Performative Lecture, The Reception, Hamilton, Ontario.

Using Filipino food as an analogy, what if we imagine Filipinx Canadian Studies and Art as a grand kamayan feast: a messy, collective experience that unabashedly rejects the tools of Western dining civility – namely, the fork and knife – in favour of our hands. With our hands, we disrupt the foundation of whiteness – or at least, white rice. No ONE food is at the centre, but the lumpia, bagoong, longanisa, and bangus intermingle, compliment, and contrast each other in a culinary cacophony that we produce and consume for our benefit and our community. 

We must sit at the boardroom tables of institutions, boards of directors of galleries, hiring committes of post-secondary institutions and act as jury members of grants, but we must also create our own tables: communal spaces of sharing, where our affects, sensibilities, and aesthetics are not exoticized or are relegated as multiculturalist add-ons to official knowledges and cultures, but cultivate new collectivities and abundant, sensuous, and fearless political, artistic, and scholarly projects.  We must form a kamayan of scholarly and artistic excellence.