Bikol literature discussed at Philippine Studies gab in London

Bikol literature and language is the topic of a panel of three academics in the Philippine Studies Conference at the SOAS University of London on August 21, 2026.

The overall theme of the conference is “Archipelagic Tongues — Philippine Languages and Meaning-making, Austronesian Worlds and Global Futures,” while the panel on Bikol literature and language is entitled “Istória, Díla’: Archipelagic Recovery and Re-orientation through Bikol.”

The first speaker, Grace M. Saqueton, who has roots in Masbate, will talk about the Pasayaw sa Leon, a folktale that used to be a feature of the Santacruzan in the early 1900s. She will study the dicho, “a form of limerick recited/sung by the paaraway (narrator/main character).” She states that while there are several versions of the tale, there are two prominent ones: Reyna Elena and Prinsipe Constantino battling ferocious creatures while they search for the True Cross, and lowland villagers battling the Agtas who disrupt village festivities. She also states that the dicho is no longer featured in recent versions of the Pasayaw and “attempts to (re)construct the linguistic elements of the tale.” She then traces the “meaning-making practices of the community as they navigate the spaces of remembering, resisting, and living.”

Julie B. Jolo will represent herself and Irish Joy Deocampo in a paper entitled “Tamwa-anay sa Balkonahe: Romero kag Huli, a queer Bikol-Hiligaynon tradaptation of Romeo and Juliet.” They use the Bikol and early Hiligaynon translations of Shakespeare in a short film of the balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet, “to reframe the act of translating Shakespeare as an experiment of archipelagic and queer co-imagination.” Tradaptation, or translation and adaptation, is “a response to the fidelity toward standard language varieties and heteronormative characterizations found in earlier translations of the play…The project explores how space and language can serve as both manifestation and affective resolution of geo-political conflict and romance.”

Meanwhile, Maria Lorena M. Santos reads the latest novel of Filipina-Australian Merlinda Bobis, In the Name of the Trees, centering on the expression “No Trees, No English.” She looks into how the author unsettles the “ideology of a monolithic English” and “foregrounds archipelagic tongues” through the “sustained integration of Bikol words, phrases, and knowledge traditions… It shows how English and Bikol operate as languages of negotiation in the text, enabling pluriversal, archipelagic modes of meaning-making in representing colonial history, matrilineal memory, and survival.”

All the presenters teach at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City.