Payback Time: Neocolonial Discourses in Peter Bacho's "Cebu"

Reviewed by: GIVING BACK: Filipino America and the Politics of Diaspora Giving by L. Joyce Zapanta Mariano Josen Masangkay Diaz GIVING BACK: Filipino America and the Politics of Diaspora Giving. By L. Joyce Zapanta Mariano. Temple University Press. 2021. While the enduring influence of the expatriate (or balikbayan) on the Philippine nation and its economy has been a long-studied phenomenon within Filipino, Filipino American, and Philippine studies, L. Joyce Zapanta Mariano offers a new critical way to explore questions about diasporic practices as they lie within the myriad structures of the global economy. Mariano’s monograph, Giving Back: Filipino America and the Politics of Diaspora Giving, theorizes the politics of giving as a mode for studying the complexities of Filipino American belonging to the homeland and outside of it, shifting U.S.-Philippine relations, and circuits of development under the regimes of globalization. Mariano centers the practice of “giving back” as a key feature of Filipino American diasporic communities through which diasporic subjects send remittances to the home-land as both obligation and responsibility. Challenging the unidirectional movement of this immigrant narrative, however, the concept “diaspora giving” reconceptualizes giving back as a set of processes that attempt to stabilize homeland and Filipinoness in the name of diaspora. For Mariano, both “diaspora” and “giving” are sites of multiplicity that hold several different practices, identities, and arrangements that underscore the transnationality of Filipino American attachment to the homeland. Diaspora giving identifies Filipino Americans as development actors often recruited to participate in the neoliberalizing economy of the Philippine development state. Moving away from discourses that highlight “love” of homeland as the foundation of the remittance economy, the book disrupts the linearity of this narrative to argue that both migration and distance are themselves transnational spaces that cultivate ideas about connection and responsibility. To this end, Mariano skillfully points to the ways that Filipinoness is never a stable entity, and the interrogation of giving practices offers insight into the ways that these acts regulate and produce alternative Filipino American diasporic formations, what Mariano calls the resubjectification of Filipino Americans’ roles for national development under globalization. Giving Back relies not upon the “policy-oriented evaluations” that measure the impact of remittances on homeland states (13). Instead, its archive follows the paths of resubjectification, using ethnography and textual analysis to trace the complexities of charity and philanthropy, which are critical operations for international and global development. Mariano historicizes charity as a colonial discourse that “brings abstract citizens together into [End Page 73] nations, constructing home or the domestic in relation to foreign spaces populated by the colonial other” (13). The four chapters of the book conceive of different forms of diaspora giving, turning not only to individual remittances but also to transnational anticolonial activism. Where the Filipino American immigrant is often configured as distinct from the Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) based on the terms of citizenship and settlement, the first chapter traces the ways that these figures are mutually constituted by a political economy structured by labor migration and state development. Mariano argues that although Filipino American diasporic subjects might not see themselves as connected to other diasporic Filipino workers, both share histories and experiences of mobility and return and have been positioned to serve as key actors for national development. Mariano’s work to disrupt the logics of Filipino American choice and OFW duty is imperative. It reveals that both choice and duty are embedded within the structure of feeling of neoliberalism. In Chapter 2, Mariano studies writer and organizer Ninotchka Rosca’s activism to provide examples of counterhegemonic giving that does not subscribe to the logics of U.S. imperialism and global capital. In doing so, Mariano theorizes homeland “disorientation” as an analytic for locating moments of disruption within the progressive pathways of state development. Disorientation interrupts the singular orientations that Filipino Americans have toward homeland. The third chapter follows Philippine Development Foundation (PhilDev), a transnational nonprofit organization, as a model of philanthropy that frames itself as the singular vehicle for addressing suffering and precarity in the Philippines, especially in its collaboration with the Philippine state. Corporate social responsibility through PhilDev and earlier Ayala foundations regulates giving by imagining itself as “doing good...

This chapter examines important developments in Filipino American literature since the pioneer Filipino American writers best exemplified by N.V.M. Gonzalez, Carlos Bulosan, José García Villa, and Bienvenido Santos. Filipino American novels deal with the ongoing political and cultural legacy of war and imperialism, and can be roughly divided into four different types: those concerned with the recovery of Filipino history and collective memory; those that attempt to contest (neo)colonialism through postmodern aesthetics; those that represent growing up in a new, globalized, and transnational world; and those that deal with issues caused by the events of 9/11. Jessica Haledon links the discovery and conquest of the Philippines by the Spaniards with American neocolonial cultural imperialism in her novel, Dream Jungle. As Filipino American community develops and matures, its literary production continues to expand its rich thematic threads and engagement with sociopolitical concerns that affect not only Filipino Americans but Filipinos worldwide.

