We know Foucault. But do we know Resil Mojares?

It is embarrassing that we do not know Resil Mojares. More precisely, it is embarrassing that some of us who call ourselves scholars, critics, teachers, and intellectuals of Philippine language, literature, history, and culture have never seriously encountered his work. This was the subject of a conversation I had with a writer friend over lunch last Sunday at another friend’s house. It was not a conversation intended to shame anyone who had simply never had the opportunity to read him. There is nothing inherently shameful about not having encountered a particular scholar. No one can read everything. But the conversation became more uncomfortable when we considered the responsibilities that come with working inside academic institutions, particularly institutions such as the University of the Philippines, where the study of Philippine society, culture, literature, and history is not merely an intellectual interest but part of the institution’s broader mission. If we teach Philippine literature, language, history, or culture, how can we afford not to know one of the country’s most important intellectuals?

Resil B. Mojares was not simply a literary scholar who wrote books about the Philippines. He was a historian, literary critic, essayist, cultural intellectual, and teacher whose scholarship crossed the artificial boundaries that often separate academic disciplines. Born in Polanco, Zamboanga del Norte, Mojares devoted much of his intellectual life to understanding the Philippines from the ground up, paying particular attention to local histories, regional cultures, literature, intellectual traditions, and the complicated processes through which Filipinos came to understand themselves. His scholarship challenged the tendency to imagine Philippine history only from Manila or only through the narratives produced by political and national institutions. He demonstrated that the Philippines could be understood more deeply when we listened to its regions, communities, writers, intellectuals, and historical experiences.

Among his many important works, The Origins of the Filipino People: A Narrative History from the Spanish Conquest to the Second World War stands as an ambitious attempt to rethink Philippine historical consciousness. His studies of Cebu and the Visayas likewise demonstrated how regional histories are not peripheral footnotes to the national story but essential components of it. His work on Philippine intellectual history, literature, nationalism, and cultural formation repeatedly asked difficult questions about who produces knowledge, whose stories become authoritative, and how Filipinos inherited, negotiated, resisted, and transformed ideas about themselves. He wrote about figures such as Marcelo H. del Pilar and Maximo Paterno, about writers and intellectuals, about Cebuano history and culture, and about the formation of Filipino identity. His scholarship was expansive precisely because the Philippine experience itself is expansive and cannot be contained within one discipline.

Mojares’s brilliance lies partly in his ability to make the local intellectually significant. This may sound simple, but it is actually a radical proposition in a country where intellectual authority has historically been concentrated in particular institutions, languages, regions, and metropolitan centers. For decades, Philippine scholarship has struggled with a Manila-centered imagination. What happens in Manila is often treated as national, while what happens in Cebu, Iloilo, Bacolod, Tacloban, Zamboanga, Davao, or other regions is too easily described as merely regional. Mojares complicated that hierarchy. His work reminds us that the regional is not the opposite of the national. The regional is one of the foundations from which the national is constructed.

This is precisely why his scholarship should matter to anyone studying Philippine language, literature, and culture. To read Mojares is to encounter a way of thinking about the Philippines that refuses easy categories. Literature is connected to history. History is connected to power. Power is connected to institutions. Institutions are connected to memory. Memory is connected to identity. Language is connected to place. Place is connected to people’s experiences of belonging and exclusion. The result is a richer understanding of Philippine culture because it refuses to isolate literature from the society that produces and receives it. For students of language and literature, this is particularly important. We cannot fully understand a literary text without understanding the historical and cultural worlds that shaped its production.

There is therefore a difference between saying, “I have not read Resil Mojares,” and saying, “I do not need to read Resil Mojares.” The first is simply an admission of an unfinished reading life. The second becomes an intellectual problem, especially when it comes from someone whose professional responsibility involves teaching or researching Philippine culture. Scholarship is always incomplete. We will inevitably have gaps in our reading. The responsibility of an academic, however, is to recognize those gaps and continually work to address them. We cannot claim intellectual authority while becoming comfortable with intellectual ignorance.

