Journal Title

Kritika Kultura

Title of the Article

Jose Garcia Villa: Vicissitudes of Neocolonial Art Fetishism and the "Beautiful Soul" of the Filipino Exile

Subject

criticism on Villa

transnationalization

list of authors

E. San Juan, Jr.

Abstract

The publication of Jose Garcia-Villa's Doveglion: Cllected Poems by Penguin Books in 2008 is remarkable not because it reveals a renewed interest in Villa"s work (as Luis Francia claims in the introduction of the book) but because it presents the nostalgic posthumous returned of the repressed. Francia, a Villa critic, fails to situate the poet in the context of the Philippines neocolonial status. Francia's mapping of Villa's trajectory as a poet is teleological; it elides those historical contexts that allowed US imperialist power to dominate the Philippine Political economy in certain periods. Timothy Yu, a Chinese-American Stanford scholar, contends that Villa is a "universal" writer whose mastery of the "imperial" language is impressive, not unlike Conrad's or Nabokov's. Both critics' evaluatins, in fact, reify the poet as a transnational figure, belying the Philippines' neocolonial status. In the face of criticism that rests easy with a pat labeling of the poet as a proponent of "art for atr's sake", what this paper suggests is a reading of this artistic practice as a symptom of the bourgeois artist's alienation from neoliberal globalization. In reading this as a symptom, I wish to fram Villa's work around conditions of posibility that are responsible for the resurrection of Villa as a classic.

Date Issued

2009