Invisible Author/Visible Predator Literary Representations of Filipinos in the United States

Date of Award

2008

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Reid, Amy

Keywords

Minor Literature, Philippine-American, Carbo, Nick, Blu's Hanging, Santos, Bienvenido, Yamanaka, Lois-Ann, Palumbo-Liu, David

Area of Concentration

Literature

Abstract

Philippine-American literary visibility is contingent upon representations created outside the Philippine-American (Pinoy) community; Pinoy representation is shaped by the American colonization of the Philippines and the racist immigration laws that Filipino immigrants faced in the early 20th century, rather than by a canon of Philippine-American writers. I incorporate David Palumbo-Liu's discussion of the "symbolic order" in America to explain the narrow literary role available to Filipinos. I also draw on Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of "minor literature" and "deterritorialization" to explain how the Philippine-American narrative necessarily conflates history, politics and culture in a way that magnifies the Filipino-American's subaltern identity. Both concepts illuminate the erasure of the Philippine-American voice from American literature, and explain the apparent lack of American literature written by Filipinos. The first chapter includes an interview with Nick Carb�, a Filipino-American poet, which raises questions about the relationship between cultural representation and subjective identity. The second chapter is an analysis of two novels concerning Filipino immigrants by the Filipino author Bienvenido Santos; here the concept of minor literature helps to explain how Santos' Philippine-American characters are emasculated by external definitions of their identity to the point of being unable to physically reproduce. The third chapter analyzes the controversy over Japanese-American author Lois-Ann Yamanaka's novel Blu's Hanging, and its depiction of Filipinos as sexual predators. Here, I move from a discussion of the controversy's publicity to a close reading of the text to determine that both reveal the ways in which structural and systemic racism silence the Philippine-American voice.

Rights

This bibliographic record is available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. The New College of Florida, as creator of this bibliographic record, has waived all rights to it worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS