Positively No Filipinos Allowed: Building Communities and Discourse

Notes

Notes INTRODUCTION: CRITICAL CONSIDERATIONS The epigraph is from Oscar V . Campomanes, “The New Empire’s Forgetful and Forgotten Citizens: Unrepresentability and Unassimilability in Filipino-American Postcolonialities ,” Critical Mass: A Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism 2, 2 (Spring 1995): 150–51. 1. Yen Le Espiritu, for example, deploys the term “differential inclusion” to underscore the violent and differential incorporation of groups of color into the national community but also to describe a process whereby a group of people is deemed integral to the building and sustaining of the nation precisely because of its subordinate status. Yen Le Espiritu, Home Bound: Filipino American Lives across Cultures, Communities, and Countries (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003). 2. Our use and understanding of the notion of cultural aphasia is informed by the work of Ryan Bishop and Lillian S. Robinson, who deploy the term to make sense of the elision of the Thai sex-tourist industry from that country’s public discourse and consciousness. Bishop and Robinson, Night Market: Sexual Cultures and the Thai Economic Miracle (New York: Routledge, 1998). 3. William Appleman Williams, Empire As a Way of Life: An Essay on the Causes and Character of America’s Present Predicament along with a Few Thoughts about an Alternative (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); Amy Kaplan, “Left Alone with America: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture,” in Cultures of United States Imperialism, ed. Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993). 4. For a more detailed discussion, see Oscar V . Campomanes, “New Formations of Asian American Studies and the Question of U.S. Imperialism,” positions 5, 2 (1997): 523–50. 5. That the debate over whether or not the United States has been or is a bona fide imperial power continues is both remarkable and telling to us, symptomatic of the pervasiveness of cultural aphasia in this nation with regards to this history. 6. The phrase “spectre of invisibility” comes from Oscar V. Campomanes, “Filipinos in the United States and Their Literature of Exile,” in Reading the Literatures of Asian America, ed. Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 53. 7. For a discussion of the elision of the Philippine-American War in historical accounts, see Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis H. Francia, eds., Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899–1999 (New York: New York University Press, 2002); Luzviminda Francisco, “The First Vietnam: The Philippine-American War, 1899–1902,”takenfromThePhilippinesReader:AHistoryofColonialism,Neocolonialism, 216 NOTES TO INTRODUCTION Dictatorship, and Resistance, ed. Daniel B. Schirmer and Stephen Rosskamm Shalom (Boston: South End Press, 1987). For a discussion of the construction of Filipinos as ungrateful recipients of U.S. beneficence, see Roxanne Lynn Doty, Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in North-South Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire Building (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980). 8. A number of scholars have commented on the limitations of conceptual frameworks that have historically informed the study of Filipinos within Asian American studies. Campomanes, for example, asserts that these frameworks tend to be United States–centric, relying on assimilationist frameworks and conceptualizing Filipino migration to the United States in terms of immigration and settlement. He also points out that a similar logic and set of tendencies operate in Filipino American studies (Campomanes, “New Formations of Asian American Studies”); Campomanes addresses similar themes in “Filipinos in the United States.” See also Kandice Chuh, imagine otherwise: on Asian Americanist critique (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), for her critique of Asian American studies, namely its continued reliance on nation as a critical frame. For a critique of the paradigmatic claims and assumptions of postcolonial studies, particularly its Eurocentric focus, see C. Richard King, ed., Postcolonial America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), especially the essay by E. San Juan, Jr., “Establishment Postcolonialism and Its Alter/Native Others: Deciding to Be Accountable in a World of Permanent Emergency”; see also Kaplan and Pease, Cultures of United States Imperialism. The term “postcolonial” itself has come under critical scrutiny, particularly in relation to the legacies of colonial powers like Britain and the United States. See Anne McClintock, “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-colonialism,’” Social Text 31–32 (1992): 84–98; Ella Shohat, “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial,’” Social Text 31–32 (1992): 99–113. 9. For...