Author Description

'Necessary Fictions' examines the intimate but fraught connection between Philippine literature and nationalist discourse through close readings of the works of Jose Rizal, Amado Hernandez, Nick Joaquin, Edgardo Reyes, Ricardo Lee, Kerima Polotan, Carlos Bulosan, and Mano de Verdades Posadas. The book argues that the long-standing affinity between Philippine literature and nationalism is based, in part, on the power of literature to work through a set of questions central to nationalist debates on the possibility and necessity of social change. It asks: What is the relationship between knowledge and action? Between the personal and political? Between the foreign and Filipino? Between culture and history, culture and politics, culture and economics? Moreover, Philippine literature does not merely deepen our understanding of the fundamental assumptions informing nationalist discourse and practice. It also registers the contradiction that exceed nationalist attempts to intervene, intellectually and politically, in the complex realities at work in Philippine society. These "excesses," which bar the ineradicable signatures of the oppressed and the marginalized, expose the anxieties--and the liberatory potential--underpinning the difficult creation of Philippine modernity in the twentieth century.