A Native Clearing Revisited: Positioning Philippine Literature

Abstract

English-language postcolonial literary studies has focused largely on parts of the world formerly colonized by England. This panel, however, will deal with the Philippines, a nation whose history of colonial encounter includes both Spain and the US, in order to advance the argument that its literature has much to contribute to the "arduous conversations" that characterize postcolonial studies. While the historical trajectory that shapes the identity of the Philippines has much in common with the narrative of other postcolonial nations, the resistance/recuperation model does not fit easily in the Philippines. Even among literary histories and critical studies there is hardly a consensus about a theoretical matrix that would explain the complexities of literary production in the Philippines in the twentieth century. This panel contends that literature from the Philippines grapples with a number of issues in ways that extend the boundaries of postcolonial theory and opens up exciting possibilities for reconfiguring nation, religion, genre, aesthetics, and the very notion of literature.