Publications

The Philippines’ experience with rail transport may be characterized as one that is riddled with underappreciation towards the latter. Nevertheless, Arturo G. Corpuz has proven in his book, The Colonial Iron Horse: Railroads and Regional Development in the Philippines, 1875–1935 (1999), that a diligent look at repositories both in the Philippines and abroad allows the reconstruction of the still-nascent subject of the history of rail transportation in the Philippines. Corpuz shows in The Colonial Iron Horse that beyond simply moving people and freight, Luzon’s once extensive railways were also a significant factor in the development of its towns in the period straddling the latter part of the Spanish colonial period to the beginning of the Commonwealth period. Despite Corpuz not being a trained historian, The Colonial Iron Horse has remained an unparalleled work in Philippine railway history. Beyond documenting Luzon’s formerly extensive railway system and discussing its role in shaping the historical trajectories of different places, Corpuz’ work is also a useful guide book in our presently transport crisis-laden cities illustrating that transportation infrastructure should always take into account local realities for it to be efficient, economical, and beneficial.

The existing historiography on the Japanese Occupation of the Philippines is replete with studies on the resistance movements, both the organized forces and the guerrilla units who fought the Japanese. Written by Filipino and foreign scholars alike, these studies have underscored the heroism of countless military men and
guerrillas who came from all walks of life. What has been often overlooked and has yet to receive the same scholarly attention is the underside of the war: Filipino collaboration. While political collaborators-figures in the government such as Jose P. Laurel and Jorge Vargas-have been well documented (see Steinberg 1967; Agoncillo 1984; De Viana 2016; Satoshi 2012), paramilitary collaborators, or those who not only took the Japanese's side but also took up arms against pro-American Filipinos and Filipino guerrillas, remain obscure. It is imperative that these narratives be also brought to light to uncover the disturbing truths and realities of the war. Without an adequate understanding of these paramilitary groups and informers, our purview of the Japanese occupation period remains myopic.

Our collective wonder of plants is as old as human history. For centuries, and to this day, we continue to marvel at their beauty and bounty. The study, identification, naming, collection, cultivation, use, and trade of plants have inspired the progress of civilization: from the fertile valleys of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates and the agri- cultural revolution, Plato's heavenly plane tree (Platanus orientalis) and the essence of humanity, Guy de La Brosses Jardin du Roi and its botanical cures, the quest for spices and the course of world history, Gregor Mendel and modern genetics, Louise Glück's "Wild Iris" and the universal quality of her poetry (1993), to Daniel Chamov- itz's lives of plants (2012)-these are only some of the varied examples that highlight
the entwined histories of plants and humankind across time and space.

My reading of this book was interrupted by two conferences, a typhoon disaster, and hours of household chores. Needless to say are the moments when I had to stop after reading a few lines of Barbaza's phenomenological explication on the metaphysics of literary traditions and nation-building. These instances of pagsabat against my own hearing-speaking with the book, I recently learned, may not only be confined within the semantic field of the Tagalog sabat, that is, indicative precisely of speech, because in Bikol, where the pasture of meanings is larger, sabat is "to meet someone, to welcome, to encounter, to run or bump into someone unexpectedly, to row against
the current, to go against the grain, to stand up to or face up to someone" (Mintz & Britanico 1985,
458).

The Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte offers an investigation of President Rodrigo Roa Duterte’s regime of fear which weaponizes death to control life and masks violence through his obscene and vulgar articulations. It is an interrogation of the machinations of the sovereign, a political strongman, in relation to the governed. The book also examines how Duterte’s surge to power was contingent on the Philippines’ history of electoral violence and its people’s neocolonial condition by using Michel Foucault’s “biopolitics” and Achille Mbembe’s “necropolitics” as analytic lenses.