A Century of Media Representations of Muslim and Chinese Minorities in the Philippines (1870s–1970s)

The act of nation building has often stood at the center of postcolonial efforts to consolidate the governance of multiethnic and multireligious groups brought together under colonial regimes. In the Philippines, unresolved structural and cultural differences during colonialism can be seen in the vacillating treatment of ethnic or religious minorities such as Chinese and Muslims in the construction of the nation. This paper investigates the discursive exclusion of these identities in Philippine textual production, arguing that early postcolonial political assertions of plurality failed to align with continuing forms of discursive othering that aligned with colonial strategies and objectives. Subsequently, exclusivist narratives in the media were unable to reflect the inclusivist rhetoric in politics and academia on national unity. This is demonstrated through an empirical mixed-methods textual analysis involving word embeddings and collocations of identity discourses in digitized archives of multilingual periodicals dating from 1872 (the latter part of the Spanish colonial period, from the Cavite Mutiny to the Treaty of Paris) to 1972 (the end of democratic rule through the implementation of Ferdinand Marcos’ martial law in the Philippines after independence). These representations foreshadow the impact of antecedent narratives on contemporary efforts at imagining the nation.