Current Issue: Volume 6, Number 2 (2026) Special Issue on the Philippine National Artists for Literature

The Literary Critic’s Unfinished Revolution

In January 2026, Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance made a bold call for submissions to its Special Issue on the Philippine National Artists for Literature. It aims to gather a sufficient collection of critical scholarship that examines the works of our National Artists within the interdisciplinary fields of literary, cultural, and performance studies, without excluding the other allied fields in the humanities. Aside from poetics and literary criticism, the proposed themes and scope of work include: the nation, the region, the nation-state, and the national artist; the writer read in the diaspora/in translation; historical construction and imagination in the writer’s work, and the interconnectedness in archipelagic studies.

For this Special Issue, the critical essays cover the works of the following National Artists for Literature: José Garcia Villa, Edith Tiempo, Nick Joaquin, F. Sionil José, Cirilo F. Bautista, Bienvenido Lumbera, and Rolando Tinio.

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Akda is pleased to initiate this issue’s conversation on the works of our National Artists and provide a space for critical reflection. We hope that such critical engagements shall, in their modest endeavor, contribute to our knowledge of Philippine literary masterpieces, and in some ways, serve our lives. In the weight of language, thought, or feeling, National Artist Cirilo F. Bautista soliloquizes against the weight of the world and the heaviness of human burdens. To Bautista, the writer is at constant war. In “Notes on the Literary Life,” he claims that all his life he has been writing to justify his existence. Upon reaching the seven ages of men, he shifts to meditating about his existence to justify his writing. Bautista states: “There can never be a ceasefire in the writer’s war with the irrational, the incompetent, and the corrupt, whether they work in the government or outside of it. That is the very substance of his existence, though he may not be aware of it; when he is aware of it, that becomes at the same time the very passion of his existence” (355). Literature, as an imagined form of living, documents and recreates the power of the pen in its creative interrogation of the malfeasance and moral turpitude in the dark bowels of society. Literary criticism then acts as a double-edged sword, piercing the comfort zones of our minds and provoking us to a mode of self-reflexivity as we investigate the recreation of life’s travails and miseries in Philippine literature.

We join the writer at war. This is the critic’s unfinished revolution.

Preliminary

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