Reviewed by: Legitimizing Empire: Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican Cultural Critique by Faye Caronan Charlie Samuya Veric Faye Caronan Legitimizing Empire: Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican Cultural Critique Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. 208 pages. Why compare? And why now? In the wake of the transnational turn in area studies wherein borders that constrain knowledge are opened up, such questions may appear outdated. Their implications, however, remain robust especially for the future of comparison in the Global South. Faye Caronan's Legitimizing Empire: Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican Cultural Critique shows us why. In the West the comparative imagination has a relatively long history. The discipline of comparative literature, for example, flourished in the US after the Second World War, a development that coincided with the escalation of the Cold War, during which the culture of others became an integral part of statecraft and international diplomacy. More recently, American studies—the larger field within which Caronan's work is situated—has seen the rise of transnationalism, expanding the investigation of US history and culture to include those of other state formations in the age of globalization. The literature embodying such developments that put comparison front and center is too broad to be enumerated here. But such breadth cannot be said about Philippine studies, a field that Legitimizing Empire also addresses, whose emergence as an academic domain corresponded with the rise of comparative literature on US shores after the Second World War. It is not unfair to say that comparison has yet to find its rightful place in the study of Philippine society, history, and culture. The late Benedict Anderson, himself a comparatist, gestured toward this possibility in The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World (Verso, 2001). The title of his book comes from no less than José Rizal, a point that may suggest the deep roots of comparative imagination in Filipino consciousness. But comparative scholarly studies done by local scholars are still hard to come by in the Philippines. This lack is ironic given the ecological and cultural diversity of the archipelago, a condition that suggests quite the opposite. Given such a diverse ecology and culture, the lay of the Filipino mind should be comparative, so to speak. The reality, however, could not be more untrue. Consider the lack of comparison in literary studies, which is rather bizarre given the fact [End Page 395] that Filipino scholars—Bienvenido Lumbera comes to mind—had been formally trained in comparative literature at American universities as early as the 1960s. Indeed, comparative literary studies remains marginal in Filipino scholarship, especially those that tackle American themes alongside Filipino questions. Since the publication of Lucilla Hosillos's Philippine–American Literary Relations, 1898–1941 (University of the Philippines Press) in 1969, for example, nothing similar has been done by a Filipino scholar on this side of the Pacific. Such a lack is a scandal given the prominence of American influence on Philippine history in the last hundred or so years. Caronan's work is accordingly significant in that it throws open the underlying principles that define cultural relations between the Philippines and the US. What is more, she includes another dimension that expands the scope of comparison—the case of Puerto Rico, a US Commonwealth. The origins of Legitimizing Empire go back to Caronan's undergraduate years at Cornell University, when she heard fellow students in the Latino Studies Resource Center talking about US colonialism in Puerto Rico while she was poring over an article by E. San Juan Jr in the nearby Asian American Resource Center. Caronan would later pursue the connections between the Philippines and Puerto Rico while completing her dissertation at the University of California, San Diego. The final product is Legitimizing Empire, Caronan's first book. Legitimizing Empire argues that US exceptionalism has delegitimized, and therefore neutralized, the critiques that are expressed in cultural texts produced by people of color, primarily Filipino American and US Puerto Rican. Looking comparatively at novels, documentary films, performance poetry, travelogues, and travel guides, Caronan illuminates the workings of US exceptionalism and highlights the deep but concealed connections that not only bind the two diasporic communities with...

Southeast Asian American literature, once seen as emergent and marginal, has undergone a proliferation of creative and critical production over the last two decades. Nonetheless, the corpus remains undertheorized as a discrete field of study and is typically analyzed in terms of war and refugee narratives by Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, and Hmong writers. This article argues for an expanded definition that encompasses works by authors with heritage of a wider Southeast Asian region, including Filipino, Indonesian, Malaysian, Singaporean, Burmese, and Thai American writing. In reviewing English-language prose (mainly fiction) published to date, this article presents a brief overview of historical and ongoing trends in the developing canon. It finds abiding concerns with shared global histories of European colonialism and Cold War imperialism; a border-crossing approach to postcolonial nation-states; and variances in the phenomenon of racialization and Asian American panethnicity within a transnational frame. The study of Southeast Asian American literature, especially when it considers the experiences of different groups more comparatively, illuminates a subjecthood marked by multiplicity and points to a distinct cultural and political strain within Asian American and US literature.


