Alternative Canons
The dialectic relationships between “elite” and “grassroots”, “structure” and (consumer) “agency”, “resistance” and “incorporation” highlight the concept of hegemony that Gramsci introduces in his works. Culture therefore cannot be pinned down to mere textuality or mere ideology; reception, and the ensuing appropriation of such meaning into everyday life, becomes the backbone for nation. In short, meanings gleaned from and represented in texts do not just exist in their materiality, but are made meaningful in the dynamics of discourse. Foucault emphasizes that these discourses can be institutionalized by those in power to make their way of knowing circulate discursively in the world, effectively creating “regimes of truth” (Storey 6). National canons are one such example of a “regime of truth”, effectively instated as absolutist representations of cultural identity. Like all constructs, however, this regime can be challenged through a critical evaluation not just of the texts in themselves, but also of the power relations that inform the negotiation and ritualization of the realities represented in such texts. Credence must be given to popular literature as a corpus of resistance texts whose “production in use”, ideological effect, and appropriation can all provide an alternative and complementary view for the construction of the nation.
In 2013, the National Book Development Board, a sub-agency of the Department of Education in the Philippines geared towards supporting book culture and production, published its 2012 Readership Survey. The survey is a cross-sectional study that was conducted in 2003, 2007, and 2012 among Filipino adults from different walks of society from all over the country. It claims that 88% of Filipino adults, or a total of 49.2 million people, voluntarily read non-school books, that most of these readers took up reading between the ages of 7-12, and that readers ages 18-34 read the most. The survey also revealed that there is relatively equal preference for texts written in Filipino and English, and the most popular reading genres are religious texts, romance/love stories, graphic novels/comic books, cookbooks, and humour/joke books. Finally, the survey revealed that readers from the lower classes actually read more books than the upper or the middle class, an interesting fact given that these people live on or below the poverty line.
These numbers indicate that readership among Filipinos is going strong, and that national readership is informed by popular culture as much as (if not more than) high literature given the titles of texts in circulation. This highlights the reality that “people’s engagement with the world of commodities [of which popular texts are part] utilizes shifting frames of reference” (Edensor 113), as shown in how consumers may be drawn to “unintelligent” popular commodities while acknowledging certain exemplary national products. These shifting frames of reference allow us to see national taste, culture, and identity as unfixed elements within the domestic space, and emphasize how the sociocultural imaginary is an exercise of agency in dialogue with existing ideological structures of selfhood. This realization necessitates a paradigm shift insofar as traditional modes of national identity and its representation in literature are concerned, since such modes highlight singularity and absolutism. In reality, nations, identities, and literatures are multiple, dynamic, and unfixed—and perhaps it is more exciting and accurate to view them in such a way.
