As a former English major and now doctoral student, I have amassed enough books for a small library. Below are some of my favorite works.
Research
“What would it mean for our research methodologies and ways of writing to consistently embrace this unfinishedness, seeking ways to analyze the general, the structural, the processual while maintaining an acute awareness of the inevitable incompleteness of our own accounts?”
–João Biehl and Adriana Petryna, “Critical Global Health” (2013)
Mamdani, Mahmood. 2022. Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tadiar, Neferti X.M. 2009. Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Ngai, Mae M. 2014. Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Poetry
“The earliest experience of art must have been that it was incantatory, magical; art was an instrument of ritual.”
–Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation: And Other Essays (1966)
Lim-Wilson, Fatima. 1995. Crossing the Snow Bridge. Columbia, OH: Ohio State University Press.
Cruz, Conchitina R. 2008. elsewhere held and lingered. Manila, PH: High Chair.
Reyes, Barbara Jane. 2010. Diwata. Rochester, NY: BOA Editions.
Diaz, Natalie. 2020. Postcolonial Love Poem. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press.
Alyan, Hala. 2024. The Moon that Turns You Back. New York, NY: Ecco.
Nezhukumatahil, Aimee. 2011. Lucky Fish. North Adams, MA: Tupelo Press.
Fiction
“Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit…?”
–Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction” (1921)
Apostol, Gina. 2012. Gun Dealers’ Daughter. New York, NY: W.W. Norton.
Boulley, Angeline. 2021. Fire Keeper’s Daughter. New York, NY: Henry Holt and Co.
Miller, Madeline. 2018. Circe. New York, NY: Little, Brown and Company.
Non-fiction
“Writing in the feminine. And on a colored sky. How do you inscribe difference without bursting into a series of euphoric narcissistic accounts of yourself and your own kind? Without indulging in a marketable romanticism or in a naive whining about your condition? … The ground is narrow and slippery. None of us can pride ourselves on being sure-footed there.”
–Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other (1989)
Williams, Jeffrey J., and Heather Steffen, eds. 2012. The Critical Pulse: Thirty-Six Credos by Contemporary Critics. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Nafisi, Azar. 2022. Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times. New York, NY: Dey Street Books.
Castillo, Elaine. 2022. How to Read Now: Essays. New York, NY: Viking Press.
San Juan Jr., Epifanio, ed. 2008. Balikbayang Sinta: An E. San Juan Reader. Quezon City, PH: Ateneo de Manila University Press.
Reyes, Barbara Jane. 2022. Wanna Peek Into My Notebook? Notes on Pinay Liminality. San Francisco, CA: Paloma Press.
Arruzza, Cinzia, Tithi Bhattacharya, and Nancy Fraser. 2019. Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto. London, UK: Verso Books.