This event was an online discussion featuring Vina A. Lanzona, Francisco Jayme Paolo A. Guiang, and Lila Ramos Shahani, moderated by Christine Balance and organized by the Southeast Asia Digital Library.

Vina A. Lanzona: "Origins and Vision of the Martial Law Library: Navigating the Difficult Philippine Past"

Associate Professor in History and former director of the Center for Philippine Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa

In this talk, Vina Lanzona will share the beginnings of the idea of a digital library of Martial Law materials, as well as the vision of the project. She will outline the major challenges as well accomplishments of this collaborative project that spans across countries, oceans and continents. Central to her presentation is to show how to navigate the website, taking all of us into a unique journey into this painful and controversial period in Philippine history.

Francisco Jayme Paolo A. Guiang: “Marcosian propaganda as fascist propaganda: Mythmaking and historical distortions in the 21st century”

Assistant Professor at the Department of History, University of the Philippines Diliman

In this talk, Jio Guiang argues that Marcosian propaganda is a form of fascist propaganda that utilizes networked disinformation as a means to manipulate public discourse and generate mass support. In recent years, social media platforms have become conduits for political mythmaking and historical distortions that ultimately subscribe to the playbook of “fascist propaganda” in the Philippines. Thus, this presentation will show examples of social media materials so as to reveal how some forces within the Philippine political establishment have deployed this type of propaganda to systematically weaponize disinformation and gain public support—a tactic that had been proven effective for the Rodrigo Duterte and the Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. regimes.

Lila Ramos Shahani: "Grieving the ungrievable: Trauma and Memory during Martial Law"

Expert Member of two International Scientific Committees of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), where she specializes in the Interpretation and Presentation of Cultural Heritage Sites (ICIP) and Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICICH)

If memorials can be described as the performance of memory, which stories do they privilege, and which do they eclipse or deliberately erase altogether? Memorials (monuments, historical markers, art, texts) can also be seen as the materialization of certain stories. But memorialization paradoxically preserves, even as it represses, memory itself. It is this dialectical relationship between memory and memorialization, one that is unending and openended, that I seek to unpack. I look at the relationship between grieving and trauma how the two are inseparable yet unresolvable in relation to narratives of torture by survivors of Martial Law in the Philippines. Following Judith Butler’s notion of “grievability,” I ask: whose lives (and stories) have been deemed to be grievable, whose have not, and how have these calibrations influenced the way Martial Law has been commemorated? Based on firsthand interviews with survivors and numerous affidavits, I examine the relative absence of memorialization of Filipino Muslims (“Moros”), particularly women, whenever the brutal record of the Marcos regime is recalled.