Quotidian Rhetorics: Estrangement, The Everyday, and Transitioning Filipinoness into An/Other Beginning

This project studies the fragments of the everyday lives of Filipino Americans, captured and interpreted via vernacular video. Read through three modes of estrangement (translation, nostalgia, and transition), Filipinoness is rendered as unheimlich or “homeless†to open multiple interpretations of this cultural identification. Filipino racial and cultural formation in the United States is often concealed by categories that tend to homogenize Asian American experience and disregard the specificity of the colonial relationship between America and the Philippines, flouting Filipino and Filipino Americans\u27 struggles against a simultaneous ambiguity, invisibility, and strangeness as hybrid persons of color. Through an interpretive reading of Filipino Americans\u27 everyday encounters with Filipinoness, a quotidian rhetorics emerges to provide a framework with which Filipino American videos are read as a way for creatively working through and improvising with multiple identities against persistent stereotypes and a frequent displacement in historical and cultural narratives. Referencing episodes in the colonial history of the Philippines and the United States, this study links the forgotten struggles of Filipinos/Filipino Americans with audio-visual representations of their estrangement from cultural artifacts, language, and images of Filipinoness. Emancipatory discourses are revealed in the strategic use of hybridity, and engagements with fragments of language and memory. As a movement that foregrounds their struggle for homeliness in the elasticity of multiple identities and historical discourses, estrangement as unheimlich provides Filipino American videographers (as well as Filipinos) with opportunities to (re)write narratives of emancipation that emerge from encounters with Filipinoness and Filipino American presence and struggle in everyday life

Crip Native Woman: The Hispanic American Philippines and the Postcolonial Disability Cultures of US Empire.

This dissertation examines how Filipino intellectual cultures, “ilustrados”, and postcolonial enlightenment discourses assert political sovereignty through self-fashioning as able-minded subjects. I argue that Spanish and US colonialisms fracture the masculinist project of Philippine sovereignty thus prompting tropological investment in the “crip native women” whose impairments are either discursively rehabilitated to fix the problem of uncertain male autonomy or is deemed “too queer to rehabilitate” by more proper subjects. My dissertation is a work of literary-cultural critique that postulates an archive of the “Hispanic American Philippines” holding in tandem the intersections of both Spanish and US colonialisms—an intersection that has been largely under-theorized in Filipino Studies and US Empire Studies. Redeeming a postcolonial disability position of “linguistic incapacity” whereby Filipinos are historically unable to access Filipino Spanish writing, I analyze works by José Rizal, Franz Fanon, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Teodoro Kalaw, José Reyes, and Miguel Syjuco, in order to demonstrate how indigeneity, disability, and postcolonialism are co-constituting cultural fields across the multiple imperialisms and multiple languages of the Philippines, Filipino America, and a transpacific re-articulation of the U.S. Mexican Borderlands--all sites subject to the same colonial projects of both the United States and Spain. “Crip Native Woman” posits the queer-of-color analytic “postcolonial cripistemology” to understand how cognitive and physical incapacities are tied to the queerness and racialized femininity of the native subject across a multilingual archive of comparative imperial encounter. In doing so, I suggest that the “Hispanic American Philippines” is productive ground for more sustained comparative work across the fields of American Studies, Asian American Studies, Latina/o Studies, Disability Studies, and postcolonial criticism.PhDAmerican CultureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133359/1/jcbolton_1.pd

Making Southeast Asian Migrant Workers Visible in Taiwanese Cinema: "Pinoy Sunday" and "Ye-Zai"

In Taiwan, the term for “migrant workers” (waiji yigong) refers to non-Han immigrant populations—including those from Thailand and the Philippines—whose numbers have been increasing since the 2000s. As these populations have grown, they have become part of the public conversation, and cinematic representations of migrant workers have increased as well. Immigrant films function as a form of recognition and thereby challenge the homogeneous Taiwanese national identity. Two questions arise: Is it possible to change existing stereotypes and cultural conflicts? And, how can we avoid a crisis of oversimplified presentations of immigrants? In order to address these questions, this article examines two films: Ho Wi Ding’s Pinoy Sunday (Taibei Xingqitian 台北星期天 2009), a comedy that focuses on two Filipino immigrant workers’ lives in Taipei, and Tseng Ying-ting’s Ye-Zai 椰仔 (2012), a crime film with a plot that involves tracking down “runaway migrant workers” (taopao wailao).The author employs three different lenses or paradigms to consider the establishment of migrant-worker subjects in these films in order to fully understand the power dynamics at play in the workers’ interactions with Taiwan’s broader society. Because of state and social attempts to control these migrant workers, the first important paradigm is the act of “running away,” which makes border restrictions in Taiwan clear and creates a space to explore strategies of escape from routine lives. Second, by considering how different powers intersect, the author explores the relationship between the viewer and the viewed, and how migrant workers can become the subjects, not just the objects, in this paradigm. By employing two techniques of visualization—the gaze and symbolism—these films present migrant workers’ emotions and desires, which are rarely shown in mainstream cinemas, and encourage viewers to recognize the perspectives of migrant workers. Finally, the author suggests the use of the language act as a means of resistance to show different affiliations and identities in both films; the visibility of these migrant workers challenges their discrimination. Keywords: Taiwan, Taiwanese film, waiji yigong, migrant workers, immigrant labor, Pinoy Sunday, Taibei Xingqitian, Ye-Zai, ethnoscapes, non-Han-Taiwanese identitie

Gazing Upon the Other: The Politics of Representing the Igorot in Philippine Modernism.

M.A. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2017