A key figure in the development of the Law and Literature movement, James Boyd White, proposed that the law ought to be conceptualized, not as a set of fixed rules, but as rhetoric. For White, rhetoric was not simply the art of persuasion, but an art that constitutes “a community of speakers perpetually renewing itself through argument.” Following White’s counsel that one must “read law as literature and literature as the law,” I present a reading of selected Philippine Supreme Court decisions and poems by Filipino anglophone poets Gemino Abad, Luis Cabalquinto, R. Torres Pandan, Victor Penaranda, Simeon Dumdum, Jr. and Ernesto Superal Yee—to demonstrate how law/literature (re)constitutes Philippine culture and communities in language.

T.S. Sungkit’s "Driftwood on Dry Land" centers on the mythic history of a Higaonon tribe, an Indigenous group in Mindanao. I argue that the novel utilizes the mode of marvelous realism to unsettle conventional “hierarchies of knowledge” (Pison 2005). These hierarchies of knowledge demean or disregard Indigenous histories, perspectives, and ways of being. The mode of marvelous realism allows the novel to challenge prevailing forms of canonical Philippine knowledge, including the sensibilities of Philippine fiction in English, which tend to be realist or otherwise possess a linear logic. The novel illustrates Kumkum Sangari’s thesis that the marvelous real is a sensibility that confronts the seemingly contradictory elements of colonial and postcolonial life, and the clash and syncretism of different belief systems. Ultimately, from this mode emerges a polyphonic voice which seeks to make meaning out of these discordant realities.

The role of translation (studies) in comparative literature is increasingly recognized, as translation has been identified as the primary means for texts to cross borders to find new, foreign readers. Simultaneously, there has been rising support for the translation of foreign literary texts to Filipino. This is evident in the Aklat ng Bayan project by the Komisyon ng Wikang Filipino (KWF), which includes paperbacks, each focused on a foreign author whose works are translated to Filipino. Among these is a translation by Alvin C. Ursua of seven short stories by Ernest Hemingway, including “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “Hills Like White Elephants”. By reading these two short stories as Ursua’s rewritings, as used by André Lefevere, this study seeks to determine how Ursua managed to translate texts written in English by an American into a language that would be ideal for the casual Filipino reader. Using Walter Benjamin’s notion of authorial intent vis-à-vis the task of the translator and Lawrence Venuti’s ideas of localizing and foreignizing, I aim to determine the losses and gains made by translating these two short stories. I will particularly be focusing on the issue of sexual politics, which is relevant in the short stories, and in this aspect, I argue, Ursua’s translations significantly alter Hemingway’s original short stories. Such alterations reveal key differences between the sexual politics of Hemingway’s world and that of ours, allowing for insights into the roles of language and translation in forming ideas about gender and sexuality.