Christopher Cañete Rodriguez Kelly

Chris Cañete Rodriguez Kelly is a literary critic whose work focuses on social relations of labor and aesthetic production. They received their Ph.D. in Literary Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2024 and specialize in twentieth-century Southeast Asian and Asian-diasporic literatures, with research and teaching interests in Philippine Tagalog and Anglophone literature and translation, Latinx studies, critical indigenous studies, as well as American and Asian American Studies. Their book project, “From Bundok to the Boondocks,” investigates how the Philippine Anglophone novel’s rise to prominence as a national literature with aspirations to globality depended upon the economic derogation of Tagalog literature. Chris’s work has appeared in Hispanic Issues, The Mekong Review, CNN Philippines, and ASAP/Journal, and is forthcoming in PMLA. From 2021-2023 they were affiliated with the University of the Philippines-Diliman and Ateneo de Manila University as a Fulbright-Hays fellow. 

Selected Publications:

“Life with a Cut: Historical Time and the Mediation of US Coloniality in Lope K. Santos’s Banaag at Sikat.” PMLA. Forthcoming.