Christian Jil Benitez is a poet, scholar, translator, and educator from the Philippines.
He is the author of Isang Dalumat ng Panahon (Ateneo Press, 2022).

Isang Dalumat ng Panahon

Ateneo de Manila UP, 2022

Best Book of Literary Criticism/Cultural Studies, 41st Philippine National Book Awards

Isang Dalumat ng Panahon attempts to articulate an understanding of time wagered to be particularly "Filipino." Harnessing literature as its object and method, it turns to a wide range of texts, from precolonial folk poetry and colonial dictionary entries, to contemporary Philippine scholarship and journalistic writings. What ultimately emerges is a vernacular intuition of time as panahon, or the opportunity (pagkakataon) for things, human and nonhuman alike, to become. Such an idea is further explored through related concepts such as the mythic (alamat) and the bountiful (kasaganaan); the materiality and arrival (datíng) of things; trope and tropicality; contemporaneity and history; and love and metaphor (talinghaga). In doing so, the book demonstrates a propositional, if not altogether new, vocabulary to talk about time, as it is specifically embodied in the Philippine world.

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Praise

What Benitez offers here is a valuable text on time, as a foundational category on critical and literary studies. There is an exceptional attention, patience, and embrace to the Filipino worldview here that is rooted on indigenous and mythological sensibilities. Here also lies the hope that in the midst of the shakiness of present ideas and systems of thinking, there are virtues that still hold and remain reliable.
— Alvin Yapan, author of Sangkatauhan, SangkahayupanIsang Dalumat ng Panahon is an incisive theoretical discourse on time through literature, how time is perceived in the very act of reading or listening to texts and languages... Exceeding simple translation of or borrowing from phenomenological studies on temporality, Benitez opens here a clear contribution: how to identify and rehearse such a study in the particular ecology that is the Philippines in its materialities.
— Gary C. Devilles, author of Sensing ManilaIn this book, Benitez creates a "language of his own," with an exceptional style on discourse, that can only be idiolectical: the sign of emergence of a true theorist and critic!
—Oscar V. Campomanes, co-editor of Colonialism & Modernity: Re-mapping Philippine HistoriesIsang Dalumat ng Panahon is an admirable piece of original Filipino thinking. There is a careful attentiveness in the theory proposed in these pages, for each gesture of time described here is enveloped in the materiality of history... What can only transpire from such placedness is a sense of planetarity that is most rooted in Filipino consciousness.
— Jaya Jacobo, author of Arasahas: Mga Tula...A novel and comprehensive study on a subject matter that is seldom considered in the field of literary studies, Christian Benitez's Isang Dalumat ng Panahon... advances an attempt to discourse time and how it is experienced in relation to the idea of being Filipino.
—Citation, 41st Philippine National Book Awards

Features

Christian Jil R. Benitez is a poet, scholar, translator, and educator from the Philippines. He earned his AB-MA in Filipino Literature from the Department of Filipino, Ateneo de Manila University (ADMU), where he teaches literature, criticism, and rhetoric. Currently based in Bangkok, Thailand, he is pursuing his PhD in comparative literature at Chulalongkorn University through a Second Century Fund (C2F) Scholarship for high-efficiency candidates.Hailed as Poet of the Year 2018 by the Commission on the Filipino Language, his poetry has been given recognition in the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature and Maningning Miclat Poetry Awards, among others. His critical and creative works in both English and Filipino primarily move around the Philippine notion of time (panahon), intuited through the rubrics of the tropical, the poetic, and the neomaterial.He is a member of the interdisciplinary research network Rethinking the Order of Time; and the Film Desk of the Young Critics Circle, where he served as chairperson for the filmic year 2019. He is also the associate editor of the journal Katipunan, published by the Department of Filipino, ADMU. Previously, he was the head of the Creative Writing Desk of the Ateneo Institute of Literary Arts and Practices, where he directed the annual Ateneo National Writers Workshop (2018-2023).Presently, he is working on his dissertation on a nonhuman comparative poetics. At the same time, he is translating to English Allan Derain's and Alvin Yapan's fiction. His translation of Jaya Jacobo's first poetry collection, Arahas (Savage Mind Publishing, 2023), is forthcoming from Paloma Press. His first book, Isang Dalumat ng Panahon (ADMU Press, 2022) was hailed as the Best Book of Literary Studies/Cultural Criticism at the 41st Philippine National Book Award.

About | Works

Panahon | Critical | Creative | Editorial/Review