 
 
 The release in 2004 of Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice marked yet another contribution to celluloid’s Austen mania that began in the 1990s and is still going strong. Released almost simultaneously on three different continents (in the UK, US, and India), and in two different languages (English and Hindi), Bride and Prejudice, however, is definitely not another Anglo-American period costume drama. Described by one reviewer as “East meets West”, Chadha’s film “marries a characteristically English saga [Austen’s Pride and Prejudice] with classic Bollywood format “transforming corsets to saris, … the Bennetts to the Bakshis and … pianos to bhangra beats” (Adarsh). Bride and Prejudice, thus, clearly belongs to the upcoming genre of South Asian cross-over cinema in its diasporic incarnation. Such cross-over cinema self-consciously acts as a bridge between at least two distinct cinematic traditions—Hollywood and Bollywood (Indian Hindi cinema). By taking Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as her source text, Chadha has added another dimension to the intertextuality of such cross-over cinema, creating a complex hybrid that does not fit neatly into binary hyphenated categories such as “Asian-American cinema” that film critics such as Mandal invoke to characterise diaspora productions. An embodiment of contemporary globalised (post?)coloniality in its narrative scope, embracing not just Amritsar and LA, but also Goa and London, Bride and Prejudice refuses to fit into a neat East versus West cross-cultural model. How, then, are we to classify this film? Is this problem of identity indicative of postmodern indeterminacy of meaning or can the film be seen to occupy a “third” space, to act as a postcolonial hybrid that successfully undermines (neo)colonial hegemony (Sangari, 1-2)? To answer this question, I will examine Bride and Prejudice as a mimic text, focusing specifically on its complex relationship with Bollywood conventions. According to Gurinder Chadha, Bride and Prejudice is a “complete Hindi movie” in which she has paid “homage to Hindi cinema” through “deliberate references to the cinema of Manoj Kumar, Raj Kapoor, Yash Chopra and Karan Johar” (Jha). This list of film makers is associated with a specific Bollywood sub-genre: the patriotic family romance. Combining aspects of two popular Bollywood genres, the “social” (Prasad, 83) and the “romance” (Virdi, 178), this sub-genre enacts the story of young lovers caught within complex familial politics against the backdrop of a nationalist celebration of Indian identity. Using a cinematic language that is characterised by the spectacular in both its aural and visual aspects, the patriotic family romance follows a typical “masala” narrative pattern that brings together “a little action and some romance with a touch of comedy, drama, tragedy, music, and dance” (Jaikumar). Bride and Prejudice’s successful mimicry of this language and narrative pattern is evident in film reviews consistently pointing to its being very “Bollywoodish”: “the songs and some sequences look straight out of a Hindi film” says one reviewer (Adarsh), while another wonders “why this talented director has reduced Jane Austen’s creation to a Bollywood masala film” (Bhaskaran). Setting aside, for the moment, these reviewers’ condemnation of such Bollywood associations, it is worthwhile to explore the implications of yoking together a canonical British text with Indian popular culture. According to Chadha, this combination is made possible since “the themes of Jane Austen’s novels are a ‘perfect fit’ for a Bollywood style film” (Wray). Ostensibly, such a comment may be seen to reinforce the authority of the colonial canonical text by affirming its transnational/transhistorical relevance. From this perspective, the Bollywood adaptation not only becomes a “native” tribute to the colonial “master” text, but also, implicitly, marks the necessary belatedness of Bollywood as a “native” cultural formation that can only mimic the “English book”. Again, Chadha herself seems to subscribe to this view: “I chose Pride and Prejudice because I feel 200 years ago, England was no different than Amritsar today” (Jha). The ease with which the basic plot premise of Pride and Prejudice—a mother with grown-up daughters obsessed with their marriage—transfers to a contemporary Indian setting does seem to substantiate this idea of belatedness. The spatio-temporal contours of the narrative require changes to accommodate the transference from eighteenth-century English countryside to twenty-first-century India, but in terms of themes, character types, and even plot elements, Bride and Prejudice is able to “mimic” its master text faithfully. While the Bennets, Bingleys and Darcy negotiate the relationship between marriage, money and social status in an England transformed by the rise of industrial capitalism, the Bakshis, Balraj and, yes, Will Darcy, undertake the same tasks in an India transformed by corporate globalisation. Differences in class are here overlaid with those in culture as a middle-class Indian family interacts with wealthy non-resident British Indians and American owners of multinational enterprises, mingling the problems created by pride in social status with prejudices rooted in cultural insularity. However, the underlying conflicts between social and individual identity, between relationships based on material expediency and romantic love, remain the same, clearly indicating India’s belated transition from tradition to modernity. It is not surprising, then, that Chadha can claim that “the transposition [of Austen to India] did not offend the purists in England at all” (Jha). But if the purity of the “master” text is not contaminated by such native mimicry, then how does one explain the Indian anglophile rejection of Bride and Prejudice? The problem, according to the Indian reviewers, lies not in the idea of an Indian adaptation, but in the choice of genre, in the devaluation of the “master” text’s cultural currency by associating it with the populist “masala” formula of Bollywood. The patriotic family romance, characterised by spectacular melodrama with little heed paid to psychological complexity, is certainly a far cry from the restrained Austenian narrative that achieves its dramatic effect exclusively through verbal sparring and epistolary revelations. When Elizabeth and Darcy’s quiet walk through Pemberley becomes Lalita and Darcy singing and dancing through public fountains, and the private economic transaction that rescues Lydia from infamy is translated into fisticuff between Darcy and Wickham in front of an applauding cinema audience, mimicry does smack too much of mockery to be taken as a tribute. It is no wonder then that “the news that [Chadha] was making Bride and Prejudice was welcomed with broad grins by everyone [in Britain] because it’s such a cheeky thing to do” (Jha). This cheekiness is evident throughout the film, which provides a splendid over-the-top cinematic translation of Pride and Prejudice that deliberately undermines the seriousness accorded to the Austen text, not just by the literary establishment, but also by cinematic counterparts that attempt to preserve its cultural value through carefully constructed period pieces. Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice, on the other hand, marries British high culture to Indian popular culture, creating a mimic text that is, in Homi Bhabha’s terms, “almost the same, but not quite” (86), thus undermining the authority, the primacy, of the so-called “master” text. This postcolonial subversion is enacted in Chadha’s film at the level of both style and content. If the adaptation of fiction into film is seen as an activity of translation, of a semiotic shift from one language to another (Boyum, 21), then Bride and Prejudice can be seen to enact this translation at two levels: the obvious translation of the language of novel into the language of film, and the more complex translation of Western high culture idiom into the idiom of Indian popular culture. The very choice of target language in the latter case clearly indicates that “authenticity” is not the intended goal here. Instead of attempting to render the target language transparent, making it a non-intrusive medium that derives all its meaning from the source text, Bride and Prejudice foregrounds the conventions of Bollywood masala films, forcing its audience to grapple with this “new” language on its own terms. The film thus becomes a classic instance of the colony “talking back” to the metropolis, of Caliban speaking to Prospero, not in the language Prospero has taught him, but in his own native tongue. The burden of responsibility is shifted; it is Prospero/audiences in the West that have the responsibility to understand the language of Bollywood without dismissing it as gibberish or attempting to domesticate it, to reduce it to the familiar. The presence in Bride and Prejudice of song and dance sequences, for example, does not make it a Hollywood musical, just as the focus on couples in love does not make it a Hollywood-style romantic comedy. Neither The Sound of Music (Robert Wise, 1965) nor You’ve Got Mail (Nora Ephron, 1998) corresponds to the Bollywood patriotic family romance that combines various elements from distinct Hollywood genres into one coherent narrative pattern. Instead, it is Bollywood hits like Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (Aditya Chopra, 1995) and Pardes (Subhash Ghai, 1997) that constitute the cinema tradition to which Bride and Prejudice belongs, and against which backdrop it needs to be seen. This is made clear in the film itself where the climactic fight between Darcy and Wickham is shot against a screening of Manoj Kumar’s Purab Aur Paschim (East and West) (1970), establishing Darcy, unequivocally, as the Bollywood hero, the rescuer of the damsel in distress, who deserves, and gets, the audience’s full support, denoted

