The Promise of the Nation: Gender, History, and Nationalism in Contemporary Ilokano Literature

The Promise of the Nation examines the construction of the nation in contemporary Ilokano literature in the intersections of gender, history, and nationalism by tracking its political, material, and socio-cultural connections and intervention in Philippine socio-political discourse, history, and historiography. It attends to and addresses the limitations, contradictions, and potential constituting Ilokano writers’ efforts to (re)make a Filipino nation, efforts made in the context of Spanish and American imperialism, neocolonialism, martial law, militarization, urban squatting, patriarchy, migrant work, and the marginalization of ethnic peoples. Finally, the book argues that the writer’ project of realizing what Caroline Hau has evocatively called the nation’s “promise of community” may be more powerfully imagined and grasped were nationalism transformed by feminism.

• Roderick G. Galam, Author

  Roderick G. Galam is a research associate at the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Free University of Berlin, Germany. He is the author of The Promise of the Nation: Gender, History, and Nationalism in Contemporary Ilokano Literature (Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2008).