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Akda: The Asian Journal of Literature, Culture, Performance

Keywords

novel, infrastructure, slow violence, Anthropocene, neoliberalism

Abstract

To read the novel is to read history from a vantage point, and to read Jun Cruz Reyes’s metafiction novel, Ang Huling Dalagang Bukid at ang Authobiography na Mali: Isang Imbestigasyon (2011), is to read unaccounted-for experiences of violence in spaces that house the spectacle of national infrastructure. Informed by concepts from environmental humanities and urban studies, this paper explores the intersection of infrastructure and violence in Ang Huling Dalagang Bukid. It interrogates the choice experimental form of the novel, close reads descriptive passages about infrastructure, and highlights corresponding manifestations of slow violence impacting humans and nonhumans alike. The resulting analysis points to the apt choice of metafiction for stressing the built world of violence, the need to perceive infrastructure in connective than fixed terms, and the need as well to understand disaster in the Philippine context as springing more from choice than mere circumstance. Ultimately, the paper ultimately argues the necessary work of the writer to contribute to the creative and cultural infrastructure that counter optics-oriented development with grounded, multisensorial narratives of everyday life in globalizing spaces. Viewed as an utterance, Reyes’s novel is a demand for governance that gives high regard to the environment and the bodies that inhabit it.

First Page

28

Last Page

40

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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