In her novel White Teeth, Zadie Smith famously writes not only about the everyday multicultural lives of the denizens in a hybridized community in Willesden, North London in 1975 but also forefronts their identity crisis in Multicultural England Drawing on the concept of hybridity in The Location of Culture by Homi K. Bhabha, the proposition of identity crisis in “The Question of Cultural Identity.” Modernity: an Introduction to Modern Societies by Stuart Hall, and the definition of Orientalism in Orientalism by Edward Said, this thesis aims to discuss the key issue, identity crisis found in White Teeth and argues that it is attributable to the racially charged colonial discourse, prevalent nationalism, the opposing strivings of the desires for ethnic authenticity and for cultural assimilation. Hence, each of the three main chapters is aimed at dealing with an individual root cause that gives rise to identity crisis. Chapter One is dedicated to discussing how the unfading colonial discourse has contributed to antagonizing the inhabitants of Great Britain, including both the migrants and the dominant white natives as a whole. To bolster the argument, I maintain that it is racial stereotype that plays a starring role in empowering colonial discourse which, in turn, inferiorizes the non-white. Chapter Two deals with how the eclipsing nationalism in Great Britain functions to subjugate its ethnic groups and eventually alienate them from the world around them. This chapter argues that in the nationalist’s appeal to the homogeneity of the nation-state, the immigrants are ostracized as the threats to the security of the nation-state, Great Britain. Accordingly, the characters in this novel doomed to such adversities suffer from their identity crisis. Chapter Three is dedicated to discussing a paradoxical identification as the immigrants oscillate between an allegiance to ethnic authenticity and an irresistible desire for assimilation into the dominant culture. The paradox can never be solved because for a disaporic subject, the two disparate cultures are irreconcilable in nature. And it is hardly surprising that this has resulted in disorienting his or her cultural identification. Through the discussions in the three chapters, this thesis argues that some of the characters in the novel suffer from identity crisis due to their inabilities to cope with the challenges a hybridized multicultural England poses to them. Keywords: identity, multicultural, hybridized, Englishness, racism, nationalism.

