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7. On the Politics of (Filipino) Youth Culture: Interview with Theodore S. Gonzalves
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ANTONIO T. TIONGSON, JR. 7 On the Politics of (Filipino) Youth Culture Interview with Theodore S. Gonzalves ON THE POLITICS OF CULTURE TONY TIONGSON: Could you please introduce yourself and talk about your university affiliation, research interests, and interests outside of academia? THEO GONZALVES: My name is Theo Gonzalves. My research interests concern Filipino American performing arts and Asian American culture and history. I am also interested in expressive forms of culture and how they inform Asian and American history. I’m particularly interested in performance as an exciting site for thinking about identities, how histories are compressed in performances, the kind of burden that these performances take up in the absence and presence of social movements. I am also very much interested in what these performances tell us about how Asian Americans relate to their parents’ generation. We’ll find that culture isn’t necessarily handed down from one generation to another but is a series of discontinuities and breaks and slippages and interesting turns— lessons that aren’t learned well but seem to get repeated over and over again, anxieties that surface in artwork or visual work, poetry, literature, dance, theater, and comedy—all things that haunt us for generations. A lot of it has to do with challenging not only dominant U.S. culture but also Asian America itself—our own relationship to our elders, the generations that went before us. TT: One of the things we are trying to do with the project is to map the broader implications of Filipino politics. We are particularly interested in looking at culture as a site not just for the consolidation of power but also for the contestation of power. First of all, how do you conceive of “culture”? Also, I wonder if you could talk about the complexities and contradictions of interpreting culture, why culture is difficult to read. TG: One of the reasons why culture can be difficult to read is because so much of what the mass media does is aimed at the most common denominator. Commercial culture or the mass media requires passivity. It requires subjects to be accepting and to be asleep. Neferti Tadiar put it this way at a recent talk she gave. She spoke of two senses of culture. One is that culture is now the organizing principle of the world economy, to which I add that such a principle disciplines subjects to be passive, to be asleep. When we think of this sense 112 On the Politics of (Filipino) Youth Culture of “culture,” we should tune in to questions like, How can culture discipline subjects as compliant actors in a world economy, to respond to market forces in a way that you would want them to? The other aspect of culture would be to see it as a resource that comes from the ground up. This is a notion of culture that is ethnographically informed, one that relies on improvisation and recombinations of symbols and myths, and sensibilities at the most local level. Culture is all that we take for granted—things that we eat, the gods that we worship, how we speak, and the kinds of accents that we use. TT: It’s also important to note that the notion of cultural industries fashioning passive consumer subjects is not an absolute, total process. TG: No, it never is. You read Antonio Gramsci a certain way and you realize that hegemony is still hard work. People are arguing at the very top of corporate boards and within war rooms as to how to actually maintain certain amounts of order. It’s never seamless. It’s never unified. It’s never completely successful. If it were, then we would not be having this kind of conversation. We would remain silent. We would be afraid to speak out. We would be afraid to identify things that we find are important. Culture, in the other sense we are talking about—in the liberatory sense, the democratic sense that we are talking about—opposes that. Culture never precludes resistance. Sometimes it becomes the grounds for resistance. It’s more important not to deny a sense of gravity that’s there, that there are people working hard every day, in terms of how to market food and how to create appetites for subjects as young as two years old. Billions of dollars are spent on crafting flavors and desires and tastes and needs at the earliest ages to create brand loyalty for...