Last Updated on October 26, 2021 by themigrationnews
Caroline S. Hau’s Elites and Ilustrados in Philippine Culture reflects on the long-established yet evolving roles of Filipino elite in nation-building and world-making. In the introductory chapter, Hau opens with the key thesis that the Filipino imagined community can no longer be imagined in terms of “a strict separation between inside and outside, between foreign and Filipino” (19). In lieu of defining who is included or excluded from this national community, the book explores the perceived otherness, hybridity, and privileges of historical and contemporary Filipinos constituting the “upper” class. Central to this approach is the exploration of conceptual linkages between wealth, education, geographical location, and mobility. Strong emphasis is placed on the “elites” juxtaposed against “masses” whose shifting capacities and intentions for travelling abroad (and returning to the motherland) attest to the changing signifiers of both elitism and nationalism throughout Philippine history. The subsequent chapters are organized thematically, each one exploring Filipino figures who are emblematic of the large-scale transformations in Philippine society across its colonial and post-colonial eras.
On the concept of Philippine patriotism and its “fraught relationship” with the self-interests of the Filipino elite during and after the colonial periods, Hau grounds her analysis of ilustrados and mestizos in the literary works of prominent Filipino writers in the second, third, and fourth chapters. The fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters explore the “converging as well as conflicting (self-)interests of the middle classes and elites” (11) constituting the “upper” Filipino class during the era of globalization using a different approach from the first half of the book. In these chapters, Hau dissects the concepts of crony capitalism (the tight-knit yet antagonistic class of political and business elites), transnational elite alliances (politico-business alliances forged between Filipino elites and their foreign counterparts), and diasporic identities (Fil-foreigners and overseas Filipino intellectuals) by analyzing actual historical and contemporary events.
As a literature expert, Hau deftly analyzes the fictional depictions of the complex roles embodied by historical and contemporary elite actors haunted by their self-contradicting, broken identities as they attempt to invoke nationalism while embodying privileged positions in Philippine society. Discussions of the sociopolitical contexts of these works were interspersed with close-readings of the Gun Dealers’ Daughter by Gina Apostol (Chapter 2), The Woman Who Had Two Navels by Nick Joaquin (Chapter 3), and Ilustrado by Miguel Syjuco (Chapter 4).
The strongest points of the book emerge in the first half when Hau delves into transnational Philippine literature centered on Chinese-Filipino linkages. Hau’s expertise in the subject allowed for a nuanced analysis of the transnational identities of the Filipino elite whose notions of patriotism were forged in sites of nationalism outside the Philippines and its former colonizers. This is best exemplified by her discussion of Hong Kong’s significance in Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels, providing a much-needed contextualization of the port city as a now-forgotten site for Filipino nationalism. This deviates from “the familiar cultural circuit linking the Philippines, Europe, and America” (85) which are often the backdrops of fictional depictions of the Philippine diaspora. In the second half of the book, Hau discusses the notions of “elitism” and “Chineseness” in the context of more recent events in the Philippines. Particularly, Chapter 6 examines the racial politics of “Chinese corruption” in the NBN-ZTE scandal in 2007 which arrived at compelling conclusions about the continuities and discontinuities of the Chinese mestizo concept throughout Philippine history.
On the other hand, this selection of works also feeds into notions of elitism, as the authors of these books come from privileged backgrounds themselves. Hau foresees this and elects to ground her literary analyses with discussions of their authors’ positionalities in Philippine society and the Filipino imagined community. This is best exemplified in Chapter 4 where Hau appraises the internationally acclaimed Ilustrado (2010) by Miguel Syjuco, whose privileged international background became the target of local critique when he remarked that his distance away from the Philippines allowed him to “really see” its problems. Hau links this to the blurring dichotomy between the “contribution” versus “betrayal” of Filipinos who left and returned to the motherland. The example of modern day Overseas Filipino Workers was used whose return is automatically perceived to be a virtuous act – heroic, even – when their return cannot be “simplistically coded as active contribution to the nation” (154).
In Chapter 7, these themes were revisited on the topic of overseas Filipino intellectuals and the politics of location and its “bearing on the (postcolonial) intellectual’s fraught relationship to power and knowledge” (246). This chapter provides a close-reading of Reynaldo Ileto’s 1999 essay entitled “Orientalism in the Study of Philippine Politics” and the responses it elicited from scholars based in the Philippines and abroad. Reflecting on these debates, Hau investigates the complex positionalities of migrant scholars, specifically those from Third World countries who claim to speak (implicitly or explicitly) on behalf of their native countries while also embodying their roles as members of the First World academe. In this sense, Hau sees overseas Filipino intellectuals as “neither an insider nor an outsider” to the Philippine imagined community (256). Moreso, Hau argues that the differences in power between Third World intellectuals now based in the First World academe versus those who remained in their native land are still reinforced by Othering concepts of “inside” and “outside”. That is, even within Third World nation-states, there are differences in power between intellectuals based in “metropolitan” universities versus those in “non-metropolitan” ones.
Interestingly, one crucial dimension that was not explicitly discussed in the book is Hau’s own position as an overseas Filipino intellectual herself, having pursued her graduate studies at Cornell University before holding her current professorship at Kyoto University. Insofar as positionality is concerned, this book could be dismissed as yet another product of “elitist” intellectualism by those who ascribe overseas Filipino intellectuals’ “distance” from the nation to their peripherality in the Filipino imagined community. Hence, it could remain subject to the very same divisiveness between Third World intellectuals at home versus abroad that it seeks to critique. Regardless of these limitations, the insights in Elites and Ilustrados effectively moves the conversation forward by interrogating and unpacking the assumptions and connotations assigned to the key concepts at the crux of these debates.
Review by Patricia Miraflores
Patricia Miraflores is a graduate student pursuing a joint Master’s degree in M.A. Euroculture at the University of Groningen and Uppsala University. She is a recipient of the 2020 Erasmus Mundus scholarship award from the European Commission. Email: p.e.c.miraflores@student.rug.nl