This paper examines how The Gangster of Love (1996), the second novel by Filipino American artist and writer Jessica Hagedorn, dismantles ready-made assumptions about the construction of minority and mainstream cultures. Spanning the period from the 1970s to the early 1990s, Gangster depicts the life of Rocky Rivera, a Filipina American young artist. As it portrays Rocky's family and friends, the novel examines the drastic re-articulation of the US's self-image brought about by Filipino Americans and other groups marginalized as minorities by virtue of their ethnic, socio–cultural, and/or sexual identities. The narrative challenges dominant notions of who and what makes history, juxtaposing historical references with fictionalizations of real episodes and completely fictional incidents, and making a constant use of parody, irony, jokes and clichés. This paper studies Rocky's reworks of her multiple ethnic and sociocultural allegiances in connection with her passion for music and popular culture, placing these reworks in the context of the Philippines’ colonial and neo–colonial background and multi-cultural US history. It also considers succinctly how Gangster's postcolonial dimensions intersect with a feminist and postmodern consciousness in a gendered strategy of socio–cultural resistance and critique.

Abstract: A discussion between Filipino American writers and poets on weaving rich stories that reflect their roots, themselves, and their place in Filipino mythology. Bringing together writers whose work centers the Filipino American experience, tackling themes of grief, displacement, intersectionality, and mental health, the discussion situated these narratives within long-standing cultural frameworks. Panelists reflected on their influences, from folklore to family histories. They discussed their writing journeys impact on their connection to their heritage and their identities (queer/gender/multi-racial/disability/diaspora). The discussion illuminated how Filipino American literature and oral tradition are evolving. Not static relics, but dynamic expressions of identity and cultural continuity.

Central to many definitions of the term “cultural imperialism” is the idea of the culture of one powerful civilization, country, or institution having great unreciprocated influence on that of another, less powerful, entity to a degree that one may speak of a measure of cultural “domination.” Cultural imperialism has sometimes been described as a theory, especially where scholars build a case that the cultural influence of the stronger entity has had a pervasive, pernicious impact on the weaker. The term evolved from 1960s neo-Marxist discourses within cultural, media, and postcolonial studies that contextualized the post–World War II “independence” wave of new nations emerging from colonial servitude. It was propelled by the writings of nationalist revolutionaries, revolutionary theorists, and their sympathizers of the 1950s and 1960s, but it has sweeping relevance across human history. The foremost western theorist of cultural imperialism in the West was Herbert Schiller. The concept was adopted and endorsed in the 1970s by both UNESCO and the Non-Aligned Movement. Following Oliver Boyd-Barrett, the concept may denote a field of study embracing all relationships between phenomena defined as “cultural” and as “imperialism.” These encompass cultural changes that are (1) enforced on a weaker entity and (2) occur within both stronger and weaker entities through contact, contest, and resistance, including (3) assimilation of social practices encountered by the stronger in the weaker entity, and (4) original hybrids manifesting cultural traces of both stronger and weaker entities. The concepts of cultural and media imperialism were much critiqued during the 1980s and 1990s, and many scholars preferred alternative concepts such as globalization and cultural globalization to analyze issues of intercultural contact, whether asymmetrical or otherwise. John Tomlinson critiqued the concept, identified four different discourses of cultural imperialism, and argued in favor of its substitution with the term “globalization.” Mirrlees has placed Tomlinson’s work in context by describing the dialectical—parallel but mutually aware—development of both a cultural imperialism and a cultural globalization paradigm. Both are influential in the 21st century. “Imperialism” commonly references relations of conquest, dominance, and hegemony between civilizations, nations, and communities. “Cultural imperialism” relates primarily to the cultural manifestations of such relations. Culture and empire relate in many different ways, fueling different theories that often play on dichotomous discourses, including territorial/non-territorial, totalistic/partial, benign/malign, ephemeral/perpetual, superficial/essential, voluntary/involuntary, intended/unintended, welcome/unwelcome, forceful/peaceful, noticed/unnoticed, linear/interactive, homogeneous/heterogeneous, and acceded/resisted. The concept has affinities with hegemony, the idea that stability in conditions of social inequality is achieved not mainly by force but by securing the consent of the masses (starting with co-option of their indigenous leaders)—through persuasion and propaganda—to the elite’s view of the world. This process is commensurate with forms of democracy that provide the appearance but not the reality of choice and control. Fissures within the ranks of the elites and within the masses create spaces for resistance and change. Culture encompasses the totality of social practices of a given community. Social practices are manifest within social institutions such as family, education, healthcare, worship, labor, recreation, language, communication, and decision-making, as well as their corresponding domains. Any of these can undergo change following a society’s encounter with exogenous influences—most dramatically so when stronger powers impose changes through top-down strategies of command and influence. Analysis of cultural imperialism often incorporates notions of media imperialism with reference to (1) print, electronic, and digital media—their industrialization, production, distribution, content, and capital accumulation; (2) cultural meanings that media evoke among receivers and audience cultures; (3) audience and media interactions in representations of topics, people, and ideas; and (4) relationships between media corporations and other centers of power in the reproduction and shaping of social systems. Media are logically subsumed as important components of cultural imperialism. Yet the significance of media can be understated. The concept of mediatization denotes that “knowledge” of social practices draws heavily on media representations. Social practices that are experienced as direct may themselves be formed through exposure to media representations or performed for media. Discourses of cultural imperialism speak to major current controversies, including: cultural suppression and genocide; ideas of “globalization”; influential economic models of “capitalism” and “neoliberalism”; ideologies that are embedded in the global spread of concepts such as “modern,” “progressive,” “growth,” “development,” “consumerism,” “free market,” “freedom,” “democracy,” “social Darwinism” and “soft power”; cultural specificity of criteria and procedures for establishing “truth”; instrumentalization for the purposes of cultural conquest of academic disciplines such as psychoanalysis, economics, social anthropology, or marketing, or environmental crises, especially as linked to western ideologies that underwrite humanity’s “right” to dominate nature.

