Open Collections

Undaloc, John

University of British Columbia

How is the post-1986 figure of the heroic overseas Filipino worker (OFW) sedimented by literary representations of revolution and sacrifice? This thesis argues that the valorized image of OFWs as the nation’s bagong bayani, “modern heroes,” emerges by way of a catachresis: a “misnaming” or “the misapplication of a word” that situates the OFW in a longer lineage of misnamings in the twentieth-century Philippine discourse on revolution. It proposes reading for catachreses as a method of critiquing the political act of claiming revolution, which engenders subjects that exceed, persist in, and “fall away” from discourse. This thesis supports its arguments by critiquing two social realist texts: Jose Maria Sison’s 1968 poem, “The Guerilla Is Like a Poet,” for its formalizing the bifurcation of the revolutionary subject amid the rise of postindependence Philippine nationalism in the second half of the twentieth century; and Ninotchka Rosca’s 1988 novel State of War for its formal innovations in representing “Festival” and revolution amid life in the Philippines.

Text

2024-07-30

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/88815

English

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/