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  • The Decolonized Eye: Filipino American Art and Performance
  • Theodore S. Gonzalves (bio)
The Decolonized Eye: Filipino American Art and Performance, by Sarita Echavez See. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Xxxiv + 210 pp. $25.00 paper. ISBN 978-0-8166-5319-5.

As any of the dancing prisoners of Cebu will tell you (if they could), performing is hard work. Filipino performers have earned their reputation for being excellent at what they do—fine mimics, according to Pico Iyer—throughout the world. In nearly every Asian capital, Filipinos are gigging in hotel lounges, convention centers, concert halls, and too many cruise lines to mention, covering everything from the Beatles to Bieber, dancing like Tina Turner, working blue comedy, and pulling rabbits out of hats. There's more there than just the love of the stage. Lives depend on it: tuition payments, monthly grocery bills, rent and repairs around the home. The state depends on it as well. At least 120,000 Filipino musicians have to leave the country each year to make ends meet. Do the ends ever meet?

Sarita See's excellent new book, The Decolonized Eye: Filipino American Art and Performance, is one of the few works that stands at the intersection of Filipino American studies and cultural studies, carefully analyzing how the aesthetic choices of a select group of primarily U.S.-based visual and performing artists of Philippine heritage are linked to the historical absurdities of colonialism.

In her introduction, See points out how, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the U.S. Supreme Court deemed the Philippines and other new colonies to be "foreign to the United States in a domestic sense" (xii). Her highlighting of this obscure phrase is an occasion to reflect on this seemingly perpetual condition—an occasion not only to look back to a time when such an attitude was offered without irony but also an opportunity to take notice of what kind of long shadow is cast on the lives of contemporary minority and immigrant communities.

See points to the United States' "simultaneous interiority and exteriority," positing the empire's inability to maintain custody of its burden as a key element in any analysis of Filipinos. Think here of Mae Ngai's or Paul Kramer's analyses of early-twentieth-century race codes pertaining to Filipinos, labor migrants prized for their labor power and transportability, while also being chased out of valleys and orchards, prompting writers to ponder the synonymity of "Filipino" and "crime."

One of the central aspects of See's work is her thorough treatment of abstraction as a tactic undertaken by Filipino American artists. Beyond the customary understanding of abstract art as that which departs from reality or representation, See is interested in the range of meaning that falls under that term. The artists in her study "point to a culture of presence and strategies of indirection that counter the invisibility surrounding Filipino America's history of racial subjugation and [End Page 160] colonization" (xiii). There's a complicated repertoire that is under their command: many emphasizing irony, sarcasm, misdirection, camp, and even insults. Scholars like See are engaging in much more thorough examinations of form and not simply the content of the work.

Part One of The Decolonized Eye considers the work of three visual artists. Manuel Ocampo's painting Heridas is studied alongside Angel Shaw's video, Nailed. These works reveal bodies in profound physical trauma—Ocampo's blood-spattered figures in tandem with Shaw's Lucy Reyes taking Catholic ritual to its extreme by being nailed to a cross—and we are left to meditate on the possibility that such wounds are analogous to seemingly never-ending cultural traumas. See asks one of the most searing of questions: "How can one remember what has been so ruthlessly forgotten?" (33–34).

Paired with the Ocampo/Shaw chapter is another that centers on Paul Pfeiffer's digital video installations, where human figures are completely removed from the action. This juxtaposition works well, as it serves to critically contrast Ocampo's and Shaw's "excessive embodiment" with Pfeiffer's "[banishing of] the figure altogether from the scenic landscape and, crucially, from the scene of...

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