The Obligation to Return: On Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado

Abstract

This article looks at the emblematic status of the ilustrado in discourses of Philippine nationalism and independence and seeks to redress the associated narrative of repatriation by looking specifically at how the ilustrado’s cosmopolitanism and global worldview produces tensions and elisions in constructions of nationalism and Philippine identity. In particular, this article reads Miguel Syjuco’s 2010 novel, Ilustrado, as symptomatic of the ways in which notions of nation, nationalism, globalism and identity become problematic tropes for interpreting the politics of belonging and foreignness, a problem specifically illustrated by the privileged position that the figure of the ilustrado, as cosmopolitan intellectual, enjoys. Of particular importance here is the status of the literary work, of the novel-form, as the site where anxieties over the homeland—to which the ilustrado seems to have to return—are formalized and made explicit. At stake is the very question of what it means to confront and take stock of how the homeland is given form: what kind of a hermeneutic makes it possible to disclose the politics of literature? The practice of reading is necessarily turned isnto a potentially self-critical activity through which the contradictions of the ilustrado’s globality and privilege are made explicit. This article asks, as the novel does, what role the ilustrado plays in today’s Filipino diasporic politics and what role it plays as an historical figure and trope in constructions of national and diasporic identity. By dramatizing these tensions, this article argues that Syjuco’s novel allegorizes the act of reading as a political practice fraught with aporias, aporias that disclose the limitations of the ilustrado as the meeting point of a set of clashing desires and political and literary critical interpretive practices.