Breaking Ground: Cebuano Women's Writing by Hope Sabanpan-Yu

Yu has done a fine job as a translator and as a writer of sophisticated cultural criticism. Her compilation alone would be enough to make this a distinguished book.
—Gus McAllan

Literary excavation as an enterprise is not new—people will always try to challenge the literary canon by putting the light of significance on works that have been long forgotten or marginalized—but Hope Sabanpan-Yu’s "Breaking Ground" proves to be a necessary corrective nonetheless. There is much to recommend an effort to anthologize women fictionists writing in Cebuano, and the book’s breadth—spanning decades from 1931 to 2010 and translated into English—is laudable. True to its conception and its title, the book indeed ‘breaks ground’ in two distinct ways: it is a rare collection of contemporary short stories in Cebuano, and it is even a rarer collection of this regional literary genre with female authorship. The specificity of the book’s scholarship makes this an immense contribution to Philippine literature.
—Ian Rosales Casocot

Women’s literature provides a medium through which they re-create or appropriate the sensibilities of a woman. But what exactly is this sensibility and how does it find creative expression in stories? What language can portray the seemingly untranslatable experience of a woman?

"Breaking Ground" investigates these and other questions in a highly original exploration of the narratives of women and the ways they have tried to capture it over time. A variety of literary texts are examined for their use of the domestic as a lens through which the woman views the world.