This paper seeks to inquire into the Filipino nationalist critique of American colonial education as a kind of counterinsurgency effort, whereby the teaching of English meant the repression of vernacular languages. Such amounted to a war of, as well as on, translation. I then ask if there is an alternative to this colonial and nationalist conception of translation as war and turn to the question of Tagalog slang as it is theorized by the renowned novelist Nick Joaquin. For Joaquin, what emerges in the history of Tagalog slang is a different politics of language. It is one based on translation not as war but as play, along with the conversion of history into language less as a means of democratizing society but as a way of expanding literary democracy.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, the Department of Comparative Literature, the LSA Theme Semester in Translation, the Department of History, the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, and the Language Resource Center.