THE National Committee on Literary Arts (NCLA), University of San Carlos Press and the USC Cebuano Studies Center launched the latest publications of Dr. Hope Sabanpan-Yu: “Bridging Cultures: The Philippine Migrant Woman in the Works of Jessica Hagedorn, Fatima Lim-Wilson and Sophia Romero” and “Institutionalizing Motherhood in Cebuano Literature” last Saturday at the Buttenbruch Hall of the USC Main Campus.
Prof. Jose Eleazar Bersales, business manager of the USC Press, opened the launch to celebrate the books’ entry to the world together with NCLA Central Visayas coordinator Haidee Emmie Palapar.
Guest speakers Dr. Erlinda Alburo, former Cebuano Studies Center director, and Erma Cuizon of Sunstar Daily delighted the audience with their review of each book.
Bridging Cultures examines the works of three Filipino-American women writers who come to a new understanding of how nation and gender translate for Filipino women in diaspora. It sheds light into the ways of rewriting the Philippines from outside its borders and at the same time, from within the borders of the US. Women’s movement and writing between nations, cultures and languages represent a reterritorializing that records the ways in which nationalistic discourses construct gender differences and inscribe women into the narrative of the nation.
Institutionalizing Motherhood is a monograph that assembles the pieces of culture and history of motherhood, their changing faces and images through the centuries and the information which have grown up around them. It tackles the subject of what it means to be a mother in the different landmark eras, the Filipino attitude toward maternity and the complex interweave of discourses on motherhood in the Philippines.