Special Seminar by Michael Pante on Jan. 22nd

Date and Time: January 22nd, 2016 16:00 – 18:00
Place: Tonan-tei (Room No. 201), Inamori Foundation Memorial Building, Kyoto University

Speaker: Michael D. Pante, instructor in the Department of History,
Ateneo de Manila University, and associate editor of Philippine Studies:
Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints

Title: The Changing Borders of a Borderline Capital: Quezon City in the
Twentieth-Century Philippines

Abstract:
Theorizing geographical borders has almost always been confined at the level of the nation-state, to the detriment of our understanding of subnational boundaries. Such a disparity is unfortunate given the fact
that at the city level numerous forms of sociospatial delineations, e.g., municipal borders, gated communities, barricades, affect people’s everyday lives. In this presentation I aim to present the analytic significance of these urban borders in understanding local history. In particular I use urban borders as a conceptual framework to shed new light on the history of Quezon City, which was founded in 1939 as a planned, purpose-built city and became the national capital in 1948.
This framework has two advantages. First, it gives us a new and more progressive way to view the city: from the margins rather than from the center, but without discarding the role played by the latter. Such is the consequence of the border’s paradox: it is occupied mainly by society’s marginalized classes but it exists and expands because of the acts of those at the center. Second, it allows us to analyze the city in the realms of both political economy and ideology. Because they influence wages, rent, product flows, etc., borders are essential in rationalizing and reinforcing the city’s material conditions. At the same time, they also help shape the “geographical imagination” of city dwellers, who develop a keen perception about their peculiar and peripheral nature. This second advantage points to another paradox of
borders: their dual character as both rigid and porous. In the process of applying this framework on Quezon City’s history in the twentieth century, I “provincialize” the urban in two ways: one, by emphasizing how Quezon City, despite being ostensibly urban, was itself a border between city and countryside; and two, by decentering the analysis of urban dynamics away from Manila to reveal the importance of the rural in the development of the country’s de facto and de jure capital cities in
the postcolonial period. As such, notwithstanding its grandiose plans and civic architecture, Quezon City was merely a borderline capital, as confirmed by its loss of its nominal status as the seat of government in 1976.

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Bionote:
Michael D. Pante is instructor in the Department of History, Ateneo de Manila University, and associate editor of Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints. He is a PhD candidate in Kyoto
University and is currently writing his dissertation about the history of Quezon City.

Moderator: Hau Caroline and Lisandro Claudio (CSEAS)