Alternative Canons
Comic book artists such as Pol Medina, Jr. (author of hugely popular comic series Pugad Baboy or Swines’ Nest) and Manix Abrera (author of Kikomachine) have enjoyed success in their no holds-barred depictions of the daily lives and preoccupations of Filipinos. Pugad Baboy especially has carved a niche for itself as a barometer of the sociocultural climate in its representations of Filipino domestic life as well as general Filipino sentiments on issues of corruption in the government and popular culture. Similarly, writer Bob Ong’s satirical works about the state of Filipino society have also been widely received; he has sold close to 2 million copies of his works. Popular romance novelist Martha Cecilia has sold numerous titles of her works as well, having multiple reprints of certain titles over the years.
And yet, popular texts remain by and large stigmatized as lacking the necessary capital to be properly representative of certain cultural milieu or heritage. Theories of national identity abound, yet most of these theories do not explore the more mundane aspects of the nation: things that exist in the day-to-day spaces of the popular. These theories are primarily built upon an examination of cultural elements that exist as part of the “high” tradition, or what Edensor terms as “reified notions of culture” (vi), which exist as a narrow aspect of the nation-space, and can be seen as a counterpoint to the changing nature of the popular. This changing nature is codified in one of the somewhat pejorative terms used to describe popular literature—“ephemera”—a term that discounts the dynamic, multiple, and fluid nature of national representation. Accordingly, these artifacts reflect the formation and representation of culture as much as the literary canon, if we accept the assertion that cultural identity is made up of “practices, institutions, and systems of classification through which there are inculcated in a population particular values, beliefs, competencies, routines of life and habitual forms of conduct” (Bennett 28). In short, in dealing with the construction of a nation, there must be an acknowledgment of the agency of consumers of culture insofar as their choices, purchases, reception, interpretations, appropriations, and uses of such cultural elements function as essential factors in making meaning and constructing identity (Storey 72). Radway argues that by paying attention in this way, there can be an increase in “articulating the differences between the [repressively Gramscian] imposition of [bourgeois, elitist] ideology and oppositional practices that, though limited in their scope and effect, at least dispute or contest the control of ideological forms” (221-222), reinforcing the idea that culture is contingent upon contestation and synthesis.
