Philippine Undergeound Literature: Backgrounding Marginality, Foregrounding Identity

Abstract

hilippine underground writings and how these legitimize and problematize the struggle for national liberation. Underground writings are the literature and writings of the underground national democratic movement, specifically those of the Communist Part of the Philippines (CPP) , National Dennocratic Front (NDF), and the New People's Army (NPA). Underground writings challenge the structures that have exploited the masses such as American imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism. They also provide a source of a cultural identity and a voice for the disenfranchised and disempowered. However, there could be multiplicities of reading of Philippine underground writings. The author suggests a reading that allows the voices layered within marginalities such as displaced genders, geographies, ethnicities and religions are represented in the power structure. Other configurations of the power structure must come in to play and the politics of the underground i writings must be repositioned, not negated, in this configuration to bring identities to the foreground. Only when boundaries are stirred and other voices considered can there be a more productive construction of marginalized identities.