This analysis of the discursive practice of the Moro resistance movement uses the notion of intertextuality to illuminate discursive change as affected by and in turn affecting the social condition and politics of the Philippines. Intertextuality refers to how a text draws on other texts, such as by combining elements from different discourses. Such concrete language use “can change the individual discourses and thereby, also, the social and cultural world. By analyzing intertextuality, one can investigate both the reproduction of discourse whereby no new elements are introduced, and discursive change through new combinations of discourse.”

There are several ways to discern this intertextuality as practised by text producers-interpreters. Bakhtin differentiates between horizontal and vertical intertextuality. Of interest here is vertical intertextuality, which refers to intertextual relations between a text and other texts within it as they are historically linked within various timescales and along various parameters. In this regard, Fairclough introduced the related notion of interdiscursivity. In interdiscursivity, elements of orders of discourse, and not just other texts, are combined, resulting in heterogeneous texts. Heterogeneous texts may vary in the extent oftheir integration or accentuation of other discursive formations and practices. Consequently, intertextuality can be the source of much ambivalence in the texts. Such ambivalence has allowed our resistance entrepreneurs in this study to survive decades of protracted conflict and to overcome new global and domestic challenges and contexts.

Significantly, the producers of the resistance texts that will be examined here were part of a “chain of speech communication” or an “intertextual chain”. The “[d]iscourses and the texts which occur within them have histories, they belong to historical series.” They drew from existing discourses/texts and were influenced by dominant and alternative ideologies, paradigms and ideas that prevailed during their time, locally and globally. As competitors for leadership in the Moro ethnopolitical movement, they engaged each other and the state directly and indirectly in a power struggle, including the power to interpret and change social reality. They were interpreting and weaving texts as they simultaneously engaged in the acts of discourse production, membership base-building, and armed struggle. Put another way, their movement entrepreneurs used multiple positioning within their discourses to negotiate power relations. This dynamic process reflects the basic notion of critical discourse analysis that discourse is constituted by the social condition, as well as constitutive of society and its politics.

The chapters in this book came from my long engagement with the Cordillera and Moro movements. I recall vividly the articles that we, as editors of the Philippine Collegian, the student paper of the University of the Philippines, bravely published on the developments in the Cordillera and Mindanao at the height of martial rule in the late 1970s. One month after graduation, I joined an international delegation that travelled to the hometown of Macli-ing Dulag, the revered chieftain of the Butbut tribe in Kalinga and the face and voice of the opposition to the Chico River Dam. In April 1980, soldiers assassinated Dulag, and our group travelled to Kalinga to show solidarity with the local people's struggle against the dam. Writing for the Diliman Review in the late 1980s, I had the opportunity to interview, among others, Conrado Balweg of the Cordillera People's Liberation Army and famed American historian and long-time Mountain Province resident William Henry Scott. During this tumultuous period, I had met and had discussions with many cadres from the Communist Party of the Philippines; I have had an inside track.

My direct involvement with the Moro movement came later, as part of my peace advocacy and new academic interest in conflict resolution and peace studies after the fall of the Marcos dictatorship. In the early 2000s I met Moro Islamic Liberation Front leaders Ebrahim Murad, the late Ali Lanang, and Mohager Iqbal as part of my advocacy work on the international campaign to ban landmines. In the Philippine Campaign to Ban Landmines, we urged different armed groups like the MILF to commit to a landmine ban. Little did I know that I would be thrust into a major role involving the MILF. In July 2010 I was appointed first as a member of President Benigno Simeon Aquino III's negotiating panel in talks with the MILF. From November 2012 to June 2016 I was the chair of the government panel that signed the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bangsamoro in March 2014.

This appointment took place after I had completed most of the research and had written the chapters that make up the bulk of this book. I have updated the 2010 drafts to take account of recent developments and other materials that have followed over the last few years. My visits to the Cordillera region in 2019 for another project allowed me to revalidate my analysis.

Three different nomenclatures have been used to refer to our unit of interest in this chapter. These are Cordillera, Mountain Province and Igorot. We have already used Cordillera to describe either the resistance movement and the resistance discourses or narratives. The term, moreover, is used to refer to the mountain range, the people inhabiting the territory, and the imagined nation. The term Cordillera region is likewise being used in different ways. It can refer to the state-defined administrative region, the unrealized autonomous region, or merely used as a spatial reference that vaguely encompasses a presumed territorial entity.

