetitia Franco, Lia Gutierrez, Precious Santos, and Rhenzy Urmeneta)
EVENT
April 12, Saturday, 3:30-5:30PM @ Everything’s Fine Bookshop, Makati City
ABSTRACT
As a Filipino, it’s my personal dream to explain the state of class relations exhaustively. I’ll tell you why I have this dream. Which has been more like a fever, more like an illness. Give up on that premise, even scholars will tell you—unless you’re courting a kind of madness, or speaking in high theory, it’s right pointing out that you cannot really give an exhaustive account of something like it. Class, a defining feature of the experience of Philippine society, is both abstract and material, acute and slippery in all the ways that Filipinos (consciously or unconsciously) understand their identity. In fact not only their identity. But their possibility.
KEYWORDS
class relations, middle class, postcolonial cities, Philippine society