In her pathbreaking book Asian American Panethnicity (1992), Yen Le Espiritu traces Asian American panethnicity to the Yellow Power movement of the civil rights era of the 1960s. Thereafter the political struggles of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, and Filipino Americans were documented in literature and studied in literary anthologies such as Frank Chin et al.’s Aiiieeeee! (1974) and David Hsin-Fu Wand’s Asian-American Heritage: An Anthology of Prose and Poetry (1974). However, early Asian American literature suggests that Asian American consciousness emerged earlier than the civil rights era. During the era of Chinese exclusion (1882–1943), Chinese American writers such as Lee Yan Phou, Sui Sin Far, and Onoto Watanna—Sui Sin Far’s sister, who wrote under a Japanese pseudonym—wrote about Chinese American and Japanese American experiences. The subsequent era of Japanese exclusion (1907–1945) brought about the modernist haiku poetry of Japanese American writers Yone Noguchi and Sadakichi Hartmann. Nevertheless, it wasn’t until the Popular Front era of the 1930s that various forms of panethnic and queer Asian American political consciousness emerged in the literature of Korean American writer Younghill Kang, Filipino American writers Carlos Bulosan (who mentions Kang in his novel, America Is In the Heart) and José García Villa, and Chinese American writer H. T. Tsiang. The politically progressive Popular Front of the 1930s, together with the influence of experimental literary forms of high modernism from just a decade before, set the stage for the Asian American panethnicity and queer consciousness that are described in the works of Kang and Bulosan, and Villa and Tsiang, respectively. Kang’s autobiographical novels The Grass Roof (1931) and East Goes West: The Making of an Oriental Yankee (1937) and Bulosan’s novel, America Is in the Heart (1943) exhibit important thematic influences by T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Likewise, Villa’s Have Come, Am Here (1942) and Tsiang’s novels The Hanging on Union Square (1935) and And China Has Hands (1937) demonstrate the influence of queer modernist Gertrude Stein. Just a few decades earlier, Yone Noguchi and Sadakichi Hartmann were both writing modernist haikus that responded to those of their friend Ezra Pound. However, without the language of political solidarity that the Popular Front provided, Noguchi’s and Hartmann’s politics, implicit in their poetry, remained overlooked by critics until the 1990s.

