Figuring Resistance

Castillo’s full-length study is a welcome contribution to scholarship on the literature and cinema of solidarity and resistance from the Philippines. Figuring Resistance highlights the contributions of independent films and novels produced aboveground to the critical and cultural work of nurturing oppositional, emancipatory, and emergent subjectivities, experiences, and politics. This book is a fitting testimonial to the enduring resilience and relevance of the multifaceted, myriad struggle for justice and equality as events and developments at the turn of the twenty-first century continue to lay bare the discontents and violence of “democratization.” –Caroline S. Hau, Japan This book examines how fiction films and novels represent the communist-led national democratic (NatDem) revolution in the Philippines. Produced aboveground decades after the Philippines’ historic transition from dictatorship to elite democracy, these NatDem fictions depict how the communist movement in the Philippines confronted various national and global changes, tracking revolutionary experiences amidst the ascendancy of neoliberalism, the continuation of counterinsurgency and the emergence of non-Marxist social movements and discourses. Figuring Resistance studies how fictions portray the tenacity of political commitment among revolutionaries engaged in the revolution's manifold history of crises, setbacks, and persistence. It illuminates the crucial role played by cultural work in creating and nourishing an oppositional public sphere, where the experiential makings of the liberation struggle in the Third World can be imagined. Laurence Marvin S. Castillo is an associate professor at the Department of Humanities, University of the Philippines Los Baños. He holds a PhD in cultural studies from the University of Melbourne. He is the author of the Digmaan ng mga Alaala: Rebolusyon at Pagkakamali sa mga Talang-Gunita (War of Memories: Revolution and Error in Memoirs, University of the Philippines Press, 2021), finalist for the Philippine National Book Award for Literary Criticism and Cultural Studies, and co-editor of Hindi Nangyari Dahil Wala sa Social Media (Did Not Happen Because Not On Social Media, Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2021), winner of the Philippine National Book Award for Media Studies.