Translation and the limits of minority discourse in the Philippines

Abstract

For many decades now, minority discourse in the Philippines has been trapped in a nativistic framework that essentializes the country’s linguistic and cultural diversity, canonizing one language, Tagalog, and euphemizing it as Filipino. This then has been institutionally imposed as the official medium for postcolonial resistance, routinely invoked in a binary opposition against a colonially endowed English—a dualism that obfuscates the neglect of all the other local languages, effectively minoritizing them as well as their corresponding oratures and literatures. While the ongoing overhaul of national education—that entails its restructuring into the Kindergarten to 12 System and the adoption of mother-tongue instruction in the first few years of primary school—does promise a rectification, as envisioned (and thus far implemented) this reform is tokenist at best, and will in fact pursue the same bilingual policy that has seen the privileging and intellectualization of Tagalog and English across the past half-century. Rethinking the relevant Deleuzian concept, this paper argues that it is by translating and therefore pluralizing texts of the country’s de jure national myths—the founding father Jose Rizal’s anarchist novels, required to be read by all Filipino students—that a new kind historically grounded, non-defeatist, and complex “minority politics” can emerge.

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