Bansa at Kapuluan: Notes on the Archipelagic Nuance of Bienvenido Lumbera’s discourse of the Region and Nationhood

This paper explores a re-reading of the ‘region’ that appears in National Artist Bienvenido Lumbera’s advocacy for valuing regional literature as a foundation of a strong national literature. His discourse against the othering of the regional literature as ‘vernacular’ is encapsuled in the philosophy of his works: that the region represents a precise, immediate worldview, while the national offers a wider, encompassing perspective of the Filipinos (Lumbera 156). Lumbera’s discourse of the nation and the region is revisited by this paper in the lens of Archipelagic studies, specifically using the kapuluan as a Philippine conceptual iteration. In essence this paper asks: where does Lumbera’s extensive discourse of the nation intersect with the articulation of the archipelagic realities of the country? Three of Lumbera’s essays from his work Pag-akda ng Bansa/Writing the Nation is examined as the impetus of exploring how kapuluan advance or complicates Lumbera’s intellectual contributions to the literary and cultural studies of the Philippines. The paper assesses that ‘region’ is articulated as the archipelagic experience of islands away from the center: that these realities are sidelined in attempts to define a centralized, static national literature. In upholding these nuances to build our national identity, Lumbera has articulated the ‘region’ as the archipelagic nuance of island communities in their insular imagination. Yet the paper also departs from the need to attach this movement to the nation-state agenda and articulates an autonomous approach to identity, free from the restrictive confines of the nation-state definition that Lumbera’s work is more frequently examined. It is through the assertion of a diversified nuance of the country as kapuluan that this paper forwards a discourse of nationhood that enmeshes itself to Lumbera’s imagination of an inclusive and interrelated Philippine Island.