This is particularly important in universities. Institutions of higher education are not supposed to reproduce only what everyone already knows. They are supposed to complicate knowledge. They are supposed to introduce students to thinkers who can challenge their assumptions and expose them to perspectives they may not encounter elsewhere. If students studying Philippine literature graduate without encountering significant regional scholarship, then something is wrong with the curriculum. If students can discuss Western theorists at length but cannot identify major Filipino scholars who have fundamentally shaped the study of Philippine society and culture, we should seriously examine what our educational priorities are teaching them.

This is not an argument against reading international scholarship. On the contrary, Philippine scholars need broad intellectual horizons. We need to engage with global scholarship, theories, methodologies, and debates. But intellectual openness should not become intellectual dependency. There is something deeply troubling when students can readily identify Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, or other major Western thinkers while remaining unfamiliar with the Filipino scholars who have spent decades asking questions about the particular historical and cultural conditions of our own society. We need both. But we must also ask why one body of knowledge so often becomes foundational while another becomes optional.

Mojares is especially important for younger generations because the Philippines they are inheriting is undergoing another period of intense cultural transformation. Young Filipinos are growing up in an environment shaped by social media, algorithmic information, globalization, migration, political polarization, popular culture, artificial intelligence, and rapidly changing forms of communication. They are exposed to enormous amounts of information but are not necessarily given the intellectual tools to interpret that information historically. Mojares offers precisely such tools. His work teaches readers to look beyond the surface of contemporary life and ask how identities, institutions, ideas, and cultural practices were formed.

Introducing Mojares to young people is therefore not about turning him into another name students are required to memorize for an examination. It is about introducing them to a method of thinking. It is about teaching them that the Philippines has produced serious intellectuals who have devoted their lives to understanding this country in all its contradictions. It is about telling young Filipinos that their own history is intellectually worthy of deep study. Their communities are worthy of scholarship. Their languages are worthy of analysis. Their regional histories are worthy of preservation. Their writers and thinkers deserve to be read not merely because they are Filipino, but because their work contributes something important to how we understand the human experience.

This becomes even more urgent now because Mojares is no longer here to continue the conversation himself. His death creates a different kind of responsibility for those of us who remain. The passing of a National Artist is not simply the loss of an individual. It is the loss of a living intellectual presence, a teacher, a researcher, a writer, and a particular way of asking questions about the country. But death does not have to mean disappearance. Scholars die, but scholarship can remain alive if succeeding generations continue to read, teach, critique, reinterpret, and argue with their work. The best way to honor an intellectual is not merely to praise them after death. It is to continue the intellectual work they made possible.

This is why recognizing Mojares as a National Artist matters. The title should not be reduced to a ceremonial honor, a line in a curriculum vitae, or a posthumous celebration accompanied by photographs and formal statements. National Artist recognition should invite us to reconsider the significance of an individual’s contribution to the cultural and intellectual life of the nation. In Mojares’s case, his recognition affirms that scholarship itself can be a form of cultural work. Research, historical writing, criticism, archival investigation, teaching, and intellectual inquiry can contribute profoundly to the making of a nation.

We often celebrate artists through performances, exhibitions, films, concerts, and literary readings because their work is visible and immediately accessible. Scholarship is different. A scholar’s influence may take decades to become visible. It exists in classrooms, footnotes, libraries, archives, dissertations, conversations, research projects, and the minds of students who have learned to ask better questions because of something they read. Mojares’s contribution belongs to this quieter but equally important tradition. His work expanded the intellectual vocabulary with which Filipinos could discuss themselves. That is not a minor contribution. It is part of nation-building.

For those of us working in Philippine literature, language, and culture, Mojares also offers an important challenge: we must take regional knowledge seriously. It is easy to speak of the Philippines as a unified cultural entity while ignoring the linguistic, historical, and geographical differences that make such unity complicated. The Philippines is not culturally homogeneous. It is an archipelago of many histories, languages, memories, and identities. To study the nation seriously is therefore to study its differences rather than erase them. Mojares’s intellectual trajectory demonstrates the value of looking closely at place, especially when that place has historically been treated as peripheral.

