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National/Transnational: Subject Formation and Media in and on the Philippines. By ROLANDO B. TOLENTINO. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2001. ix, 205 pp. $24.95 (paper).
Rolando Tolentino's book is a difficult text. It is difficult not only because of the theoretical virtuosity Tolentino employs but also because of the multiple levels of his analysis and the seriousness of his endeavor. He treats images as the joint of articulation among several networks-a node or nexus-through which one can decipher the workings of power and capital. He thereby provides reference points with which to navigate the discourses and connections-local, regional, and global; academic, popular, and alternative-that circulate and utilize images of the Philippines and Filipinos. By exposing these discourses as linked to each other, he seeks to uncover the cultural politics of media and images in the interest of cognitively mapping the Filipino subject's formation and position in a period of transnationalism.
The book is a collection of previously published essays and is divided into three sections, with each section containing three essays. The first section, "National/Transnational Disjuncture," focuses on the category of "Filipino" and the category's value primarily for Filipinos themselves as hybrid subjects. This hybrid subjectivity "implies both critique when necessary and complicity when tactically gainful" (p. 68). Tolentino convincingly argues that this is true whether the Filipino subject or category formed is a mail-order bride, the mother nation, or the Asian-American.
The second section, entitled "Colonial and Imperial Localities," is primarily interested in how the image of the Philippines circulates and is invoked...