Christian Jil R Benitez
Biographic Data
| ID | 1265851 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christian Jil R Benitez |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christian Jil R |
| FAMILY NAME | Benitez |
| SIGNATURE | BENITEZ C J R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Ateneo de Manila University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0654-1698 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 48 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 20 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Flower of Heidelberg
Set in the year 2577, this short story imagines a dystopic future where all languages—except for five from the imperial temperate world—have been almost wiped out by five homogenous global capitalist entities, each known as Corporation (according to each corporation’s home language). In this bleak future, linguists exist not as scholars but as peddlers of languages, particularly endangered ones, including the various Filipino vernaculars. The liv…
Swarms of comparison
This article meditates on comparison beyond being a method, an academic technique, or a discursive strategy, and instead as a phenomenon entangled with the apocalyptic. As its critical point of departure, the article considers the concept of “demonio de las comparaciones” described by the Filipino polymath and patriot José Rizal in his novel Noli me tángere (1887), through its particular interpretation by Benedict Anderson. The latter scholar, ha…
Stony Brook Souvenir and other translated poems
This essay preliminary elucidates on the process of translating Jaya Jacobo’s poetry from Filipino to English. It briefly recounts the unprompted beginning of this translation work, citing it as an instance of a gift; as well the author’s general translation practice in his scholarly work, as demanded by the contemporary academic culture. Recognizing that translation is an argument in and of itself, the gesture—as it is hoped to be demonstrated h…
Queering the Tropics
This special issue entitled “Queering the Tropics” explores how queering as a methodology and gender and sexuality as a critical rubric complicate the study of the tropics and conceptions of tropicality. It also engages with how the tropics as a worldly zone, and the notion of tropicality as simultaneously material and imaginary, reconfigure notions of queer sexuality. In other words, our aim has been to study how the tropical might queer queerne…
Boy with the Pet Dog
Set at the beginning of the hot season in the Philippines, when heat starts to crawl on skin, the short fiction “The Boy with the Pet Dog” (“Ang Batang May Alagang Aso”) stages an encounter between the titular character and a young man from the province who intends to work on his family’s farm. Queerness figures in the narrative as intimately entangled with class, and becomes articulable only through a language made possible by the tropics itself…
Queering Tropically
This is the second collection of papers in a two-part issue on the theme of Queering the Tropics. This second issue begins by delving into the notion of “Queering Tropically,” in other words, queering in a tropical manner or in the manner of the tropics. The term queering tropically simultaneously alludes to queering through tropes (figurative and performative), and queering through tropical materiality (climate, elements, nature). This issue ass…
Empire and Environment
The Pacific Ocean, as this book asserts, is “not [simply] a garbage patch” (xi); instead, it is an agentic material assemblage that participates in planetary discourses. As Macarena Gómez-Barris puts it in her foreword, for instance, the world's largest body of water “biodynamically devours and expels . . . memories of [World War II], these hauntings and traces of the colonial/imperial divide” (xi). As such, the ocean materializes itself as “that…
Philippine philippine, or the Tropics in Cixous’s Dreaming True
Hélène Cixous’s oneiric ideation of the philippine (twin almond)—and by extension, her text Philippines (2009/2011)—primarily evokes love, or that force of attraction between two beings in which one can never say where each begins or ends. It is by the virtue of this entanglement that another philippine can be offered to this discourse: the Philippines that is that archipelago which encloses and opens up a particular location and reality within t…
Philippine Literature and Ecofeminism
This chapter outlines the possibility of articulating an ecofeminism from the Philippine tropics. While ecocriticism as a discipline is considerably nascent in the scholarly landscape of the archipelago, it is argued here that Philippine ecofeminism is already discernible in existent vernacular feminist scholarships, albeit often categorized under other traditions of ideas such as the “decolonial” and the “Indigenous.” As such, the chapter turns …
Vernacular Virtual
This essay turns to and through the Philippine vernacular in order to open up the possibility of a new materialist regard of literature, one that specifically stems from the Philippine tropics. It proposes that the opportunity for such a tropical materialism rests on the onomatopoeism observed in the vernacular. Onomatopoeia, as a material linguistic principle, is recognized here to be most instructive in reunderstanding Philippine folk poetry — …
Relational Nation
Bagay
Keeping in time with the new materialist turn that aspires to respond to the common disregard to matter in Euro-Western tradition of thought while at the same time insisting the imperative to decolonize such turn, this essay attempts to articulate a Philippine rendition of new materialism, through the notion of bagay, nominated here as a thing whose materiality is intuited to be appropriately determinable concerning a particular moment. This atte…
A Tropical Traumaturgy
Tropical Materialisms
Tropical Materialisms concur on at least three things: humans are always entangled with non-human/material agents; such entanglement is necessary for any creative act to take place; and these same entanglements allow us to interrogate and re-evaluate preconceived notions about the world. This Special Issue aligns itself with the fields of new materialism and posthumanism. What is particularly exciting is the opportunity to rearticulate these fiel…
All Hail, the Baklang Kanal
In November 2020, in a now-deleted tweet, twelve queer Filipino influencers on Twitter were branded as “baklang kanal,” for their noted expressions of dissent against the Rodrigo Duterte regime. Soon after, an online debate ensued: among these twelve influencers, who are the most rightful to be considered as baklang kanal ? While the term as commonly used now in Twitter is understood to refer to “gay individuals who are unapologetically outspoken…
On the Weariness of Time
As a rehearsal of a “tropical imaginary” that attempts to accentuate the entanglement of literature with the material world, this essay ‘coincides’ Jose F. Lacaba’s 1965 poem “Ang Kapaguran ng Panahon” (“The Weariness of Time”) with the 2015 El Niño phenomenon in the Philippines and its violent culmination the following year in Kidapawan City, Cotabato Province, Mindanao. While time or panahon in the Philippine tropics is usually intuited as gen…
No Wild Iris
The Philippines, as a tropical archipelago, is “concurrently a country of premodern, modern, and postmodern societies[:] our rural areas, small communities, and villages, while we may sweepingly characterize them as premodern, possses at the same time some of the trappings of postmodern cities like Manila, Los Angeles, or Paris” (Cruz-Lucero, 2007, p. 7). And yet, as a nation, this concurrence of temporalities is ultimately flattened, so as to tu…
Apocalypse
Alvin Yapan’s “Apocalypse” (Filipino: “Apokalipsis”) renders the end of the world as the simultaneous transgression of presupposed boundaries between the individual and collective, the human and non-human, and the rational and irrational. By locating the narrative in an unnamed corner of the Philippine metropolis that is altogether too familiar in the present, and through interweaving the folkloric and popular, the text proposes a timely urban le…
The Riddle of the Fowl and the Eagle
Alvin Yapan’s “The Riddle of the Fowl and the Eagle” (Filipino: “Ang Bugtong ng Manok at Agila”) teases at the boundaries between the cultural, the natural, and the supernatural, in order to foreground a contemporary Philippine conundrum that elucidates an ethical concern. The story questions what it is to be human, and what it means to be so in times that are rather inhumane. In the context of this text, this is simultaneously a concern with the…
Panahon and Bagay
This article demonstrates how the close reading of words used in lexicographic definitions of the word panahon point to a Filipino understanding of temporality. These definitions resort to metonymy to concretize the abstract. Although different meanings cloud its meaning, panahon is understandable in a given instance when it refers coincidentally to something else. Etymologically, panahon is related to nahon and taon, which embody the opportune a…
Tropical Materialisms
Tropical Materialisms concur on at least three things: humans are always entangled with non-human/material agents; such entanglement is necessary for any creative act to take place; and these same entanglements allow us to interrogate and re-evaluate preconceived notions about the world. This Special Issue aligns itself with the fields of new materialism and posthumanism. What is particularly exciting is the opportunity to rearticulate these fiel…
Panahon and Bagay
This article demonstrates how the close reading of words used in lexicographic definitions of the word panahon point to a Filipino understanding of temporality. These definitions resort to metonymy to concretize the abstract. Although different meanings cloud its meaning, panahon is understandable in a given instance when it refers coincidentally to something else. Etymologically, panahon is related to nahon and taon, which embody the opportune a…
A Tropical Traumaturgy
On the Weariness of Time
As a rehearsal of a “tropical imaginary” that attempts to accentuate the entanglement of literature with the material world, this essay ‘coincides’ Jose F. Lacaba’s 1965 poem “Ang Kapaguran ng Panahon” (“The Weariness of Time”) with the 2015 El Niño phenomenon in the Philippines and its violent culmination the following year in Kidapawan City, Cotabato Province, Mindanao. While time or panahon in the Philippine tropics is usually intuited as gen…
No Wild Iris
The Philippines, as a tropical archipelago, is “concurrently a country of premodern, modern, and postmodern societies[:] our rural areas, small communities, and villages, while we may sweepingly characterize them as premodern, possses at the same time some of the trappings of postmodern cities like Manila, Los Angeles, or Paris” (Cruz-Lucero, 2007, p. 7). And yet, as a nation, this concurrence of temporalities is ultimately flattened, so as to tu…
