Black Henry: Charting New Ways Forward in Filipino History

Asian American / Asian Research Institute (AAARI) - The City University of New York (CUNY)

In her CUNY FORUM essay, writer Vina Orden discusses quincentennial commemoration of the Magellan-Elcano circumnavigation across the Pacific to South America, through the Strait of Magellan, and across the Pacific to Guam and the Philippines. What exactly was being commemorated depended on who you asked. Here, Orden presents a critique of colonial Spanish and Filipino history, utilizing Filipino journalist, poet, and playwright Luis H. Francias play, Black Henry, as a radical work of imagination and jumping off point to deconstruct colonial history.