Response to "The Promise of the Foreign"

Abstract

In his “Response to The Promise of the Foreign,” Roland Tolentino generates a battery of provocative questions that seeks to resituate Rafael’s trope of “the foreign,” particularly in the field of Philippine Studies. Here, Tolentino asks nine questions that open up “the foreign” into zones of contacts with other contexts: the foreign in relation to the linguistic context of the period; its relationship with the vernacular, particularly in the case of the recodification of the baybayin; its involvement with act of writing and rewriting; its viability as a social project and its political efficacy; the foreign and its relation to social class; the foreign in light of the present bilingual condition; its relation to a second colonial language, American English; its reckoning with the indigene/colonized/native/vernacular; and lastly, its relation to the untranslatable.