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Necessary Fictions: Philippine Literature and the Nation, 1946-1980. By CAROLINE S. HAU. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2000. 319 pp. $29.00 (paper).
Caroline S. Hau's Necessary Fictions: Philippine Literature and the Nation, 1946-1980 stands as a significant and noteworthy contribution to scholarship on the relationship between nationalism and literature in the Philippines. Hau's project argues in favor of a long-standing affinity between Filipino literature and nationalism, as it attends to difficult questions regarding how we imagine the living fiction of the Philippine nation-this in the formidable parlance lent to us via the author's former advisor, Benedict Anderson. This book acknowledges that nationalism is a narrative, a fiction that presents itself as natural and self-evident while suppressing that which is apprehended as contingent.
Hau's work directs us to consider some of the foundational fictions of Philippine literature (by such authors as Jose Rizal, Amado V. Hernanclez, Nick Joaquin, Ricardo Lee, Edgardo Reyes, Kerima Polotan, Carlos Bulosan, and Mano...