Towards a Philippine Transnation: Dreaming a Philippines in Ninotchka Rosca’s State of War

This article explores how Filipina writer Ninotchka Rosca represents the complex, heterogeneous nature of Philippine identity in her novel State of War. Colonized by Spain for more than three hundred years and then sold to the United States to become its territory for another half century, the Philippines represents an intriguing tapestry of culture and history that tightly interweaves multiple ideological strands. Analyzing it with recourse to Bill Ashcroft’s concept of the Transnation, this article demonstrates how Rosca’s novel unravels this web of ideological relationships and showcases the heterogeneity of the Philippines. It argues that in the novel, the carnival of the Ati-Atihan serves Rosca as an allegorical representation of the Philippine Transnation. But since Rosca’s Ati-Atihan collapses and dissolves in violence, it is ultimately in the smooth space of memory that she finds a second, more stable allegory for the cultural heterogeneity of the Philippine Transnation.