Alternative Canons
It is easy, and perhaps even convenient, to dismiss Philippine literature as minor or juvenile, especially when viewed against dominant literary traditions of the West, whose cultural capital remain undisputable even in a post-imperial world. The development of the Philippine literary tradition has always been chronotopically postcolonial, that is, it is a tradition that has always reflected the constant tension, negotiation, and struggle against superimposed structures of its time, which in this case would be the colonialism and cultural domination of the West. In a very real sense, the colonial struggle now extends in world literature as a West-vs.-Other divide. In her book Other Asias, Gayatri Spivak talks about the need to pluralize this notion of “Other” through critical regionalism, expanding on Edward Said’s view on Orientalism to accommodate the various geographic, cultural, and social epistemes that comprise our conception of “Asia”. The Asia in Spivak’s mind is not one but many, an Asia both Self and Othered. These “Other Asias” must always contend with the “invisible hand” of the hegemonic, colonial, and Western tradition that is the undeniable and immutable center of all postcolonial dynamics. In short, Spivak notes that a pluralized vision of Asia, one that is borne out of a critical regionalism, is one that transcends the understanding of Asia as “simply a matter of imaginative geography, but also of discontinuous epistemes” (8).
Following Spivak’s critique of a singularized view of Asia, perhaps it would be profitable to view these multiple canons of literature and identity as also being “regional”, not necessarily in a spatial sense (though to some extent it is that too) but in a sociocultural sense. As Spivak’s critical regionalism is an affirmation of the “negotiable multiplicity” of the fragmented postcolonial landscape, so too can we view the national identity as represented in literature as varied, fluid, and dynamic: the product of contestations against hegemony. Spivak’s concept of a critical regionalism can help us understand that the development of a representative literature, created through dialectic processes of struggle, deterritorializations, subversions, and negotiations, is always going to be an agonistic process. In the case of a postcolonial literature such as the Philippines’, it is even more difficult given the essential physical and social fragmentations that contextualize its historicity. Looking at such literatures necessitate looking beyond the geopolitics of the discourse; indeed, more than just a critical regionalism, perhaps what we need is a critical cultural regionalism, a prismatic lens with which to view the fragmented entity of a Filipino nation. This 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.
