Orality and the subaltern: Anticolonial resistance in Rosario Cruz-Lucero’s Feast and Famine: Stories of Negros

Rosario Cruz-Lucero’s Feast and Famine: Stories of Negros decolonizes historical narratives by centring the lived experiences and oral traditions of marginalized communities in Negros Island, Philippines. The collection highlights how peasant workers and local storytellers resist the displacement, marginalization, and erasure of Indigenous systems of knowledge under colonial and neo-liberal regimes. Through forms of orality such as composos, epics, gossip, and oraciones, Cruz-Lucero reconstructs historical imaginaries that challenge dominant narratives rooted in racial capitalism and elite historiography. These oral forms, often dismissed as non-serious or irrational, emerge in her stories as vital repositories of cultural memory, survival, and anticolonial resistance. Framed through the lens of pluriversality, the stories assert ways of knowing and being that resist the totalizing logic of capitalist modernity. Cruz-Lucero’s work reveals how oral traditions serve not merely as cultural residue but as active instruments in confronting epistemic violence and reimagining decolonial futures from the margins.