UP Press launches 10 new titles
The UP Press launched ten new books last September 5 at the Balay Kalinaw, UP Diliman Campus, Quezon City. The titles run the gamut of biography to poetry and fiction, criticism to media theories, and art studies to science.
The ten new titles are:
Cesar Virata: Life and Times Through Four Decades of Philippine Economic History
by Gerardo P. Sicat
Business professor, college dean, management expert, Cesar Virata emerged as the most prominent technocrat during the presidency and martial law rule of Ferdinand Marcos. He rose to prime minister in the parliamentary government. Thereafter, he returned to the private sector as banker, respected citizen and community leader, and senior statesman. His public service career was tested by tumultuous shocks and demanding development problems–the energy crisis of the 1970s aggravated by currency and interest rate changes. In the middle of very challenging times, he helped to steer major investment, financial, banking, tax, and budgetary reforms until the People Power revolution in 1986. Through the lens of this biography, Gerardo Sicat reexamines four decades of Philippine economic history from the 1960s to the the 1990s, their complexities, their circumstances and context. The book spares no difficult issues–social and political upheavals, monopolies, corruption, plunder, crony capitalism, and economic rise and collapse.
Changing Philippine Climate: Impacts on Agriculture and Natural Resources
by Josefino C. Comiso, Catalino A. Blanche, Terry I. Sarigumba, Ma. Victoria O. Espaldon, Felino P. Lansigan, Nestor T. Baguinon, Roger C. Birosel, Jesusita O. Coladilla, Rex Victor O. Cruz, Leonardo M. Florece, Rafael D. Guerrero III, Rodel D. Lasco, Rosa T. Perez, Juan M. Pulhin, and Lourdes V. Tibig
The climate of our planet, including that of the Philippines, has been changing significantly during the last century primarily driven by anthropogenic activities. This book contains comprehensive information about the changes in climate and their impacts on the country’s environment, natural resources, agriculture, ecosystem, biodiversity, weather, and the quality of life of its inhabitants. Risk management and resilience are discussed along with selected strategies for mitigation and effective adaptation especially in agriculture, forestry, grassland, livestock, fisheries, and health.
Dance and Other Slippages: Critical Narratives on Women, Dance, and Art
by Rina Angela Corpus
Corpus’s critical essays are a thoughtful contribution not only to feminist art studies but also to the broader and ongoing feminist theoretical engagements of spatial theory/analysis. Not surprisingly, her work as a feminist intellectual crosses and bridges disciplinary boundaries because it is informed and enriched by her embodied experience. – Carolina Ruiz Austria, Instructor, Women and Gender Studies, University of Toronto..
Dance and Other Slippages is a collection of essays that grapples with questions in reading dance, art, and gender. Covering a number of Philippine women choreographers who are forerunners in dance in a number of ways, the essays look into the complicated entanglements of aesthetics, sexual politics, and material/economic realities that inform their works. -Dr. Ruth Pison, Associate Professor, Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of the Philippines
Masculinity, Media, and Their Publics in the Philippines: Selected Essays
by Reuben Ramas Cañete
This anthology focuses on the sustained critique of the forms by which masculinity is imagined, intuited, and instrumentalized in the contemporary postcolonial space of the Philippines, by analyzing and reflecting upon the political economy of visual culture. By “visual culture” we reify the anthropological basis of culture as a series of daily, regulated interactions and relationships of power between individuals, subgroups, and classes within a community or society, focusing on the peculiarly modern conventions by which visuality (the manner by which “seeing” becomes a means of knowing and feeling) has become a primary means of encoding these relations. Through the massified application of modern technologies and methods of popular dissemination … visual culture becomes part of the general problematic by which ideas of nation, affect, progress, and happiness are encapsulized into specific representations that are calculated to produce consumptive desire and the indefinite deferral of actualized material fulfillment. These are achieved through the propagation of ever-newer images of desire … What constitutes the intellectual promise of the study of masculinity in this context is the long history of practices and widespread range of manifestations by which male representations and agency intersect, and which gives the field an empirical archive from which to extract, analyze, and critique.
