Reading Trese through Hybridity and Symbolic Interactionism: Constructing the Postcolonial Filipino Hero

Abstract

This study examines Trese (2021), Netflix’s first Filipino animated series, as a postcolonial cultural text that negotiates Filipino identity, heroism, and world-building within the conditions of global streaming. Drawing on Homi K. Bhabha’s postcolonial theory and Herbert Blumer’s symbolic interactionism, the study integrates macro-level analysis of structural hybridity with micro-level examination of identity formation through social interaction. Using a qualitative, theory-driven critical textual analysis, the research analyzes Trese’s world-building, narrative motifs, and central protagonist, Alexandra Trese, to address how postcolonial hybridity is articulated and enacted. The findings reveal that Trese constructs Manila as a postcolonial Third Space where myth, bureaucracy, and informal justice coexist, exposing the limitations of modern institutions shaped by colonial residue. Alexandra Trese emerges as a structurally hybrid subject whose ambivalent inheritance of authority produces a form of heroism grounded in negotiation rather than moral absolutism. Through symbolic interaction, her identity as a hero is socially produced and continuously reaffirmed through interactions with police, supernatural beings, and civil society. Ultimately, the study argues that Trese reconfigures Filipino hero archetypes by shifting heroism from masculinity and nationalist spectacle toward relational authority, ethical restraint, and contextual negotiation, illustrating the possibilities and limits of postcolonial representation under platform capitalism.

Highlights
• Introduces an integrated macro–micro analytical framework by combining Bhabha’s postcolonial theory with Blumer’s symbolic interactionism, demonstrating how structural hybridity is enacted through everyday social interaction in media texts.
• Reconceptualizes postcolonial hybridity as a lived and negotiated process, showing that hybridity in Trese operates not only at the level of world-building but through the protagonist’s role-taking, interaction, and identity formation.
• Advances postcolonial hero studies by identifying a relational and context-dependent model of Filipino heroism that departs from masculinity, moral absolutism, and nationalist spectacle.
• Develops a theory-led critical textual analysis method that operationalizes postcolonial concepts (hybridity, ambivalence, mimicry) alongside interactionist indicators (role expectation, symbolic recognition, response).
• Provides a critical account of negotiated cultural visibility under global streaming, revealing how Trese both resists and accommodates platform constraints, highlighting the limits of postcolonial resistance within platform capitalism.