Structures of Hegemony in Contemporary Mindanawon Short Fiction

This study examined how selected twenty-first century Mindanawon short stories present hegemonic structures. Six stories, one from each of six Mindanao regions, were read through Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony using theory-driven interpretive textual analysis: "The Price of Air" (Zamboanga Peninsula), "Sublimation Taking Over" (Northern Mindanao), "Palabas" (Davao Region), "Santelmo" (SOCCSKSARGEN), "Ashes of Padian" (Bangsamoro Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao), and "Ang Panaad ni Romeo" (Caraga). Passages were coded deductively for consent, coercion, war of position, transformismo, good sense, and the organic intellectual, and for the structure exercising each, and inductively for features the theory did not anticipate; the stories were then compared on the same dimensions. The stories present hegemony in Mindanao as a field of armed and economic actors rather than a single apparatus: mine security, a landholder's retainers, an army command joined to a political dynasty, state soldiers and an unnamed extremist group, and an incumbent mayor with a hired gun. These actors work through local intermediaries, among them a strike leader, a printer, a farmer, and a healer. Consent appears less often as belief than as resignation or cynicism, and in one story it is purchased outright and fails in public. Transformismo works through need rather than persuasion, and in "Palabas" it is inverted, as men who are not rebels are paid to perform a surrender. Good sense is present in every story but is costly, and it survives chiefly as private knowledge, a vow, or a gesture in the next generation. The study concludes that the stories reveal Mindanawon hegemony as layered and locally mediated power, and it reports that two of the six texts carry Mindanao only weakly or tentatively on the page.