The Postcolonial Perverse: Critiques of Contemporary Philippine Culture Volume One and Volume Two
by J. Neil C. Garcia
The “names” of this work’s two volumes are the words of its title parsed into two–a heuristic apportioning of pieces that means very little, inasmuch as these words, as they conceptually operate in these texts, implicate and interpenetrate each other so thoroughly that they are practically synonymous. Which is to say: what is postcolonial is necessarily perverse, since perversion is the frustration of teleology and its requisite purity, the undermining of the normative and the narrative, the transitivity that troubles the supposedly pristine, eternal, and abiding. These are precisely what postcolonialism must imply, being that it is, among other things, the historically situated labor of arriving at a critical awareness of colonialism’s fractured and translated (and therefore eminently appropriable) “nature.”
Communication and Media Theories
by Rolando B. Tolentino, Patrick F. Campos, Randy Jay C. Solis, and Choy S. Pangilinan
The Media and Communication Textbook Series is jointly published by the Office of Research and Publication of the University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication and the University of the Philippines Press. The series features critical and theoretical writings by Filipino scholars that shed light on communication and media studies in the context of Philippine culture and society.
The textbook series includes Media at Lipunan.
Media at Lipunan
by Rolando B. Tolentino and Josefina M. C. Santos
The Media and Communication Textbook Series is jointly published by the Office of Research and Publication of the University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication and the University of the Philippines Press. The series features critical and theoretical writings by Filipino scholars that shed light on communication and media studies in the context of Philippine culture and society.
The textbook series includes Communication and Media Theories.
Taburos Han Dagat
by Victor N. Sugbo
The Red Sea and the desert were my environs during my writer’s retreat at El Gouna. The cool night wind of the sea and the cawing of black crows in the desert reminded me how far I was from home. I realized how it was to be an exile, the apprehensions I carried with me when I went to Egypt armed with only my deep faith in the letters of my hosts whose names I could not pronounce properly. Though I had never heard their voices, their words I always trusted. Something inexplicable pulled me to Egypt, and for this reason, I made my resolve to leave Tacloban, throwing all my cares away yet ready to face whatever uncertainties I would encounter. Once in Egypt, Cairo, Hurghada and Alexandria, I never felt I was a stranger among the locals. I felt safe and was able to write my poems there.
Boy in the Platinum Palace and Other Stories
by Maria L.M. Fres-Felix
Only a few of the young writers today know how to write a story. Many of them have gone to so-called writing workshops where they were homogenized and convinced that to make the grade they must be capable of flashy, wordy showing off. This will make their arrival noisy and glamorous. They forget that writing is storytelling—a craft which they have ignored in their avid search for style and originality.
Dada Felix is aware of the basics—aside from being a consummate craftsman, she has both style and originality and above all these, she knows how to write a story. She is, in fact, one of our very best writers in English today. This newest collection of her short fiction illustrates her excellence first and foremost as a storyteller. Her narrative skill is superb as bourne out by these stories, none of which is boring. This is the ultimate test of good writing—the reading. Does it bore or does it not? Most of these stories are narrated in the first person point of view. Whether the storyteller is a man, a woman, or even a child, he-she maneuvers in a very limited space which tests the imaginative skill.
Dada’s language is often spare but where necessary, it is adorned not so much with adverbs and adjectives but by the skillful use of choice verbs. And there are those tiny details which contribute to the plausibility of the stories, whether they pertain to economics, crime detection, or even history. All minutiae are refreshingly in place. Her futuristic account of the Revolution of 1896 for instance is an enjoyable read, historically accurate, but at the same time, delightfully imagined.
Dada is a trained economist and exalted public servant. It is not in the bureaucracy, however, where she will leave an indelible mark. It is in literature. Just wait for her first novel which is coming out shortly. It is seriously funny, compellingly readable, and transcedentally meaningful. –F. Sionil Jose, National Artist for Literature
For more information, please call the UP Press Marketing Division at 926-6642, or visit uppress.com.ph on how to order.
