Asian American Studies Program presents
“Philippine Palimpsests: Filipino Studies in the 21st Century”
March 7 & 8, 2008

Levis Faculty Center, 3rd Floor
919 West Illinois Street, Urbana, Illinois 61801
217.333.6241

Conference web site:
<http://www.aasp.uiuc.edu/PhilippinePalimpsests/index.html>http://www.aasp.uiuc.edu/PhilippinePalimpsests/index.html
<<http://www.aasp.uiuc.edu/PhilippinePalimpsests/index.html>http://www.aasp.uiuc.edu/PhilippinePalimpsests/index.html>

A) March 7, 2008
6:00 p.m. - 8:00 pm
Plenary Speaker: Professor Reynaldo Ileto
“American Scrapbooks: Two Filipinos’ Experiences of the Imperial
World”

“In this autobiographical presentation, I reflect upon the journeys of
two Filipinos to the United States, initially through the scrapbooks of
photos and other memorabilia of those events. My father, born in 1920,
was a product of U.S. colonial rule. His journey to West Point, New
York, in 1940 turned him four years later into a soldier of the empire,
to fight the Japanese and, later, the Communist enemy. I was born in
1946, the year the Philippines technically became an independent
nation-state. I followed my father’s footsteps, journeying to
Ithaca, New York, in 1967 to pursue my graduate studies. Though this was
the time of the Vietnam War and student unrest worldwide ˆ
different, to be sure, from my father’s times ˆ still I arguably
was turned into a scholar of the empire. But in what sense?

The scrapbooks of these two Filipinos are read in the context of the
state of “Philippine studies” in the 1930s and 1960s ˆ in
particular, the contested representations of the revolution of 1896-98,
the Filipino-American war of 1899-1902, and the special relationship
with the U.S. In a sense both scrapbooks can be placed in the category
of “wartime experiences.” In my father’s case, the wars were
military in essence; for me, the battlefield was the academe. The point
of this exercise is to bring out the complex interplay of personal
experience and regimes of knowledge that constitute one’s belonging
and response to empire in two different eras. But I speak from the
standpoint of the present and I hope that this exercise will illumine
the scholarly challenges we face in the age of imperial decline.”

Professor Reynaldo Ileto is Professor of History and Southeast Asian
Studies, National University of Singapore. Prior to this, he was Reader
at Australia National University in Canberra. Ileto, a graduate of
Cornell University, was a student of classically trained scholars like
O.D. Wolters, Benedict Anderson, and Victor Turner. His Pasyon and
Revolution (1979), widely recognized as one of the seminal texts of
Southeast Asian history, and his percipient essays collected in
Filipinos and Their Revolution (1998), have earned for Ileto
international recognition as the leader of Philippine Historical studies
and a pioneer of the burgeoning field of Filipino diasporic studies.

Biographical information about Dr. Ileto is available at:

http://www.fas.nus.edu.sg/sea/ppl/ac_illeto.htm

B) March 8, 2008

8:00 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Four scheduled panels

For more information about conference participants and scheduled panels,
visit http://www.aasp.uiuc.edu/PhilippinePalimpsests/index.html