Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7661-1612
Abstract
This introduction to the Kritika Kultura special issue positions contemporary Filipino fiction as a counter-practice to state-driven moral discourses that flatten history, depoliticize crisis, and naturalize inequity. Reading against the NCCA’s Filipino Values for the Common Good, the essay argues that literary work in Filipino refuses the primer’s rhetoric of timeless virtues by foregrounding structural violence, decolonial epistemologies, and the uneven terrains of translation. Through close attention to the nine selected works written originally in Filipino— and to the English translations that accompany them—the introduction shows how fiction enacts a literacy of refusal that interrupts the coercive demands of state, market, and algorithm. These stories illuminate three interlinked arenas: indigenous cosmologies as living critique; platform capitalism’s capture of attention and labor; and the everyday infrastructures of care that sustain alternative kinships across class and distance. The essay further reflects on translation as a contested space where sovereignty, accessibility, and institutional constraint collide. Loss becomes diagnostic, revealing linguistic, regional, and political asymmetries that unsettle any singular notion of “Filipino literature.” Yet translation also refracts, heightens, and estranges, enabling encounters that resist domestication. Ultimately, the issue argues for fiction as method rather than moral instruction: a recalibration of perception that invites readers to dwell in discomfort, attend to what wounds and sustains, and imagine futures not scripted by “values” as state commodity. In place of primers, it proposes pitstops—temporary sites of repair where narratives clear space to rethink what matters, and for whom, in a nation where belonging is always negotiated.
Recommended Citation
Samar, Edgar Calabia
(2025)
"Toward Somewhere Livable: Contemporary Filipino Fiction Against Primers
of Values,"
Kritika Kultura:
No.
48, Article 13.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.13185/1656-152X.2209
Available at:
https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss48/13
