(Trans)National Imaginary and Tropical Melancholy in Jessica Hagedorn’s ＂Dogeaters＂

This paper explores the Philippines' specific condition of transnationality in Jessica Hagedorn's novel Dogeaters. I use the linkage of the four terms-images, imagined community, social imaginary and the ”identification imaginary” to examine the impact of global media on the nation's process of reconstruction in the aftermath of American colonization. The first section concentrates on a sociopolitical investigation of the intricate relationship between global media and the nation-state in the construction of an ”imagined community” based upon the cultural logic of ”the spectacle.” I argue that the cultural logic of the society of the spectacle serves as a codified ground for the social production of meaning, which becomes a new form of Foucauldian technique of power. The paper's second section turns to an in-depth psychoanalytical investigation of the trauma of loss and national melancholy hidden beneath the glossy surface of a society of the spectacle. Drawing upon Zizek's ideas of uncanniness and surplus enjoyment in modernity, LaCapra's distinction between absence, loss and lack, and Freud's mourning and melancholia, this section argues that the revealing of the trauma of the society of the spectacle through magic realistic accounts sets in motion a journey toward healing and awakening.