Cebuano Scholar Launches Local History and Literature Reader

Cebu City — The University of San Carlos Press and the USC Cebuano Studies Center (CSC) will launch this weekend “The Resil Mojares Reader”, a book of 12 of the best scholarly works by the famous Cebuano social historian, USC professor emeritus and CSC founding director Dr. Resil Mojares.

The book, edited by CSC director Dr. Hope Yu, will be unveiled at 5 o’clock in the afternoon at the Ayala Activity Center, during a one-on-one conversation on-stage between Mojares and Manila-based fiction-writer, columnist, and publisher Jessica Zafra. The book’s release is timed with the three-day 2015 Cebu Litfest at the Ayala Center, which will bring together poets, writers, novelists, and essayists of Cebu.

Written between 1976 and 2012, the articles range from a variety of topics including Cebuano notions of personhood, space, and ‘world’, the historical formation of rural and metropolitan communities in Cebu, the symbolic dynamics of early Cebuano fiction, and the politics of nationalism as it played out in local controversies in the early twentieth-century over U.S. economic dominance, the Cebuano migration to Hawaii, and the political career of Sergio Osmeña.

Scholarly but accessible, the essays in this volume should interest Cebuanos as well as students in history, literature, political science, urban studies, and anthropology.

 

Resil B. Mojares is Professor Emeritus at the University of San Carlos, where he was founding director (1975-1996) of the university’s Cebuano Studies Center. He has been visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of California-Los Angeles, University of Hawaii, Kyoto University, and National University of Singapore. He has received numerous local, national, and international honors for his books and scholarly contributions.

Dr. Yu is professor of comparative literature at the University of San Carlos. She is current director of the USC Cebuano Studies Center.

Dr. Mojares will sign copies of the book, which will be on sale at P400 per copy during the event. Afterwards, copies can be obtained for P650 each at the following outlets: USC Museum (USC Downtown Campus, former Main Campus), Tel. 2531000 loc. 191; USC Press (USC Talamban Campus Gate 1) Tel. 23000 100 loc. 290; USC Cebuano Studies Center (Baumgartner LRC Building, USC Talamban Campus) Tel. 406 6079 . Phiazarra Publishing House Inc. has been designated the official external distributor of the book and can be reached at Tel. 505 2759. (Photos by the USC Press)