NatDem Fictions: Revolutionary Experiences in Contemporary Film and Literature in the Philippines

© 2021 Laurence Marvin CastilloSoutheast Asia's longest-running communist armed revolution -- the national democratic (NatDem) revolution led by the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) -- is the subject of fiction films and novels produced aboveground decades after the Marcos dictatorship, a period that covers the post-Cold War global ascendancy of neoliberal capitalism, the country's democratic transition, and the crises and recovery of the NatDem movement. These works examine the complex history of, and experiences in, the political struggle, and engage with the question of the relevance of the revolution as a project of national liberation. I refer to these works as NatDem fictions -- fictional narratives that sympathetically portray the struggle, and affirm the legitimacy of its agenda for social transformation. This thesis studies a selection of these films and novels, reflecting on their construction of revolutionary experiences. Informed by a range of theoretical resources such as Raymond Williams' notion of structures of feeling, Neferti Tadiar's conceptualisation of experience, and the writings on Party politics by scholars like Jodi Dean and J. Moufawad-Paul, I conceptualise revolutionary experiences as an emergent and transformative ensemble of social relations and practices of revolutionary subjects in the struggle against the Philippine government to transform the country's semi-colonial, semi-feudal order. Through this conceptualisation, I closely read these filmic and novelistic fictions, as they deal with a range of themes and issues such as the construction of Martial Law memory, post-EDSA revolutionary errors, Left melancholia, and contemporary neoliberal violence. My analyses position these works in dialogue with their creators, who navigate the democratic openings and counterinsurgent mechanisms that complicate cultural work in the country, as well as with an engaged public who generate their critical interpretation of these works. The thesis argues that these selected NatDem fictions mobilise a dynamic view of revolutionary experiences to foreground how revolutionary subjects overcome political crises, setbacks, and challenges, and configure their socio-political practices in ways that interact with, and address, the socio-historical developments in the Philippines in the past few decades. These imaginative articulations of the complex experiences in the struggle function to argue for the enduring legitimacy of the revolution, and serve as important oppositional culture against widespread state anti-communism. This study therefore offers an account of how filmmakers and novelists engage in political contestations about the ongoing struggle through their aboveground figurations of the transformative and emergent makings of an alternative social order in the Philippines