Perhaps this is why our conversation over lunch stayed with me. The question was not really whether everyone should have already read every book by Resil Mojares. That would be an unreasonable standard. The more important question is whether we, as academics and cultural workers, are sufficiently curious about the intellectual traditions produced by our own country. Are we reading beyond the convenient canon? Are we introducing our students to scholars from the regions? Are we examining how knowledge about the Philippines has been produced? Are we challenging the hierarchy that tells us which thinkers are indispensable and which are merely supplementary? These are uncomfortable questions, but discomfort is often where serious scholarship begins.

There is also something deeply ironic about celebrating Filipino identity while remaining unfamiliar with the intellectuals who spent their lives examining how that identity was constructed. We often speak proudly about being Filipino, but identity should not be treated as something self-evident and uncomplicated. Who gets to define the Filipino? What histories are included? Which languages are privileged? Which regions are remembered? Which communities disappear from national narratives? What kinds of knowledge are considered legitimate? Mojares’s scholarship helps us approach these questions with greater historical depth and intellectual discipline.

For teachers, introducing Mojares to younger generations should therefore be part of a larger project of intellectual inheritance. We should not allow his books to remain confined to university libraries or to the reading lists of specialists. We should find ways to make his ideas accessible to students without reducing their complexity. We can discuss regional history in classrooms. We can introduce excerpts from his essays. We can connect his scholarship to contemporary questions about identity and culture. We can ask students to investigate their own communities and histories. We can encourage them to read local scholars alongside international theorists. In doing so, we transform scholarship from something students merely consume into something they can continue.

And perhaps that is the most important responsibility left to us. We should not simply preserve Mojares’s name. We should preserve the habit of intellectual curiosity that defined his work. We should teach young people to investigate rather than merely accept, to contextualize rather than simplify, and to question rather than memorize. We should encourage them to look at the Philippines not as a finished idea but as an ongoing historical and cultural project. If Mojares gave us anything enduring, it is the reminder that understanding the country requires patience, research, curiosity, and a willingness to look closely at the complicated stories beneath familiar narratives.

So yes, it is embarrassing when scholars of Philippine culture do not know Resil Mojares. But perhaps the greater embarrassment would be to recognize that gap and still refuse to do anything about it. There is still time to read him. There is still time to teach him. There is still time to place his books in the hands of students. There is still time to debate his arguments, challenge his interpretations, extend his questions, and discover what his scholarship can tell us about the Philippines today. His death should not close the conversation. It should make the conversation more urgent.

Resil Mojares is gone, but the Philippines he spent his life trying to understand remains unfinished. That unfinished country is now our responsibility to study. If we want to understand who we are as Filipinos, we must be willing to read those who have seriously asked the question before us. We owe it to our students, to our communities, to our intellectual traditions, and to ourselves as scholars. Celebrating Mojares does not mean placing him beyond criticism or turning him into an untouchable icon. It means reading him carefully enough to understand why his work matters, teaching him generously enough that younger generations can encounter his ideas, and engaging his scholarship critically enough that it can continue to produce new questions.

The most meaningful tribute we can give National Artist Resil Mojares is not another congratulatory statement, another commemorative event, or another photograph beside his name. It is a reader. Then another reader. Then a classroom full of readers. Then a generation of young Filipinos who encounter his work and realize that understanding their country requires more than consuming information about it. It requires looking deeply into its histories, languages, regions, contradictions, memories, and people. Mojares spent his life doing precisely that. Now that he is no longer here to ask the questions himself, the responsibility of asking them belongs to us.

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Noel Galon de Leon is a writer and educator at the University of the Philippines Visayas. He teaches in the Division of Professional Education and at UP High School in Iloilo. He currently serves as faculty-in-charge of the UP Visayas Language Program Office and as secretary of the National Committee on Literary Arts of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (NCCA). His poetry has been recognized by the Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature.