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The Bantayog ng mga Bayani [Monument of Heroes] is a memorial centre in Manila dedicated to the memory of individuals who resisted the dictatorship of the late President Ferdinand E. Marcos. This article examines history as represented in this memorial centre. Through an examination of its museum and the debates concerning whom the Bantayog should honour as heroes, it analyses a key historical tension in the representation of the Marcos period: an ambivalence regarding the anti-dictatorship struggle of the organized Left. It also examines the class-based nature of historical memory in the Philippines, arguing that class positions inform who and what is remembered.

In January 2001, a peaceful urban revolt ousted President Joseph Estrada of the Philippines amid evidence of the president's involvement in illegal gambling. Using Estrada's ouster as a case study, this article examines the ground-up process that turns everyday criminality in the Philippines into public scandal. It contends that scandalous politicsacts of illegality perpetrated by the political elite in various localities-are a constant feature of the Philippine state. However, it is only when these acts become legible to the observers of national politics that a public scandal occurs. In examining the nexus between scandalous politics and public scandal, the article views scandal as a mediated phenomenon, one premised on the concerns of middle-class politics in Manila.Noong Enero 2001, natanggal sa pwesto si Pangulong Joseph Estrada nang malantad ang katibayan ng kanyang pagkasangkot sa ilegal na pagsusugal. Sa pamamagitan ng halimbawa ng pagkatanggal ni Estrada, kinikilatis ng artikulong ito ang proseso kung saan ang mga pang-araw-araw na krimen sa Pilipinas ay nagiging pampublikong iskandalo. Ginigiit nito na ang maiskandalong pulitika-mga gawaing ilegal ng mga elit sa iba't ibang lokalidad-ay isang patuloy na katangian ng estado sa Pilipinas. Subalit nagiging pampublikong iskandalo lamang ang mga gawaing ito kapag napapansin ito ng mga tagapagmasid ng pulitika sa sentro ng bayan. Sa pagkilatis ng koneksyon ng maiskandalong pulitika at pambulikong iskandalo, tinitingnan ng artikulong ito ang iskandalo bilang isang penomenang nakabatay sa mga isyung mahalaga sa burgis na pulitika sa Maynila.

discuss the Comaroff's recent publication Theory from the South and its implications for rethinking global relations through the praxis of critical scholarship. NOTE: The following interview, conducted by Lisandro Claudio, took place in Copenhagen in November 2015. Its content arises largely out of the recent publication of Theory from the South: Or, how Euro-America is evolving toward Africa, Jean and John Comaroff (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2012). * LC: How do you define the Global South? JC: This is not an easy question to answer. The Global South has multiple referents, multiple meanings. In ordinary conversation, of course, its primary denotation is geographical: it signifies, hemispherically, the lower half of the planet, its underside. But this is a grotesque simplification, a realist-and often racist-conceit. The term has a far more complex fan of significata. Superficially, it describes those reaches of the planet that were formerly colonized, although not always at the same time; those parts of the world that European imperial metropoles "discovered," conquered by means of one or another form of violence, exploited for economic and political purposes, and took to be part of their so-called overseas "possessions." A more subtle conceptualization treats the Global South less as a geopolitical or even an historical entity-in spatiotemporal terms, that is-than as a relational term that takes on its substance by virtue of its contrast, be it binary or complementary or orthogonal or even at times rhizomatic, to the global north. Because it is a relational sign, a "shifter" if you prefer the technical linguistic designation, its content is constantly shifting. In some contexts, its connotation is largely imaginative: it stands as a loose, and quite plastic, rhetorical trope of otherness to EuroAmerica. In others, it takes on a hard-edged materiality, as in the formation of BRICS (a geo-economic axis that brings together Brazil, India, South Africa, China, and Russia); or, in the world of finance, as a zone in which credit ratings are low, labile, and carefully regulated, and toward which G8 policies require regularly to be negotiated. For the critical scholar, however-and here is the point-our theory-work requires that we do not take "the global south" as an analytic category in or for itself. Our task is to interrogate and explain the various ways in which the term is understood, deployed, commissioned, and contested. In Theory from the South, Jean Comaroff and I make the argument that, whatever else it might be taken to denote, geopolitically or imaginatively or economically, "the global south" alludes to any ex-centric location-a location external to self-appointed, historical centers, that is, in a world of metamorphosing relations among, even deconstructions of, centers-and-peripheries-from which to look at the contemporary planetary order Source: Cuny.edu.

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