Novel: Dogeaters

Overview
Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters (1990) is a kaleidoscopic portrait of the Philippines during the 1950s and 1960s, a moment of feverish modernity and mounting political tension. The narrative moves through a collage of voices and scenes, film sets, gossip columns, prayer meetings, seedy clubs, and government offices, assembling a panoramic view of a society riven by class, influence, and spiritual longing. American culture and local tradition collide, producing a landscape where celebrity and corruption feed one another and private despair becomes public spectacle.

Structure and Style
The book rejects a single authoritative narrator in favor of fragmented vignettes, dramatic monologues, faux-newspaper items, radio scripts, and stage directions. That hybrid form mirrors the cultural hybridity it depicts: Tagalog and English blend, high art mixes with popular entertainment, and the sacred rubs against the profane. Hagedorn's language shifts with each voice, ranging from fevered lyricism to clipped reportage, and the novel's collage technique gives it a restless energy that mimics the swirl of media and rumor shaping public life.

Characters and Perspectives
A wide cast populates the pages, gossip writers who trade in scandal, politicians who manipulate appearances, film stars who sell fantasies, drug dealers who traffic in desperation, and religious fanatics who promise salvation. Central figures include show-business personalities whose glamour masks fragile private lives and journalists whose scoops reveal a brittle moral order. Rather than a conventional protagonist, the book treats the community itself as the main character, showing how disparate lives intersect through commerce, image, and rumor.

Themes and Motifs
Colonial legacy and cultural imperialism run throughout, as American films, music, and advertising saturate daily life and shape aspirations. Corruption and cronyism are depicted not as isolated sins but as systemic forces that distort morality and reward spectacle over substance. Religious fervor appears both as genuine consolation and as a vehicle for exploitation, reflecting a society searching for meaning amid instability. Celebrity functions as currency: fame buys access and erases accountability, while media narratives manufacture desire and distract from political decay.

Politics and Social Critique
Political unease simmers beneath the pages: alliances between power and performance keep dissent muted even as inequality deepens. The novel gestures toward the forces that would later culminate in overt authoritarianism, depicting a culture where personal loyalties and public personas can tip the balance of power. Hagedorn's satire cuts to the ways entertainment, commerce, and official rhetoric sustain one another, producing a nation where the line between patriot and puppet, piety and profiteering, becomes perilously thin.

Resonance and Legacy
Dogeaters reads as both a period piece and an urgent meditation on how image economies shape collective life. Its polyphonic form and sharp observational eye document a specific historical moment while offering broader reflections on media, memory, and the tangled relations between colonizer and colonized. The novel's vibrancy, moral ambivalence, and formal daring have secured its place as a landmark of Filipino-American literature, a book that remains hauntingly relevant whenever culture and power collide.