Reviewed by: Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures Monica Chiu Sheng-mei Ma. Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures. Albany: State U of New York P, 1998. 188 pp. Recent debates in Asian American studies include issues regarding denationalizing the field, addressed by Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, and monitoring the effects of globalization and an increased Asian American population, championed by Lisa Lowe. As such, immigrant and postcolonial subjectivities in Asian American and postcolonial studies would seem an applicable and important arena for scrutiny. However, Sheng-Mei Ma finds an inherent ideology in the field that fabricates immigrants as “others” and replicates stereotypes it purports to destroy; as well, Ma unveils entrenched western-centric views within postcolonial studies, those limiting Asian American and postcolonial scholars to an ironic European-postcolonial stance. His intriguing angles and their accompanying textual examples are a major contribution to radicalizing traditional views of immigrant subjectivities. The book’s first five chapters discuss how “Asian American discourse Orientalizes Asian immigrants and Occidentalizes white bodies.” Ma notes that those Southeast Asian immigrants who have been arriving on U.S. shores in great numbers since 1975 offer a rich field of information by which to glean biographies and other stories. However, he criticizes second- and third-generation story tellers—those who are often more linguistically apt to tell these immigrants’ tales—for creating characters who are “native informants” or who practice “ethnographic feminism.” The former, exemplified by Frank Chin and other editors of Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian-American Writers, foregrounds the “exoticism” they resent while simultaneously “empowering themselves in the midst of a white society through immigrant memories and the mythic Asian past.” Ma introduces “ethnographic feminism” through the often praised The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston. The protagonist’s mother, born in China before relocating to the U.S., becomes a “native informant” whose “fantastic” tales are effortlessly transcribed into a western feminist context. This feminism (which Ma regards as a gesture toward political correctness), combined with ethnography (read: orientalism), promotes, more than anything else, increased book sales. Ma names this orientalism among Chinese American authors a form of [End Page 542] “self-hatred,” wherein those who employ so-called effeminate Chinese male characters or who write in a so-called debased pidgin in order to defuse their negative cultural implications only reveal complicity in western orientalism. In other chapters of this section, Ma criticizes Asian American authors whose male characters eroticize white women’s bodies as a form of self-empowerment, and he explores two Taiwanese overseas student writers who produce schizophrenic immigrant characters, replicating and not dismantling the idea of the “unassimilable alien.” In his last three chapters, Ma investigates two types of Asian diaspora literature which illuminate immigrant subjectivities whose consciousness and focal point are Chinese- and not western-centric. Liu-hsueh-shen wen hsueh (“overseas student literature”) addresses topics such as characters’ exclusion from both Chinese and American cultural arenas and the impact, on Taiwan, of political movements and western theories (modernism or existentialism) in novels like Yu Li-hua’s Again the Palm Trees! and Chang Hsi-kuo’s Rage of Yesteryear. Ma finds that Hsiang-t’u we-hsueh (“home-soil or nativist literature” from Taiwan since the 1970s) critiques, first, the Chinese essence of the aforementioned overseas literature as well as westernization, particularly that generated by American Gls on leave who establish a “mushrooming sex trade” abroad. Ma inquires why postcolonial studies, with its emphasis on nonwestern, nonhegemonic practices, has relegated such literature that obviously encompasses postcolonial contexts to sinologists and Asian—not Asian American—departments. He answers by defining western postcolonial studies as “deeply Eurocentric”: it accentuates the European angle of British or French colonies, as does Edward Said for example; it ignores Asian-colonized territories; and it focuses on minority subjects in the so-called first world. He concludes that western academics’ “linguistic and cultural self-interests” unfortunately exclude overseas (mostly middle-class) Chinese writers, who provide rich material by which to study immigrant subjectivities. The most recent incarnation of overseas student literature, suggests Ma, is filmmaking. He concludes with provocative readings of Ang...

B ilingual Brokers examines bilingual personhood in Asian American and Latino literature through social debates on bilingualism. Instead of arguing for or against bilingualism this study focuses on the contingencies under which bilingualism is taken as good or bad to bring into high relief the function of language as capital in these debates. Behind the discourse of American identity, economic calculations and rationale played a significant role in challenging the long-held popular view of bilingualism as a liability. The emergence and recognition of Asian American and Latino literature take place against the backdrop of these debates on bilingualism as the place where social anxieties about American identity in the face of new immigration and globalization are worked out. Interweaving the social significance of language as human capital and the literary significance of English as the language of cultural capital, Bilingual Brokers traces a structure of feeling around the dual meaning of bilingualism as liability and asset in Asian American and Latino literature. In literary representations, bilingual personhood illustrates a regime of flexible inclusion where an economic calculus of value for racialized subjects crystallizes at the intersections of language and racial difference and is used in deliberations of social worthiness. By pointing to the nexus of race, capital, and language as the focal point of negotiations of difference and inclusion, Bilingual Brokers probes liberalism’s fault lines for racialized subjects.

