Insurrecto with author Gina Apostol in conversation with Patricia McManus

“Of course, as opposed to the colonizer, the world of the colonized is visibly and thus irreparably multiple – because included in the world of the colonized is the world of the colonizer.”. —How Do We Know the Things That Make Us?, An essay from Gina Apostol

Gina Apostol’s Insurrecto is a harrowing depiction of the nearly 125-year history of U.S. intervention, occupation, and domination in the Philippines. Through a compelling historical, cultural, post-modernist journey, the author recounts the U.S. hold on the Philippines, as told by Magsalin, a Filipina translator and screenwriter, and Chiara, an American filmmaker. The U.S.-made merry-go-round of dictators has circled around Manila and the 7,000-plus islands of the Philippines since the 1901 massacre at Balangiga—the slaughter of more than 2,500 Filipinos in retaliation for 40 American soldiers killed in a raid by local national liberationists. When President Theodore Roosevelt issued a command to pacify the Philippines after the raid was reported to him, the local U.S. general issued the following command:  “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn; the more you kill and burn, the better it will please me… The interior of Samar must be made a howling wilderness.” From that point on he was known as “Howling Wilderness” Smith. Insurrecto spans the decades from the moment of the massacre to the current Duterte regime, with much between—a fractured story of torture and misrepresentation over many years of U.S. and western hegemony.

Please join Gina Apostol and  Patricia McManus for an evening of discovery as they discuss the inspiration, writing, and more of this astonishing novel (published by Soho Press).

GINA APOSTOL’s third book, Gun Dealers’ Daughter, won the2013 PEN/Open Book Award and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize. Her first two novels, Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, both won the Juan Laya Prize for the Novel (Philippine National Book Award). She was a fellow at Civitella Ranieri in Umbria, Italy, among other fellowships. Her essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Foreign Policy, Gettysburg Review, Massachusetts Review, and others. She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts and grew up in Tacloban, Philippines. She teaches at the Fieldston School in New York City.

PATRICIA McMANUS is a Senior Lecturer, School of Humanities at University of Brighton. She is the founder of the Dystopia Project. Her research interests are the novel—in particular the problems involved in understanding genre as a productive force in literary history—and Marxism as a methodology for utopianism.