Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading

Introduction

1 Introduction F R O M T H E VA N TAG E point of the second millennium, the 1990s may be regarded as a period of unprecedented cultural and scholarly ferment by Filipinos in the United States. Ushered in by the publication of Jessica Hagedorn’s National Book Award–nominated novel Dogeaters (1990), the decade came to a close with numerous critical and collaborative publications and events commemorating the centennial celebrations of Philippine independence from Spain in 1898. The years between saw a steady outpouring of literary production, and this “literary renaissance”1 continues to thrive in the first decade of the twenty-first century, with a host of established and new Filipino writers not only seeing their work in print but also winning major awards. This cultural explosion is marked by a relentless thematic and generic diversity. The range of issues taken up in the literature—transnational and international migration, generational conflict and continuity , gender and sexual nonconformity, assimilation and its inherent failures, labor under late capitalism and the contradictory pressures of upward mobility, racial misrecognition and differentiation, crosscolor affiliation and aversion, racial hybridity, geographical dispersal and isolation, and historical reconstructions of the Philippine Revolution (1896–1898), the Philippine-American War (1899–1902), the Japanese occupation (1942–1945), and Ferdinand Marcos’s martial law regime (1972–1986) in the Philippines—is matched by a broad array of literary forms—novels, short story collections, autobiographies, personal essays, poems, plays, and anthologies—used to evoke these themes. Even a cursory glance at this body of work makes evident that there is neither an ascendant set of issues with which contemporary Filipino literature has been engaged nor a particular form that writers have gravitated toward. And yet despite the tremendous growth of Filipino studies scholarship in the United States since the 1990s, this literary abundance has not been met with a corresponding critical recognition.2 2 Introduction Beyond the Nation provides what might be termed a queer diasporic history to this literary profusion by moving back in time and across the Pacific. The study traces the roots of anglophone Filipino literature to U.S. colonialism in the Philippines and examines how Filipino literature in the United States is shaped by the overlapping forces of colonialism, imperialism, and migration. Situated between the Philippine postcolonial and the U.S. ethnic, what I describe as diasporic Filipino literature exceeds the boundaries of either national frame in both its representational strategies and its performative articulations. Complicating approaches to reading “minority” literature that privilege, in this case, race and nation as the primary categories of analysis, Beyond the Nation theorizes and enacts a model of queer diasporic reading that tracks the ways that Filipino literature addresses multiple audiences at once and how those multivalent addresses are mediated through gender, sexuality, eroticism, and desire. This book seeks to elucidate how such complex articulations (expressions and linkages) contest, and sometimes capitulate to, the normative compulsions of “Benevolent Assimilation” in the Philippines , Filipino (cultural) nationalism, and assimilation in the United States, and how they proffer alternative relationalities and socialities that surpass or elude the nation as the default form of imagining community. Diasporic Filipino literature does not lend itself to the construction of a “national” literary history whose consolidation would “[guarantee] a sense of cultural legitimacy,” as Linda Hutcheon writes.3 Since Filipino literature in the United States has remained a peripheral and marginalized literature in the U.S. academy and in the wider reading public, it may seem as though “a familiar bedrock narrative of development”—a “teleological” literary history that emphasizes “the importance of origins and the assumption of continuous, organic development” (5)—has “to be laid down first, before competing, correcting, or even counterdiscursive narratives can be articulated” (13, my emphasis). Beyond the Nation suggests instead that Filipino literature in the United States has long been “diasporic” and “queer”—a dispersed, coreless tradition whose relation to conventional political and social histories has invariably been oblique and ex-centric to the latter’s normalizing dictates.4 As such, this tradition’s diachronic and synchronic contours can be mapped only through an episodic, nonteleological literary history “that does not inevitably betray the aleatory, accidental, contingent, random dimensions of literary creativity.”5 Such contingencies may indeed be surprising (if not entirely random), but my readings neither familiarize the foreign nor Introduction 3 discipline the disruptive, pursuing instead interpretations that underscore rather than underplay the literature’s peculiarities...