Adventure and imagination are constant companions in creating landscapes and geographies in travel writing. Authors of travel texts cast the gaze from viewing platforms informed by Western discourse as they engage aesthetic dimensions of time and space to position the liminal in their narratives. In narratives of mobility the ‘arrival’ scene appears as a defining moment: one must cross a threshold and maintain a movement or passage involving temporal and spatial dimensions of liminality. In representing landscape, authors work with discourses of colonialism, post-colonialism, Orientalism and imperialism to formulate a discursive framework of what this paper positions as late twentieth century ‘western cosmopolitical perspective’. Liminality is positioned as a tool to formulate metaphors, authorize discourse and characterize landscape through articulations of the gaze. This paper examines the writings of three women authors who wrote about their travels to the Islamic Republic of Iran in a particular historical moment – between the Islamic Revolution and US President Bush's ‘Axis of Evil’ declaration in 2002. Tracts of texts are drawn from the ‘arrival’ scenes to explore the various ways these writers frame their narratives according to the ‘I’ who focuses the ‘eye’ through a lens orientated by their cosmopolitical imagination or worldview. The gaze, articulated through discourse, provides a powerful view that may not reflect reality, but reflects what Western readerships may want to see as ‘apparently’ real.

Largely ignored throughout the 1980s and 1990s, in the last few years Iranian American women writers have become suddenly visible to a growing American readership. To an increasing number of critics, meanwhile, the popularity of books by Iranian women in America, particularly memoirs, constitutes a pernicious outcome of contemporary military campaigns in the Middle East: a restaging of Orientalist and imperialist ideologies by a cadre of informers. (1) In a way, there is nothing at all new about the claim. As John Carlos Rowe wrote in a recent essay for American Quarterly, ethnographies of foreign peoples have long been recognized as integral to US cultural imperialism (253). It is, in other words, a well-known story in the history of American literature. What is interesting is that in this version of the story an all-out campaign has been launched against Iranian immigrant writers; moreover, leading the campaign are US-based Iranian academics who decry these writers' authority to speak about the experience of real Iranians. The present crisis over Iranian American literature surely expresses the fundamental quandary of how and where to situate any new immigrant literature. It also recalls debates about authenticity and authority in other US ethnic literatures, for example the debates that arose in the late 1970s and 1980s following the publication of Aiiieeeee! (1974), the first anthology of Asian American literature. And yet the question of where and how to situate Iranian immigrant writing in the post-9/11 period poses challenges that are quite new and different. In an essay on the state of scholarship about Arab American literature since 9/11, Steven Salaita writes of the fundamental inadequacies of a critical framework born of political crisis (147). I would argue that Iranian American literature suffers from a shakier and more critical framework than even Arab American literature. And I use the phrase embattled quite purposefully. Instead of textual analysis, we have accusations and insinuations, all served up in the very language of war. In an effort to bring a much-needed critical geography to bear on Iranian American literature, this essay considers one of the most recurrent forms to have emerged in the Iranian diaspora, memoirs that I will call narratives. I approach here three such memoirs--Gelareh Asayesh's Saffron Sky (1999), Tara Bahrampour's To See and See Again (1999), and Azadeh Moaveni's Lipstick Jihad (2005)--in terms of Cherrie Moraga's idea of patria (or homeland) as a distorting mirror for the returning immigrant. (2) The authors of these return narratives are frequently caught between two extremes: a native culture which has traditionally sanctioned neither women's freedom to travel nor women's autobiographical writing, and an adopted culture with an insatiable curiosity for both the intimate details of their lives and descriptions of forbidden and alien landscape? This essay considers how the traffic between Iran and America distorts the immigrant's ideas about gender, culture, and ethnicity, and how the act of recounting such traffic, in turn, distorts principal conventions of western travel literature. By examining three return narratives, I examine the development of the genre with an eye toward its relevance to the still-evolving field of Iranian American literature. At once acts of political witness and intimate self-revelation, return narratives demonstrate a persistent feature of Iranian immigrant literature: the dominance of Iran--its history as well as its contemporary culture and politics--in the exploration and articulation of Iranian American identity. This is a striking departure from many other US ethnic literatures, where issues of homeland and heritage have tended to give way to representations of the everyday lives of immigrants in America? In the case of the Iranian diaspora, the ongoing political crisis between the governments of Iran and America has created a literature whose gaze remains steadfastly fixed on Iran. …

This paper dispels the myth of liberal Enlightenment in relation to penal law reforms in colonial India by advancing two sets of argument. First, the liberal project of codification on the basis of universalist notion of utilitarianism never broke with cultural hierarchy inbuilt in the very act of colonisation. In this paper, I specifically look into the emerging phenomenon of evolutionary science in the nineteenth century – social Darwinism – to explain the dominant normative, as opposed to realist, justification of such racial hierarchy in colonial discourses since the nineteenth century. Second, using Dipesh Chakrabarty’s theoretical framework, I provincialise the penal law reform project in colonial India through the examination of literature in the field, and substantiate how the notion of utilitarian universality remained vague and unpromising in face of instrumental needs on ground – both in the colony and in the metropolis. Taken together, these propositions dispel the myth of the liberal project of penal law reforms in colonial India based on this universalist position and underscore the fallacies of the transition narrative of modernity itself.