Queering the Tropics
This special issue entitled “Queering the Tropics” explores how queering as a methodology and gender and sexuality as a critical rubric complicate the study of the tropics and conceptions of tropicality. It also engages with how the tropics as a worldly zone, and the notion of tropicality as simultaneously material and imaginary, reconfigure notions of queer sexuality. In other words, our aim has been to study how the tropical might queer queerne…
Queering Tropically
This is the second collection of papers in a two-part issue on the theme of Queering the Tropics. This second issue begins by delving into the notion of “Queering Tropically,” in other words, queering in a tropical manner or in the manner of the tropics. The term queering tropically simultaneously alludes to queering through tropes (figurative and performative), and queering through tropical materiality (climate, elements, nature). This issue ass…
Vernacular Virtual
This essay turns to and through the Philippine vernacular in order to open up the possibility of a new materialist regard of literature, one that specifically stems from the Philippine tropics. It proposes that the opportunity for such a tropical materialism rests on the onomatopoeism observed in the vernacular. Onomatopoeia, as a material linguistic principle, is recognized here to be most instructive in reunderstanding Philippine folk poetry — …
Bagay
Keeping in time with the new materialist turn that aspires to respond to the common disregard to matter in Euro-Western tradition of thought while at the same time insisting the imperative to decolonize such turn, this essay attempts to articulate a Philippine rendition of new materialism, through the notion of bagay, nominated here as a thing whose materiality is intuited to be appropriately determinable concerning a particular moment. This atte…
Apocalypse
Alvin Yapan’s “Apocalypse” (Filipino: “Apokalipsis”) renders the end of the world as the simultaneous transgression of presupposed boundaries between the individual and collective, the human and non-human, and the rational and irrational. By locating the narrative in an unnamed corner of the Philippine metropolis that is altogether too familiar in the present, and through interweaving the folkloric and popular, the text proposes a timely urban le…
The Riddle of the Fowl and the Eagle
Alvin Yapan’s “The Riddle of the Fowl and the Eagle” (Filipino: “Ang Bugtong ng Manok at Agila”) teases at the boundaries between the cultural, the natural, and the supernatural, in order to foreground a contemporary Philippine conundrum that elucidates an ethical concern. The story questions what it is to be human, and what it means to be so in times that are rather inhumane. In the context of this text, this is simultaneously a concern with the…
Panahon and Bagay
This article demonstrates how the close reading of words used in lexicographic definitions of the word panahon point to a Filipino understanding of temporality. These definitions resort to metonymy to concretize the abstract. Although different meanings cloud its meaning, panahon is understandable in a given instance when it refers coincidentally to something else. Etymologically, panahon is related to nahon and taon, which embody the opportune a…
All Hail, the Baklang Kanal
In November 2020, in a now-deleted tweet, twelve queer Filipino influencers on Twitter were branded as “baklang kanal,” for their noted expressions of dissent against the Rodrigo Duterte regime. Soon after, an online debate ensued: among these twelve influencers, who are the most rightful to be considered as baklang kanal ? While the term as commonly used now in Twitter is understood to refer to “gay individuals who are unapologetically outspoken…
On the Weariness of Time
As a rehearsal of a “tropical imaginary” that attempts to accentuate the entanglement of literature with the material world, this essay ‘coincides’ Jose F. Lacaba’s 1965 poem “Ang Kapaguran ng Panahon” (“The Weariness of Time”) with the 2015 El Niño phenomenon in the Philippines and its violent culmination the following year in Kidapawan City, Cotabato Province, Mindanao. While time or panahon in the Philippine tropics is usually intuited as gen…
No Wild Iris
The Philippines, as a tropical archipelago, is “concurrently a country of premodern, modern, and postmodern societies[:] our rural areas, small communities, and villages, while we may sweepingly characterize them as premodern, possses at the same time some of the trappings of postmodern cities like Manila, Los Angeles, or Paris” (Cruz-Lucero, 2007, p. 7). And yet, as a nation, this concurrence of temporalities is ultimately flattened, so as to tu…
Philippine Literature and Ecofeminism
This chapter outlines the possibility of articulating an ecofeminism from the Philippine tropics. While ecocriticism as a discipline is considerably nascent in the scholarly landscape of the archipelago, it is argued here that Philippine ecofeminism is already discernible in existent vernacular feminist scholarships, albeit often categorized under other traditions of ideas such as the “decolonial” and the “Indigenous.” As such, the chapter turns …
Vernacular Virtual