The geographic location of the Cordillera discourse is the Gran Cordillera Central mountain range in Northern Luzon. As we shall see, boundaries of this homeland, ancestral domains and/or the roots or origins of what we call today the Cordillera people(s) and Cordillera region have not been fixed but were rather porous. They have been constructed and reconstructed over time, both by state fiat and societal processes.

Then and now, the term Igorot is a highly contested term. Briefly, the term originated during the Spanish times. It was used by the Spaniards and the lowlanders as a collective, undifferentiated identity marker for most of the inhabitants of the Cordillera range. Like the word Moro, Ygorrotes/Igorots (mountain people) came from outsiders, although the American historian and long-time resident of Mountain Province William Henry Scott wrote that it was derived from local languages. Igolot in Tagalog means “dwellers in/people of a mountain chain”. Golod or golor in Tagalog and golot in the language of the Bagos (descendants of Igorots who migrated to Ilocos) meant the mountain or a hill; and the prefix i- denotes place of origin. Prill-Brett offers another possibility — that the name came from the Ilocano word gerret, which means “to cut off”, and may have been inspired by the headhunting tradition among these mountain people. The label, along with its negative and positive attributes, was carried on to the postcolonial period.

Mountain Province originally referred to the politico-administrative unit established by the American colonial regime in 1908. It was made up of seven sub-provinces; namely, Benguet, Ifugao, Bontoc, Apayao, Kalinga, Amburayan and Lepanto. In 1966 this unit gave birth to four provinces, including one that is also called Mountain Province. The other three were Benguet, Ifugao and Kalinga-Apayao.

The events and circumstances that gave rise to the armed conflict in Mindanao are multiple and complex. Some scholars, the popular media and protagonists alike have described the conflict as a “religious war”. This perception may have been fed by the way the Spaniards framed and justified their colonization campaign in the past that resulted in deeply ingrained prejudices held between the Christianized natives and the indigenous followers of Islam. The perception was bolstered with the rise of communal conflicts in parts of Mindanao in the early 1970s involving vigilante groups among the settler and indigenous communities, often arising from land-related disputes or contestation over political and/or territorial control.

Seeds of Discontent

The hostility draws on historical antecedents that saw the Islamic population in the south marginalized from the centre of politics and society located in the northern capital on Luzon island. Moreover, policies undertaken by the American colonial regime and the Philippine Republic significantly changed the demographic composition and social structure of Mindanao. Notably, the series of resettlement programmes of populations from Luzon and the Visayas to Mindanao initiated by the American colonial regime transformed many segments of the indigenous population into minorities. The succeeding Philippine government pursued the same policies. Mindanao thus developed into a settler colony from the early to the mid-1900s. Homestead arrangements for migrants and the infusion of American capital for the plantation economy in the region hastened the loss of control over land and tribute collection in the hands of the original inhabitants.

In this book we have examined the respective discourses of two armed ethnopolitical mobilizations in the south and north of the Philippines; namely, the Moro and Cordillera movements. We traced how some core elements of these articulations have become valorized and accepted as gospel truths by their respective politicized masses of adherents. At the same time, we saw how the movement organizations modified their framings and appropriated elements from global and other domestic discourses, showing how creatively and pragmatically movement intellectuals adapted to new ideas and the changed conditions over the forty-year period since their movements emerged.

We followed the MNLF intellectuals in founding their claim to a separate/autonomous Bangsa Moro and statehood. The MILF enriched this core Moro ethnonationalist discursive practice by further highlighting Islam as an organizational and ideological platform, effectively distinguishing itself from its more secular mother organization, the MNLF. In the 1990s the MILF complemented their two-axis discourse on nation and Islam with a third axis that maximized the language of ancestral domain and IP rights.

Meanwhile, we saw how the Cordillera struggle for regional autonomy emerged in the mid-1970s from the popular opposition to several development programmes instituted by the Marcos regime. The popular opposition was harvested and later led by the CPP operating in the region. The CPP-led CPDF, which became the underground organizational expression of the movement, espoused a Marxist ideology and dovetailed the popular opposition to support the national democratic revolution whose class-based struggle tended to subordinate ethnonationalist aspirations. The CPLA that split from the CPP was dominated by cadres who were natives of the Cordillera provinces. These leading cadres espoused a more decisively ethnonationalist platform that stressed the oppression of the Cordillera cultural communities by the Filipino majority. In this aspect, their discourse veered more closely to that of the Moro ethnonationalists. In the same vein, they elevated the notion of a Cordillera (administrative and political) region to a ‘nation’ and had irredentist claims to wider territories and ethnic groupings. They also favoured a federal state that drew features from their cultural practices and institutions such as the bodong (peace pact), as against a regional autonomy movement that was subordinated to the larger national democratic agenda of the CPP-CPDF.

