A RE-READING OF RENATO CONSTANTINO’S POSTCOLONIAL DISCOURSES ON PHILIPPINE EDUCATION Christian Bryan S. Bustamante Postcolonial discourses emerged from the testimonies of the former colonials. These discourses emanated from their experiences as colonized people. Postcolonial discourses are discourses of the “minorities,” the “inferior, and the “other.” In postcolonial discourses, the once slaves are now treating their former masters as the “other” and “objects” of their ideas and intellectual activities. Intellectuals of postcolonial discourses see themselves as co-equal with the self-proclaimed men of true civilization and superior culture. They criticize the hegemonic discourses of the West which justify the normality of “uneven development and the differential, often disadvantaged, histories of nations, races, communities, peoples.” 1 They formulate their discourses around the issues of “cultural difference, social authority and political discrimination.” 2 The notion of postcolonial includes the idea of cultural struggle and cultural power. 3 It is the struggle between nations to create a level playing field in the “uneven and unequal forces of cultural representation.” 4 The words of Sartre in his Preface to the book, The Wretched of the Earth, echo this struggle: It came to an end; the mouths opened by themselves; the yellow black voices still spoke of our humanism but only to reproach us with our inhumanity. We listened without displeasure to these polite statements of resentment, at first with proud amazement. What? They are able to talk by themselves? Just look at what we have made of them! We did not doubt but that they would accept our ideals, since they accused us of not being faithful to them… A new generation came to the scene, which changed the issue. With unbelievable patience, its writers and poets tried to explain to us that our values and the true facts of their lives did not hang together, and that they could neither reject them completely nor yet assimilate them. By and large, what they are saying was this: “You are making us into monstrosities ; your humanism claims we are at one with the rest of humanity but your racist methods set us apart.” 5 1 Homi K. Bhabha, The Postcolonial and the Postmodern in The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. Simon During (London: Routledge, 1993), 190. 2 Bhabha. 3 Jon Stratton and Ien Ang, On The Impossibility of a Global Cultural Studies in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, eds. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996), 381. 4 Bhabha, 190. 5 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 7- 8.