This essay turns to and through the Philippine vernacular in order to open up the possibility of a new materialist regard of literature, one that specifically stems from the Philippine tropics. It proposes that the opportunity for such a tropical materialism rests on the onomatopoeism observed in the vernacular. Onomatopoeia, as a material linguistic principle, is recognized here to be most instructive in reunderstanding Philippine folk poetry — …
Relational Nation
Bagay
Keeping in time with the new materialist turn that aspires to respond to the common disregard to matter in Euro-Western tradition of thought while at the same time insisting the imperative to decolonize such turn, this essay attempts to articulate a Philippine rendition of new materialism, through the notion of bagay, nominated here as a thing whose materiality is intuited to be appropriately determinable concerning a particular moment. This atte…
A Tropical Traumaturgy
Tropical Materialisms
Tropical Materialisms concur on at least three things: humans are always entangled with non-human/material agents; such entanglement is necessary for any creative act to take place; and these same entanglements allow us to interrogate and re-evaluate preconceived notions about the world. This Special Issue aligns itself with the fields of new materialism and posthumanism. What is particularly exciting is the opportunity to rearticulate these fiel…
Philippine philippine, or the Tropics in Cixous’s Dreaming True
Hélène Cixous’s oneiric ideation of the philippine (twin almond)—and by extension, her text Philippines (2009/2011)—primarily evokes love, or that force of attraction between two beings in which one can never say where each begins or ends. It is by the virtue of this entanglement that another philippine can be offered to this discourse: the Philippines that is that archipelago which encloses and opens up a particular location and reality within t…
Stony Brook Souvenir and other translated poems
This essay preliminary elucidates on the process of translating Jaya Jacobo’s poetry from Filipino to English. It briefly recounts the unprompted beginning of this translation work, citing it as an instance of a gift; as well the author’s general translation practice in his scholarly work, as demanded by the contemporary academic culture. Recognizing that translation is an argument in and of itself, the gesture—as it is hoped to be demonstrated h…
Queering the Tropics
This special issue entitled “Queering the Tropics” explores how queering as a methodology and gender and sexuality as a critical rubric complicate the study of the tropics and conceptions of tropicality. It also engages with how the tropics as a worldly zone, and the notion of tropicality as simultaneously material and imaginary, reconfigure notions of queer sexuality. In other words, our aim has been to study how the tropical might queer queerne…
Boy with the Pet Dog
Set at the beginning of the hot season in the Philippines, when heat starts to crawl on skin, the short fiction “The Boy with the Pet Dog” (“Ang Batang May Alagang Aso”) stages an encounter between the titular character and a young man from the province who intends to work on his family’s farm. Queerness figures in the narrative as intimately entangled with class, and becomes articulable only through a language made possible by the tropics itself…
Queering Tropically
This is the second collection of papers in a two-part issue on the theme of Queering the Tropics. This second issue begins by delving into the notion of “Queering Tropically,” in other words, queering in a tropical manner or in the manner of the tropics. The term queering tropically simultaneously alludes to queering through tropes (figurative and performative), and queering through tropical materiality (climate, elements, nature). This issue ass…
Empire and Environment
The Pacific Ocean, as this book asserts, is “not [simply] a garbage patch” (xi); instead, it is an agentic material assemblage that participates in planetary discourses. As Macarena Gómez-Barris puts it in her foreword, for instance, the world's largest body of water “biodynamically devours and expels . . . memories of [World War II], these hauntings and traces of the colonial/imperial divide” (xi). As such, the ocean materializes itself as “that…
Flower of Heidelberg
Set in the year 2577, this short story imagines a dystopic future where all languages—except for five from the imperial temperate world—have been almost wiped out by five homogenous global capitalist entities, each known as Corporation (according to each corporation’s home language). In this bleak future, linguists exist not as scholars but as peddlers of languages, particularly endangered ones, including the various Filipino vernaculars. The liv…
Swarms of comparison
This article meditates on comparison beyond being a method, an academic technique, or a discursive strategy, and instead as a phenomenon entangled with the apocalyptic. As its critical point of departure, the article considers the concept of “demonio de las comparaciones” described by the Filipino polymath and patriot José Rizal in his novel Noli me tángere (1887), through its particular interpretation by Benedict Anderson. The latter scholar, ha…
Art (14 works) · History (12 works) · Literature (11 works) · Philippine History and Culture (11 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · History (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Aesthetics (6 works)