Abstract

The claim about Europe's and the West's spiritual indefensibility puts forth a critique of the western colonial project as informed by a subtle duplicity anchored on the employment of a techno-scientific and economic-capitalist rationality working under the illusion of a God-given mission civilisatrice. To combat this ideology, present postcolonial discourses, notably in Asia, tend to create a rupture within this linear view of global politics and history by employing discursive strategies of decentralization and destabilization from the perspective of an identity-politics by the marginalized colonial ―other.‖ Within the Philippine context, I claim that this obsessive-compulsive tendency to look for collective identities as basis for anti-colonial struggle is itself contained within that inescapable cycle of colonial violence and oppression. Using Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's notion of epistemic violence, I argue that the insistence on the privilege of a discovered, achieved, or constructed Filipino identity by nationalist discourses, be it from the Ilustrado elite or the hastily generalized and abstract Filipino masses, render them susceptible to becoming subtle—though unwitting—arms of the colonial machinery itself. To insist on a certain Filipino identity as an ideal of who or what a Filipino is or Filipino-ness is to be implicated within discursive complicity, i.e., a process that implicates the anti-colonial struggle within the homogenizing ―identity-trap‖ laid down by the colonial processes themselves and simulates the struggle for a Philippine nationalist liberation as a worse—because more subtle—form of colonial hegemony. I illustrate my claim by describing how historical injustice is propagated and perpetuated through the distorted interpretations of historical data by nationalist historiographies that only solidify the horrible heritage of the Philippine colonial experience.