The project entails the preparation of two independent manuscripts based on a new Filipino Historiography. The first book features the intellectual movement embodied in today's Pantayong Pananaw (PP, from-us-for-us perspective) and Bagong Kasaysayan (BK, re/newed history). In this study, I will argue that shifts in language signal meaningful transformations of dominant concepts in the discipline. In the Philippines, this process ultimately led to the development of a contemporary Filipino historiography vis-à-vis its colonial counterpart. While maintaining the internal-external method of thought history, I will interrogate the Filipino history-idea and pursue understanding (verstehen) how the people's personhood could be shaped therein.

The winds of this linguistic change began to blow amidst Philippine academia in the 1970's. It came to fruition in the Pantayong Pananaw movement pioneered by historian Zeus Salazar of the University of the Philippines-Diliman. PP is expressed as the exclusively Filipino bagong kasaysayan, drawing its inspiration from the in linguistic and cultural turns in historiography (social sciences, more generally). As PP and its attendant BK gained ground and a following among younger academics, they gradually began to embody a formative school of thought in history; they altered the conceptions, conclusions, and imaginaries--e.g. nation, identity, Filipino, heroes--in the dominant Philippine written narrative. Thus, my study addresses the following questions: What are the consequences of these historiographical processes and battles? How does a language shift become significant in the craft? Precisely in what ways did PP and BK affect the discipline? For how long can PP and BK contain its exclusively Filipino perspective? In all, this study critically explores the latest unfolding of the country's historical scholarship. In so doing, it questions judgments and motivations among historians, and ultimately confronts the question universally relevant to the discipline's practice -- the role of the historian in the nationalist project.
The second book tackles the parallel historiography of kasaysayan (significance, important story) and historia (history). Every text is a discourse; words represent sources of data and information. They symbolize the codes for a complex matrix of information, involving an author's theories and conclusions on the one hand, his expressed intentions and hidden desires on the other. In this project, I theorize that the introduction of a foreign concept of history denoted both the creation and, importantly, the containment of "the indigenous" within the written narrative. By misleadingly nativizing matters relating to the archipelago, this process over time estranged the historian and Filipinos from their own histories.

In this book, I will plot the evolution of kasaysayan and historia, highlighting their internal dynamics and philosophical underpinnings. Crucially, I trace these historical transformations and examined within the framework of a disciplinal Geschichtwissenschaft. This is done to illuminate how kasaysayan and historia were figuratively transformed into action--for instance, subsequent images in history textbooks and influences upon a public's free interpretative consumption. I propose why and how Filipinos retained their views on history during a given period, while also accounting for how such views tangibly influenced decisions, courses of action and Weltansschauung (world view), as a whole. Here, feelings of insecurity, disempowerment, and coloniality stand out. Finally, the project implies in which ways a historian and his/her craft effectively molds a country's present and future imaginations.