INTRODUCTION:The 'Filipino identity' has been the topic of heated debate for a long time. It has proven itself elusive and difficult to define mainly because of the country's history of colonization. The hundreds of years of colonization have left the Filipinos with a hybridized existence that has seen the dominance of imperial influence on culture, practice, and mentality. Colonization has served as the great force in othering the indigenous practices and values of the Filipinos. The belief of the West in their superiority has led to the propagation of stereotypes that portray the colonized as inferior and strange. This is evident in television, film, and literature, where the Filipino is portrayed either as the domestic helper, factory worker or the mail-order bride. These stereotypes have reflected the West as superior at the expense of marginalizing the colonized that even the Filipinos themselves have come to believe these stereotypes. As a result, the Filipino sensibility is silenced and challenged by these stereotypes. Seemingly, the Filipino legacy underscored by the revolt in Mactan against the Spaniards, then against the Americans is almost forgotten by the Filipinos themselves, for traces of colonization are still evident in the Filipinos in their culture, philosophy, education, literature, and the like. It is no surprise then that from the moment of its birth, Philippine Literature in English has been tested against the Anglo - American tradition. (Almario, 2006) argued that there is a need of reorientation of teaching Philippine Literature to discover the roots, origin and metamorphosis of the colonized subject. 'Similarly, mainstream writers and critics consciously or unconsciously believed that there was a correct literary center to follow and to learn from. Pineda in her thesis stated that many critics often depict Philippine writers as being initially a group of apprentices who need to learn both the language and the craft of literature and eventually a group that finally learned both language and skill while they struggled with their national and most importantly their local identity along the way.2 However, these same critics recalibrated their critical instruments according to alternative contemporary standards. The result, as postcolonial theorists seem to have discovered elsewhere in our emergent world, was a potentially new reading and appreciation of Philippine Literature.One of the writers today who shares equal footing in writing on uniquely Filipino subjects, characters and themes is Merlinda Carullo Bobis, a Bikol writer who has made her name known not only in the Philippines but also outside the country. The originality of Bobis's stories cannot be overstated. Reading each one becomes an adventure of discovery, as though Bobis has given her reader a piece of fruit so delicious that in eating it, you almost forget there is a seed of truth hidden inside.STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM:This research article attempts to resolve the questions of ten selected short stories in White Turtle as representation of postcolonial literature - how these stories subvert the domination of imperial culture and assert the consciousness of Bikolano sensibility thereby liberating the colonized subject from Western hegemony. The short stories are described as having emerged out of the experience of colonization and readings of the texts explore the recurrent themes of hybridity, ambivalence and displacement which foreground the tension between the colonizers and the colonized stereotypes. The abrogation and appropriation of the English language to english language, and the writer's use of magical metaphor and metonymy creatively reconstruct the identity of both the colonizer and colonized.THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND CONSIDERATIONS:In examining the postcoloniality of Bobis's texts, this research uses the postcolonial framework proposed by Homi Bhabha, a theory that appropriates Michel Foucault's notion of discourse as power, Jacques Lacan's subjectivity and Jacques Derrida's differance and supplementarity. …
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Open Access
Dec 12, 2018
Tomohiro Inukai 
