Caroline S. Hau Book order

The rising strength of mainland China has spurred a revival of “Chineseness” in the Philippines. Perceived during the Cold War era as economically dominant, politically disloyal, and culturally different, the “Chinese” presented themselves as an integral part of the Filipino imagined community. Today, as Filipinos seek associations with China, many of them see the local Chinese community as key players in East Asian regional economic development. With the revaluing of Chineseness has come a repositioning of “Chinese” racial and cultural identity. Philippine mestizos (people of mixed ancestry) form an important sub-group of the Filipino elite, but their Chineseness was occluded as they disappeared into the emergent Filipino nation. In the twentieth century, mestizos defined themselves and based claims to privilege on “white” ancestry, but mestizos are now actively reclaiming their “Chinese” heritage. At the same time, so-called “pure Chinese” are parlaying their connections into cultural, social, symbolic, or economic capital, and leaders of mainland Chinese state companies have entered into politico-business alliances with the Filipino national elite. As the meanings of “Chinese” and “Filipino” evolve, intractable contradictions are appearing in the concepts of citizenship and national belonging. Through an examination of cinematic and literary works, The Chinese Question shows how race, class, ideology, nationality, territory, sovereignty, and mobility are shaping the discourses of national integration, regional identification, and global cosmopolitanism.

'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 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.