Anticipating Nationhood: Collaboration and Rumor in the Japanese Occupation of Manila
To come under colonial occupation is to live in a state of constant displacement. Under siege from the economic, military, and cultural forces of the metropole, a colonized people finds itself constrained to exist on the expanding borders of imperial designs. Differentially positioned within the structures of the colonial regime, it must perforce negotiate with and around the regime’s agents and institutions, now rejecting, now acceding to the Other’s claims on land, labor, and loyalties. As such, this people continually recasts, even as it appropriates, identities and languages: those of its real or imagined ancestors, as well as those imposed on it by the colonial state or imputed to it by other ethnic groups. With these efforts, it seeks a place in the social hierarchy, even as it struggles to project alternative conditions for future empowerment.