INTRODUCTION

Vietnam is currently experiencing one of the most intensive urban transitions in the world. Its urban population doubled over the last thirty years (UN 2018). Since 2010, it has been growing at about 3 per cent per year, placing Vietnam’ urbanization rate above the Southeast Asian annual average (2.5 per cent) and very close to China's rate of 3.1 per cent (OECD 2018). According to latest UN projections, half of Vietnam's population will be urban by 2039 and that figure will reach 60 per cent by 2050 (UN 2018).

This shift from rural to urban society is closely associated with socio-economic reforms launched in the mid-1980s which progressively liberalized the economy and relaxed the grip of the state on population movements and activities. Known as Doi Moi (literally “new change”), these reforms removed constraints on the movement of people from rural to urban places and allowed occupational shifts away from agriculture. These policies later encouraged the physical expansion of existing urban areas and the creation of new urban-industrial space in densely settled rural communes (World Bank 2011).

As the nation's capital city and second largest agglomeration after Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi is one of the key sites of this urban transition. Vietnamese leaders acknowledge that the growth of Hanoi and other cities is crucial to the growth of manufacturing and higher-order services, as well as to the material well-being of the national population. At the same time, the rapid increase in populations and activities in and around cities placed intense pressure on local authorities to keep pace with the rising demand for infrastructure, social services, housing, environmental controls and public amenities. While there is consensus about the potential benefits of urbanization, concerns have also been raised by local and foreign academics, professionals and decision-makers about the importance of anticipating and addressing problems that flow from the urbanization process.

The mechanisms by which Hanoi authorities plan to ensure the sustainable growth and development of the city's territory, society and space are still in the making. While many problems remain to be addressed, the last two decades have seen the emergence of initiatives aimed at mitigating the negative impact of urbanization.

The economic, political, strategic and cultural dynamism in Southeast Asia has gained added relevance in recent years with the spectacular rise of giant economies in East and South Asia. This has drawn greater attention to the region and to the enhanced role it now plays in international relations and global economics.

The sustained effort made by Southeast Asian nations since 1967 towards a peaceful and gradual integration of their economies has had indubitable success, and perhaps as a consequence of this, most of these countries are undergoing deep political and social changes domestically and are constructing innovative solutions to meet new international challenges. Big Power tensions continue to be played out in the neighbourhood despite the tradition of neutrality exercised by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).

The Trends in Southeast Asia series acts as a platform for serious analyses by selected authors who are experts in their fields. It is aimed at encouraging policymakers and scholars to contemplate the diversity and dynamism of this exciting region.

THE EDITORS

Series Chairman:

Series Editor:

Editorial Committee:

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

• • Vietnam is in the midst of one of the world's most rapid and intensive rural-to-urban transitions.

• • In Hanoi, heritage preservation has gained significant policy attention over the last decades, but efforts continue to focus on the Old Quarter and Colonial City to the exclusion of collective socialist housing complexes and former village areas, and natural features such as canals and urban lakes.

• • Parks and public spaces are urgently needed to offset the high residential densities and to improve the quality of life of residents.

• • Motor vehicles continue to fuel the growth in transportation. Significant efforts were recently made to establish a mass transit system, but progress there is slow. More attention should be paid to improving the existing transportation system and to reduce dependence on fossil fuels.

• • Investments in new housing estates have fuelled a speculative real estate market but failed to address adequately the needs of the vulnerable segments of the population.

• • Regional integration is a challenge as the city expands and swallows the peri-urban areas around the city

On 11 August 1986, as Dr Frederick George Peter Jaquet cycled from Den Haag to his office in Leiden, no one would have guessed that he was transporting an Indonesian national treasure. The wooden box strapped to his bicycle looked perfectly ordinary. When he arrived at the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, the scholar opened the box to view the Institute's long-awaited prize: a cache of postcards, photographs, and scraps of letters sent by Raden Adjeng Kartini and her sisters to the family of Mr J.H. Abendanon, the colonial official who was both her patron and publisher. From this box so grudgingly surrendered by Abendanon's family spilled new light on the life of this Javanese nobleman's daughter, new clues to the mystery of her struggle.

