The National Historical Commission of the Philippines released last week the book The Visayas, Islands in the Sea: A History, written by historian Dr. Earl Jude Paul Cleope, NHCP commissioner.
“Dr. Cleope’s book emphasized maritime history, tracing the interactions of people and their activity at sea, and connecting the history of the different islands in the Visayas,”said NHCP Chair Dr. Emmanuel Franco Calairo.
Role of the sea
“This study of history is framed on the role of the sea in the historical development of the Visayas region,” said Cleope, who is also vice president for Academic Affairs at Silliman University.
In the introduction of his book, Cleope said he spent 15 years examining the role of the bodies of water surrounding the Visayas islands as “part of the historical discourse.” With this focus on the seas and maritime activities of people in the Visayas, the book describes the history of the Visayas islands as major historical events in Philippine history unfold.
“It dealt with voluminous materials dealing with Visayan local history that were synthesized to provide a history of the region, with the ultimate goal of contributing to constructing a complete history of the nation,” wrote Cleope.
He said the book emphasizes the maritime parts of the Visayas that shaped the region’s identity and cultural heritage, and attempts to “fill in the first gaps” needed to develop the region’s history.
Regional history
Cleope said in his book he aimed to offer a “new framework” for writing a “total, national history” that develops the entire history of a region using a multi-interdisciplinary approach. This “new historicist perspective,” he said, was used to explain the history of the Visayas because he “feels that regional history must be developed first” before the drafting of a national history.
Dr. Bernardita Reyes-Churchill, Philippine National Historical Society president, said in the foreword that the book “blazed a trail in local/regional history”.
“The ultimate goal was to synthesize the history of the Visayas, collating the various historical studies thus far, constructing a regional history of the Visayas that would find resonance in the historiography of the other regions in the Philippines,” she wrote.
Churchill also said the book “maintains that the Visayas cannot be studied in complete isolation, and must be set in the context of national history,” which shares the same goal of the National Historical Society as the country’s oldest professional organization of historians and practitioners.
“There is a whole history of the Visayas—land and people—awaiting the attention of historians and other social scientists,” she said.
Multi-interdisciplinary approach
Churchill said Cleope used a multi-interdisciplinary technique to “illustrate parallelisms, similarities, and differences in the historical and cultural development among the Visayan islands.”
She noted how Cleope used “voluminous materials” on Visayan regional/local history to write the book, including texts and discourses of archival and published records, first-hand knowledge from folklore and oral traditions, etymologies, literary and linguistic studies, travel accounts, and oral history.
“This has almost been a lifetime work that the author has dedicated to Visayan historiography,” she added.
Other chapters in the book are about: the Visayan Islands before the arrival of Europeans; early revolts and reactions to Spanish colonization; Visayan maritime raiding; Visayan-Tagalog tension in the Philippine Revolution; Japanese occupation in the Visayas; the non-combatants in the Visayas Islands in areas labeled by the Japanese as “Bandit Zones”; and the historical evolution of Visayan ports.
The book The Visayas, Islands in the Sea: A History by Cleope will be available from Sept. 14-17 at the NHCP booth at the Manila International Book Fair at the SMX Convention Center. (Jameela Mendoza/SU OIP)
