Alternative Canons
Limitations, Implications, and Conclusion
Johannes Fabian argues that as cultural critics, we should be wary of reducing popular to a mere numbers game, especially since “it is easy to qualify, perhaps dismiss, such a critique of culture as populist, that is motivated by political, even demagogic interests…[but] political, partisan commitment is not what ultimately gives strength to arguments based on the study of popular culture…[instead] the strength of popular culture derives from the fact that it is an ongoing process, that power is constantly established, negated, reestablished” (Fabian 131; 133). It must not deny unity or purity where they are real; instead, “they must be rejected where they become criteria defining what counts as real” (Fabian 132). Our understanding of popular culture as the locus of national identity must account for dialectical dynamics because nation itself is malleable and changing. Thus it must engage three characteristic elements of popular texts: changing cultural sensibilities reflected in content, multiplicity in forms, and development of linguistic conventions.
These elements also underscore the fundamental difficulties with trying to reconcile popular culture with national identity. First, because popular literature represents dynamic sociocultural sensibilities and changes in linguistic conventions, we must also recognize that the notion of national identity that informs such literature must also remain pliable and fluid. Second, because popular literature is not universal, this confronts us with the possibility of multiple national identities representing diverse but coexisting cultures. Lastly, this calls into question the notion of national literature itself, and whether such categorization is really nothing more than a fictive mode of representation, especially in the context of (fragmented) postcolonial contexts. What methods can be employed in a critical evaluation of the parallel existence of the literary canon with the countercanon?
The existence of a representative literature of the Philippines has always been a contentious issue. There exists pervasive regionalism within the country that has led to numerous sociocultural and literary traditions to exist side by side with each other, but which has resulted to the lack of a unified national literature. Diglossic hierarchies of low and high languages have produced vertically divergent traditions of literary production, usually arranged along socioeconomic, intellectual, and diasporic lines. Finally, ongoing globalization trends have sustained if not widened the gap between classes, whose social, cultural, and political boundaries remain impermeable to each other. All these factors reinforce a characteristic fragmentariness in the nature of the Philippine literary tradition, where a seeming sense of alienation haunts both its estranged authors and the corpus of texts that they produce.
