"cite, sight, site" by Christine Dianne Guiyangco

The public is invited to 

cite, sight, site

by Christine Dianne Guiyangco

University of California, Irvine

Part of the KRITIKA KULTURA LECTURE SERIES

To register, visit https://go.ateneo.edu/KKLectureGuiyangco

Kritika Kultura, in collaboration with the Literary and Cultural Studies Program, Ateneo Institute of Literary Arts and Practices (AILAP), and PLUME, invites you to a lecture titled “cite, sight, site,” to be delivered by Christine Diane Guiyangco of the University of California, Irvine. The event will take place on 4 September 2025, 5:15–7:00 PM, at the NGF Conference Room, De la Costa Hall, Ateneo de Manila University.

This lecture explores how Taglish, from its early formations in Filipino comics like Kenkoy to its contemporary uses in call centers and care work, carries an afterlife of laughter shaped by empire, migration, and labor. Drawing on translation theory and a close reading of caricature, it examines how bilingual speech, accent, and puns reveal the risks and residues of humor across Filipino diasporic histories. 

Admission is free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase before and after the event. Please bring a valid ID for campus access. 

ABSTRACT

If you ask me “haw is yu?” the greeting sets a method of cite, sight, site. I cite Kenkoy, a widely circulated popular comic strip from the US colonial Philippines, where Tagalog and English sit side by side and caricature makes language laugh at itself, revealing how speech is shaped, stretched, and returned against power. I place this homeland Taglish beside its overseas descendant formed through migration and service economies, where the same sounds carry different obligations. I sight the page by reading punctuation as drawing and line as speech, following how timing, spacing, and sequence carry what laughter remembers and what it leaves behind as punchlines move across places and through uneven histories of the Filipino diaspora. I site Taglish within today’s call centers, care work, and remittance networks, where accent training and scripted fluency convert bilingual voice into utility and where early funniness can be repackaged as punniness. Guided by translation theory, I ask for an English that shows its seam rather than seals it, and I use caricature and translation together to examine how jokes travel, what they remember, and what they forget. To translate that afterlife without flattening it is to carry an archive of laughter from empire into the present, even as Taglish draws a wage. From here, the organizing question follows: which practices of translating, reading, and making can return risk to laughter without converting domination into utility? When the greeting circles back, I want to tell you that I have been “beveriry gudgood period”

BIONOTE

Christine Dianne Guiyangco is an artist and scholar whose work spans sculpture, installation, performance, comics, video, and writing. Her practice converges art and theory, turning words into characters and characters into words to trace how colonial violence reverberates through diasporic life in asynchronous echoes. She uses puns, punctuations, and punchlines as strategies that resist capitalism’s mechanized temporality. Working in Comparative Literature, Global Asias, translation, aesthetics, psychoanalysis, and critical theory, she reads across art, literature, and philosophy to hold witness and transformation together. She engages the comics medium as both form and method and is currently developing a new comic series that theorizes mis/translation and joke time, examining the wait and the weight of endurance as a way of attending to historical time. Guiyangco is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, with emphases in Asian American Studies and Translation Theory, and holds an MFA in Studio Art with a Critical Theory emphasis from the University of California, Irvine, and a BA in Art from the University of California, Los Angeles.

ABOUT KRITIKA KULTURA

Kritika Kultura is acknowledged by a host of Asian and Asian American Studies libraries and scholarly networks and indexed in the MLA International Bibliography, Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Clarivate), Scopus, EBSCO, the Directory of Open Access Journals, and the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs (ICCTP). Read KK issues and learn about submission guidelines and events on https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk or email the editors at kk@ateneo.edu.

Register here: https://go.ateneo.edu/KKLectureGuiyangco