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Abstract:
This article explores how Filipina writer Ninotchka Rosca represents the complex, heterogeneous nature of Philippine identity in her novel State of War. Colonized by Spain for more than three hundred years and then sold to the United States to become its territory for another half century, the Philippines represents an intriguing tapestry of culture and history that tightly interweaves multiple ideological strands. Analyzing it with recourse to Bill Ashcroft's concept of the Transnation, this article demonstrates how Rosca's novel unravels this web of ideological relationships and showcases the heterogeneity of the Philippines. It argues that in the novel, the carnival of the Ati-Atihan serves Rosca as an allegorical representation of the Philippine Transnation. But since Rosca's Ati-Atihan collapses and dissolves in violence, it is ultimately in the smooth space of memory that she finds a second, more stable allegory for the cultural heterogeneity of the Philippine Transnation.
Keywords: postcolonial, Philippines, Transnation, Ninotchka Rosca, Filipino novel, carnivalesque, memory
The history of nations is often imagined as a story, a narrative. We imagine a progression in time and speak of racial beginnings, or genealogies of heroes, and myths of founding fathers. . . . The narrative enables us to make sense of our collective passage in time, and pampers us with a sense of progressing, a moving forward in time. Yet, it is also a form that carries with it a particular tyranny, its mystifications and exclusions, predisposing us to determinate ways of framing our subject, of breaking up experience into semantic units so we can read the past in ways that make intelligible who we are and why we are where we are.
Resil Mojares, Waiting for Mariang Makiling: Essays in Philippine Cultural History 270
In the Philippines, an archipelago of more than 7100 islands, the exclusive, tyrannical nature of national history is all too readily apparent. Because the country was colonized by Spain for more than three hundred years and then became an American territory for another half century, its history is plagued with silences, gaps, and contradictions. Just consider that the words "Philippines," "Filipino," and "Filipina" are xenonyms: they are signifiers that have been imposed on peoples and their land by a foreign entity. What is more, they are signifiers whose signified...