The paper revisits the highly contested concept and method of “comparison” by examining Jean Genet’s novel Querelle of Brest and Werner Fassbinder’s film adaptation Querelle, while situating the two within the moving image work of Filipino contemporary queer artist Jon Cuyson, who visually translates Fassbinder’s film into Kerel. In illustrating the comparative relations across these works, the paper frames its presentation around the following questions: What happens when works like the queer classics of Genet’s fiction and Fassbinder’s film adaptation are visually translated into a moving image by Cuyson? What kind of worldmaking is shaped through the process of visual translation? How does the moving image visualize comparison, especially as we acknowledge the presence of what Benedict Anderson calls “specters of comparison”? In acknowledging our comparative relations with Europe, what becomes our practice and technique of comparison? What meaning of comparison can we generate from Kerel’s visual translation of Querelle? With these questions, the paper also initiates discursive conversations with one of the major theorists of Philippine comparative literature, Lucilla Hosillos, whose powerful conception of comparison, described as concentric circles—a rippling movement enabled by pebbles being dropped into a pool of water—also serves as her framework for imagining spheres of cosmopolitan influence and cross-contact. By allowing such ideas to percolate across the selected works, this paper envisions a germinal hydro-perspective on comparative methodology, which may also be relevant to the field of world literature as it grapples with challenges posed by climate disasters, mass extinction, and sinking nation-states.

This study examines the destabilization of Southeast Asian creative industries through the lens of capitalist commodification, drawing historical parallels with how ancient religions once reshaped cultural landscapes in the region. It argues that neoliberal capitalism, much like these earlier religious systems, functions as a totalizing force that reorganizes the production and circulation of art and literature. Through comparative analysis, the study explores how creative practices are increasingly subsumed into the logic of global markets, transforming art into a sub-industry of capitalism. This transformation diminishes the political and ideological complexity of creative works, with artists and writers prioritizing immediate material concerns over deeper engagements with identity, resistance, and history. Furthermore, the temporal conditions of creative labor now mirror the accelerated rhythms of commodity production, forcing creators to produce at a pace dictated by market imperatives. By drawing parallels between the historical spread of religion and the contemporary influence of capitalism, the study interrogates how these dynamics have reconfigured the relationship between creativity and socio-political critique in Southeast Asia, ultimately questioning the role of artistic expression within a capitalist system that instrumentalizes art as both product and spectacle while dimming the agency of those who create it.

The idea of water in Philippine culture is an area that needs to be studied. As an archipelago in Southeast Asia, water is an integral part of the natural environment through the seas, rivers, typhoons, floods, as well as the habitat of native spirits.

Water cosmologies require that the Filipino native respect the presence and habitat of native deities. Practices and rituals are performed to help protect fisherfolk, travelers, or communities in the open seas or rivers. Early colonial Spanish texts portrayed and argued the easy conversion of the Filipino natives to the new Catholic faith through baptism. But the Filipino natives at the time may have read the ritual of using water differently, possibly as medicine for healing, or as an act of friendship. This paper explores the world of water from the native point of view, as against the Spanish interpretation of easy conversion to the new faith. Aside from the daily ritual of sanitation and hygiene (washing one's hands and feet before entering someone's home), we see that water and its medicinal properties are an integral part of Philippine culture.

Using Gaspar de San Augustin's text, Conquistas de las Islas Filipinas (1565-1615), selected folk tales and practices, I argue water is seen as a means to communicate with the spirits in the natural environment, and as a way to heal illnesses attributed to actions that displeased the native spirits. Using Peter Boomgaard's landmark text, A World of Water as a framework, this study hopes to contribute to a decolonial exploration of the Filipino worldview of water.

The 1960s and the 1970s in the Philippines were militant times since the United Stated backed despotic governments across Southeast Asia. With the rise of the anti-imperialist discourse during the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos Sr., writers from the youth and the student movement questioned the highly elitist nature of literature. They pushed for poetry that fights for social change. However, an overwhelming majority elected the son of the former dictator as Philippine president in 2022, fifty years after the declaration of Martial Law in 1972. This prompted a resurgence of examining the literary and artistic production during Martial Law. These texts counter the nostalgia surrounding the dictatorship that was marked by censorship and human rights violations.

This paper delineates the ways poetry written during the Marcos dictatorship can be taught to the present generation of students who have no memories of Martial Law. One examines the contradictions of writing in English, a foreign language, to articulate a nationalist discourse. In relation, one also notes the proletarianization of these writers as they eschew their bourgeois class origins to embrace the life of the peasant and the working class. The paper also analyzes how the targeted audience of these poems informs the literary style and expressions. Ultimately, this paper articulates the postcolonial question on how the English language—despite its colonial imposition—can be used to fight back against oppressors through literary and artistic expressions with a critical and anti-imperialist message. In teaching these poems to a younger generation who were born decades after Martial Law, these poems can be vessels of remembering.