‘We may speak bamboo English, but it is still English': The Politics of Language, Coloniality, and Imperial Amnesia in the 1986 Philippine Constitutional Commission

Abstract

This study unsettles and complicates our understanding of the language provisions stipulated in the 1987 Philippine Constitution, specifically Article XIV, sections 6–9, by looking underneath its surface and calling into question the unequal and racialized (post)colonial matrices and relations of power that had informed its drafting and development during the 1986 Philippine Constitutional Commission. Through a critical discursive and historiographical perspective, I argued that conditions of coloniality were articulated during the language provision deliberations of the Commission and were mobilized on two axes, namely, the racialization of language through imperial amnesia and the conflation of neoliberal and linguistic entrepreneurial discourses, both of which perpetuate the effects and legacies of colonialism on language policy-making, teaching, and education even after the period of formal colonization.

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