The Manila International Book Fair
The Manila International Book Fair, the country’s biggest book event, will be held on September 13 – 17, 2017 at the SMX Convention Center, Mall of Asia Complex, Pasay City. It will showcase the largest and most diverse collection of books for leisure and academic reading. Everything you need from educational materials and references, to textbooks, to fiction bestsellers, and graphic novels will be under one roof.
Come and support our local publishers at the book fair. Visit the University of the Philippines Press at booths 263-265 to sample and purchase our titles, including our bestsellers and new releases. Avail of big discounts on selected items!
The promotion of literacy is a cause in which the entirety of our national educational system is, of necessity, urgently invested.
After all, we have only been unevenly—and in many places, minimally—literate for a tumultuous century.
It’s easy to see how the residual orality that afflicts our personal lives, as well as our social and political systems, is in many ways the uneasy endowment of this cultural condition.
If only for this reason, the cultivation of literacy through the sponsorship of the arts may be seen as a uniquely nationalistic undertaking: it builds the Filipino nation as a matter of collective inclination and awareness—as an imaginative and ethical “inner” structure, first and foremost.
The University of the Philippines Press certainly plays a crucial role in this immense and unfinished task. In pursuing its mandate to advocate academic freedom it presents and disseminates local and important forms of knowledge—by publishing the very best creative and scholarly books by our country’s very best writers and scholars.
Because the arts are an exemplary form of heightened consciousness, they may be said to be the condition for, and evidence of, a mature and transformative literacy—of the visual, performative, and literary sorts. Hence, their continued production and distribution, through the medium of books, can only be in the interest of our country’s one and only national university to carry out.
We need to realize that the powerful orality that continues to permeate our lives is a cultural mode characterized by a fluid and variable memory.
While copious and valuable in its own tactile and immediate ways, the oral mind—with its makeshift and situational predisposition—has prevented us from remembering analytically and tenaciously about things. Sadly, this is precisely the kind of cognitive skill that we need in order to set a-right so much of what is wrong about our national reality, blighted as it is by exactly the kinds of clientelist ties—premised on personalistic logic—that orality propagates and requires.
UP must continue to champion profound forms of reading and writing not only because textual or categorical mentality is something our country vitally needs, but also because it is especially through these mindful acts that an ethical intuition can take root.
Literacy suspends us inside the consciousness of others—rendering us responsible for our ways of relating with them, who affirm our sense of self precisely by being irreducible to it, and with whom we must share this imperiled and perilous world.
Immersing themselves in the complexities of their formal practices, artists leave behind the safety of the familiar, the known, and the same, in order to confront, respect, and relate to strangeness, difference, otherness.
It is through the arts and their imaginative flights—their ability to endow us a point of view distinct from our own, to incarnate us, as it were—that we bring our sense of identity, our very self, to a state of beautiful crisis, from which we may emerge not only more aware and appreciative of the existence of others, but also, more importantly, as fundamentally different from or other to ourselves.
From this recontextualizing of the self—its de-centering and empathy across embodiments and locations—a sense of morality may hopefully, gradually emerge…
Of course, it is our artists who bridge the chasm between our present and our past, in order to provide us the brightest rituals, symbols, images, sounds, and narratives that collectively inspire—and perform into being—our national culture.
In the words of Frantz Fanon,
A national culture is the whole body of efforts made by a people in the sphere of thought to describe, justify, and praise the action through which that people has created itself and keeps itself in existence.
On behalf of the University of the Philippines, I would like to thank all our National Artist authors for entrusting to us, UP’s official Publishing House, their wondrous and irreplaceable books—the children of their best selves, bestowals of their giving consciousness.
As carefully shaped vessels of enduring memory, books are nothing if not invitations to the ethical life, gestures toward principled sociality, manifestos against the shame and impunity of forgetting.
Our country—as bodied forth by its one and only national university—shall forever be grateful to all of you.
I would also like to thank our partner institutions for this tribute program—namely, the College of Arts and Letters of UP Diliman (headed by Dean Amihan Bonifacio-Ramolete), and the UP Open University (headed by Chancellor Grace Alfonso).
Our heartfelt thanks also goes to the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, and the Likhaan: UP Institute of Creative Writing, as well as all the speakers, resource persons, performers, emcees, visual and musical artists, and members of the production staff, who all worked tirelessly in the making of our tribute videos and installations, as well as our activity here today.
I would like, in particular, to thank Ms. Olive Nieto, special project coordinator of the UP Press. She and her team—that includes Alden Acosta, Angela Simbajon, and Opaline Santos—as well as members of the Press’ editorial, marketing, and administrative sections, have been unstinting and entirely committed to all our golden anniversary activities (especially today’s).
Finally, I wish to thank the administration of President Alfredo E. Pascual, especially my lovely and indefatigable boss, Vice-President for Academic Affairs Giselle Padilla Concepcion, for their unwavering support of all the projects and initiatives of the UP Press.
Thank you for coming. A pleasant evening to one and all.
The University of the Philippines Open University has agreed to document our event which we are holding in partnership of the College of Arts and Letters of UP Diliman. The resulting videos will be used as supplementary materials by UPOU.
PAGPUPUGAY: A Tribute to the National Artists of the UP Press
Description of Event
The University of the Philippines Press in partnership with the College of Arts and Letters UP Diliman is holding a couple of events honoring the National Artists whose books have been published by the institution.
Since it was founded in 1965, UP Press has published works by no less than thirteen authors who have been named National Artists of the Philippines.
The thirteen National Artists are: Amado V. Hernandez (Literature, 1973), Leonor Orosa-Goquingco (Dance, 1976), Francisco Arcellana (Literature, 1990), Edith L. Tiempo (Literature, 1999), Nestor Vicente Madali (NVM) Gonzalez (Literature, 1997), Rolando S. Tinio (Theatre, 1997), Jose M. Maceda (Music, 1997), Francisco Sionil Jose (Literature, 2001), Virgilio S. Almario (Literature, 2003), Bienvenido L. Lumbera (Literature, 2006), Lazaro A. Francisco (Literature, 2009), Ramon P. Santos (Music, 2014), and Cirilo F. Bautista (Literature, 2014).
We are pleased to inform you that the University of the Philippines Press will be launching fourteen new titles. The book launch dubbed Paglulunsad will be held on November 27, 2015, Friday, 4:00 p.m. at the 2nd floor Balay Kalinaw, corner Guerrero and Dagohoy Streets, UP Diliman Campus.
This is open to the public.
Team UP Press will be there until 7 p.m.