Damming the nation: Region/nation and the global order in contemporary West Visayan literature

• Main Author: Cruz, Isidoro Manaligod
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2007
• Subjects: Philippine literature > History and criticism; Philippine literature; English Language and Literature
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_doctoral/186; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/context/etd_doctoral/article/1185/viewcontent/CDTG004396_P.pdf
• Institution: De La Salle University

This dissertation examines the discourse of contemporary West Visayan literature on Region/Nation and the Global Order, which may evince a particular imagining of the nation from a regional standpoint. It describes how the region and the nation are constructed and deconstructed in writings in the three lingua franca (Hiligaynon, Filipino, and English), published from 1986 (EDSA Revolution) to 2003. The region and the nation are mutually deconstructive, as well as fragmented due to differences in ethnicity, gender, and class. Reading one major work each by seven acclaimed writers of the region, this dissertation argues that contemporary West Visayan literature proffers a (re)construction of the nation and employs strategies (viz., technology, language, spectacle, gossip, pornography, cartography, revolution, and concealment) that are transgressive so as to disable the erosion of the region and the nation. Because a claim on ethnicity is a claim on resources, Leoncio Deriada has contrived a West Visayan Filipino language (exemplified by the writings of John Iremil Teodoro), one that serves as a model for a more inclusive nation. Through the language of his poetry collection, John Iremil Teodoro posits that what is regional is national. Vicente Garcia Groyon suggests that, ironically, it is a history of illegitimacy that forms selves and simultaneously binds and divides the community, the region and the nation. Alice Tan-Gonzales presents a Filipino nation pushed underground by colonizers. Pungsod, the Hiligaynon term for nation used in Esperanza, is another model for nationhood: it avoids gendered metonymies of nationhood and more properly images the nation as a collectivity characterized by both plurality and singularity, rather than a ii homogeneous single body. Genevieve Asenjo shows that the discourse region/nation is reproducible in the national capital, but chooses to retain the label taga-uma@manila. Isabel Sebullen employs mimicry of the national capital to dispel a culture of enchantment that has preserved the binaries peripheral/center, backward/progressive. Alice Sun-Cua affirms the erosion of regional and national cultures due to globalization but, resisting erasure, she problematizes the binary region/nation as incapable of capturing regions of dual racial affiliations in the Filipino nation, those that do not fall neatly into ethnic categories because they are not bound to place, unlike the typical regions. Contemporary West Visayan literature, metaphorically speaking, is rechanneling the way Filipinos think about the Filipino nation and its regions, to keep the center of the nation from making regional belonging a reason for exclusion.