Kallautang---University of Hawaii Lecture

The UHM Ilokano and Philippine Drama and Film Program
and the National Foreign Language Research Center (NFLRC)


present

Kallautang as Ilokano Poetics of Exile
and the Exile of Ilokano Poetics: Implications
in Ilokano Language Teaching


Dr. Aurelio S. Agcaoili

The talk offers a reading of Ilokano exilic texts by using the trope of kallautang. Kallautang, loosely, is wandering. In this talk, the author looks at kallautang from three levels: cosmological, epistemological, and ontological. From these three levels, the author imports the aesthetic life of the Ilokanos and draw from there the connection of their literary works in their understanding of the world, in their mediation of what human life is all about, and in their attempt to look at existence in light of the demands of the meaningful and relevant.

With kallautang, there are two aesthetic movements that he intends to bring to the surface: (a) Ilokano poetics of exile and (b) exile of Ilokano poetics. The first movement talks about the texts and the discourse they propose on the reality of exile; here, we have a clear reading of the embedded ethnography of suffering seen in the cosmic, epistemic, and the ontological. The second movement talks the aesthetic displacement?and therefore, estrangement, which happens when the Ilokano texts are read from the point of view of exiles writing from exile.

Kallautang is a frame through which Ilokano exilic texts may be read, critiqued, or taught. The choice of this frame is pedagogic: it both teaches the student to look at the exilic texts from the Ilokano language as an attempt to communicate the complexities of exilic life and teaches him/her as well that all these attempts are culture and language-bound even if these are always-already also extra-cultural and extra-linguistic.

February 15, 2006 (Wednesday)
12 noon 2:00 pm
Korean Studies Auditorium

This talk is part of the commemoration of the centennial of Filipino immigration to Hawaii. It is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served. It is co-sponsored with the Center for Philippine Studies, English Department, Timpuyog ? Ilokano Student Organization, and Hawaiian and Indo-Pacific Languages and Literatures. For more information and for disability access, please call the Ilokano Language Program at 956-2226 or 956-8405 or email Precy Espiritu (precye@aol.com) or Julius Soria (soria@hawaii.edu). Funding was provided by the NFLRC.

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