Imperfect Tense and Times by Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz

What is collected here comes in the imperfect tense. These essays are meditations on self, as well as historical and social commentary on the Philippines. The things and thoughts collected here are those that mattered to the author in the worlds that she has been studying, reconsidering, and losing. They are meditations on privilege, humanity, and the Philippines, and they render her positionality centrally in all such thinking.
Her critiques of the elite are issued from self-critiques. Her philosophical explorations were consciously bracketed by age. Such disparate political, personal, and philosophical explorations unite in their shared secular negotiation with morality—with the possibility of crafting it for oneself and of reforming the ones that confronted her.

Reviews:

“Not quite a memoir, nor an academic history. Not quite poetry, nor prose. Not quite sanguine, nor anguished about her country. The eloquent not-quites of Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz’s essays are the necessary puzzles of contemporary Philippine life.” — Lisandro Claudio, University of California Berkeley

“This small volume is suffused with autobiography, which tracks the author’s philosophical explorations before she moved on to writing a groundbreaking dissertation exploring the Philippines’ relations with Asia at the turn of the twentieth century. Imperfect Tense and Times is also about locating herself in a country riven by class differences and patrimonial jobbery. In his study, The Patchwork City: Class, Space, and Politics in Metro Manila, sociologist Marco Garrido portrays a fragmented metropole where residents of slums, middle-class subdivisions, and the Golden Ghettos never interact despite their proximity. Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz refuses to be constrained by these walls as she tries to understand what happens on the other side while trying to find something good about her own place. An unusual, perhaps Quixotic, but totally admirable quest.” — Patricio N. Abinales, University of Hawai‘i at Manoa