Dr Jaquet's discovery, glowingly reported in the Indonesian press, was but the latest episode in a long series of attempts to liberate Kartini from the boxes which have contained her. For decades, Indonesian and foreign scholars alike have sought to penetrate the veils obscuring the real Kartini in order to reach the core of a personality repressed by colonial officials, Dutch artists and intellectuals, the strictures of tradition, and the tragedy of her untimely death. The promise and the mystery of Kartini have given rise to a fluorescence of questions on all aspects of her life. Why did she give up her plans to go to Holland? Did she really predict her own death? Was she a feminist or a nationalist? Is Indonesia living up to her dreams? President Suharto's pronouncement notwithstanding, Kartini has sparked a conversation which seems unlikely to cease.

Whence the enthusiasm, the obsession with Kartini? From her birth on 21 April 1879 to her death in childbirth in 1904, Kartini scarcely ventured beyond the borders of the community in which she was raised. When she died, she left little behind except a handful of essays and a series of letters written to Dutch pen pals during the last four years of her life.

Introduction

Luisa Passerini writes about the paradox of memory (and, we can add, forgetting) that we cannot look for something we lost unless we remember it at least in part (Passerini 2003, p. 239). When investigating cultural memory of colonialism in Europe, a first impression many people have is one of silence in the sense of oblivion (Ricoeur 2004): colonialism, in this conception, has vanished without a trace. In the Netherlands, people have claimed that Dutch colonialism in Indonesia is not taught in high schools, not talked about in the media, that photographs of colonial atrocities committed by the Dutch colonial army have been swept under the carpet and that the voices of those once colonized by the Dutch are never heard in the Netherlands. Yet if we investigate specific places and communities, a different picture emerges: histories of Dutch colonialism have been part of the school exams since the 1970s, colonial “scandals” (e.g. abusive labour conditions of coolies in colonial Indonesia) have been reported upon in newspapers since the nineteenth century, photographs of colonial atrocities were widely published and distributed in the early twentieth century, and the Netherlands has a rich tradition of publishing Indonesian authors, both originally writing in Dutch and in translation (Bijl 2012, 2015). How can we account for this impression of silence and this abundance of sounds?

In this Chapter, analysing current cultural memories of Kartini in Dutch contexts, I will argue that in investigating silences we need to pay attention to location as both sounds and silences are always unevenly distributed: while in certain locations there can be almost a cacophony of sounds, in others utter silence can be encountered. Second, I want to show how silences, once they have occurred or been produced, change position and meaning over time, sometimes being perpetuated and repeated, sometimes changing character as they move across contexts. By investigating these two aspects, I want to draw attention to silence's spatial (synchronic) and temporal (diachronic) dimensions. In this Chapter, I will mainly focus on a prize named after Kartini which has been awarded in the city of The Hague since 2001 to stimulate emancipation of, at first, Dutch women of colour but eventually, at least in theory, everybody contributing to the emancipation of anybody. Silence as a phenomenon can be connected in two ways to this prize, one spatial, the other temporal.

The contributors to this volume deliver us a striking paradox. Internationally, Kartini ranks just after Anne Frank as the best known of authors who wrote in the Dutch language. But in the Netherlands today she is barely known or read. In Indonesia, Kartini is barely read but widely known. Kartini has a rich afterlife in hundreds of articles, speeches and exhibitions. UNESCO sponsored translations into English and French of some of her letters for its Collection of Representative Works of world literature. She is the heroine of at least two feature-length films. A national day is dedicated to her in Indonesia when her name is invoked in recognition of women's achievements. All this while, the letters she wrote and by which she was launched into transnational consciousness remain largely unread.

What we have here, as this book makes very clear, is that the historical personage has transmogrified into a reference point in discussions, debates and controversies on big topics. Kartini's name is invoked in studies of colonialism, racism, political ideologies, religion, gender, equality, human rights and women's emancipation. In specifically Indonesian contexts, her name is invoked in conversations on girls’ education and careers.

Now, this is a very heavy burden to lay on the shoulders of one who lived a mere twenty-five years and six months. The years of Kartini's life that are part of the written record are 1898–1904. Within this short time span, if we read her letters we discover passage from a young girl's excitement at venturing upon the modern age, the noble ideals and dreams of the precocious, the transport of affections for new-found friends, energetic efforts to raise pride in Javanese culture, and the hope of forming ties with like-minded young people in Java. There is also maturation, ambitions adapted to meet changed circumstances, and then a life cut short just days after giving birth to her only child. Had Kartini been given a longer life we would perhaps have traced evolution in ideas and principles and achievement of goals. Over the decades since her death, commentators have analysed Kartini according to the sensibilities of their own historical time and priorities. And they have necessarily found the heroine wanting.