Reveals the impact of sociology on ethnic literature and the politics of race During World War II, the rising visibility of anticolonial and antiracist movements exposed contradictions
between the U.S. democratic mission in Europe and racist practices against people of color at home.
Yet the professional success stories of people of color gave ideological support to the notion that liberal antiracism was spreading within the United States.
Challenging conventional accounts of U.S. ethnic literature rooted in 1960s and 1970s social movements, Cynthia H. Tolentino sees this literary work as emerging from a political climate in which arguments about the integration of racial minorities and the moral legitimacy of U.S. international leadership are intertwined. Probing how sociologists including Robert E. Park, Gunnar Myrdal, and Emory Bogardus situated Asian Americans, Filipinos, and African Americans as model citizens and problems, Tolentino contends that such studies served as a staging ground for writers of color to become narrators of racial identity, citizenship, and U.S. neocolonialism.
Tracing the literary engagements of Richard Wright, Carlos Bulosan, and Jade Snow Wong with the sociology of
race, Tolentino assesses
their works as critical expressions of class negotiation on the global stage and illuminates the significance of U.S. ethnic literature. Cynthia H. Tolentino is assistant professor of English at the University of Oregon. 200 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 | 2009 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: Between Subjects and Objects 1. Sociological Interests, Racial Reform: Richard Wright’s Intellectual of Color 2. Americanization as Black Professionalization: Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma 3. Training for the American Century: Professional Filipinos in Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart 4. Not Black, Not Coolies: Pathologization, Asian American Citizenship, and Jade Snow Wong’s Fifth Chinese Daughter Coda: The Tutelary Byways
of Global
Uplift Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
The Decolonized Eye Filipino American Art and Performance
Sarita Echavez See
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$25.00 paper
ISBN: 978-0-8166-5319-5
$75.00 cloth
ISBN: 978-0-8166-5318-8
| Filipino American artists map and contest the United States’ amnesia about its colonization of the Philippines From the late 1980s to the present, artists of Filipino descent in the United States have produced a challenging and creative movement. In The Decolonized Eye, Sarita Echavez See shows how these artists have engaged with the complex aftermath of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines.
Focusing on artists working in New York and California, See examines the
overlapping artistic and aesthetic practices and concerns of filmmaker Angel Shaw, painter Manuel Ocampo, installation artist Paul Pfeiffer, comedian Rex Navarrete, performance artist Nicky Paraiso, and sculptor Reanne Estrada to explain the reasons for their strangely shadowy presence in American culture and scholarship. Offering an interpretation of their creations that accounts for their queer, decolonizing strategies of camp, mimesis, and humor, See reveals the conditions of possibility that constitute this contemporary archive.
By analyzing art, performance, and visual culture, The Decolonized Eye illuminates the unexpected consequences of America’s amnesia over its imperial history.
Sarita Echavez See is associate professor of Asian/Pacific Islander American studies at the University of Michigan. 232 pages | 25 b&w illustrations, 13 color plates | 5 1/2 x
8 1/2 |
2009 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction: Foreign in a Domestic Sense Part I. Staging the Sublime
1. An Open Wound: Angel Shaw and Manuel Ocampo
2. A Queer Horizon: Paul Pfeiffer’s Disintegrating Figure Studies Part II. Pilipinos Are Punny, Freud Is Filipino
3. Why Filipinos Make Pun(s) of One Another: The Sikolohiya/Psychology of Rex Navarrete’s Stand-up Comedy
4. “He will not always say what you would have him say”: Loss and Aural (Be)Longing in Nicky Paraiso’s House/Boy Conclusion: Reanne Estrada, Identity, and the Politics of Abstraction Notes
Bibliography
Index
Suspended
Apocalypse White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition
Dylan Rodríguez
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$25.00 paper
ISBN: 978-0-8166-5350-8
$75.00 cloth
ISBN: 978-0-8166-5349-2
| Examines the
Filipino American as a product of conquest, white supremacy, and racial empire
Suspended Apocalypse is a rich and provocative meditation on the emergence of the Filipino American as a subject of history. Culling from historical, popular, and ethnographic archives, Dylan Rodríguez provides a sophisticated analysis of the Filipino presence in the American imaginary. Radically critiquing current conceptions of Filipino American identity, community, and history, he puts forth a genealogy of Filipino genocide, rooted in the early twentieth-century military, political, and cultural subjugation of the Philippines by the United States. Suspended Apocalypse critically addresses what Rodríguez calls “Filipino American communion,” interrogating redemptive and romantic notions of Filipino migration and settlement in the United States in relation to larger
histories of race, colonial conquest, and white supremacy. Contemporary popular and scholarly discussions of the Filipino American are, he asserts, inseparable from their origins in the violent racist regimes of the United States and its historical successor, liberal multiculturalism.
Rodríguez deftly contrasts the colonization of the Philippines with present-day disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and Mount Pinatubo to show how the global subjection of Philippine, black, and indigenous peoples create a linked history of genocide. But in these juxtapositions, Rodríguez finds moments and spaces of radical opportunity. Engaging the violence and disruption of the Filipino condition sets the stage, he argues, for the possibility of a transformation of the political lens through which contemporary empire might be analyzed, understood, and perhaps even overcome.
Dylan Rodríguez is associate
professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime(Minnesota, 2006). 256 pages | 5 b&w illustrations | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 | December 2009
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American Tropics Articulating Filipino America Allan Punzalan Isaac
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$22.50 Paper
ISBN: 0-8166-4274-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4274-8
$60.00 Cloth
ISBN: 0-8166-4273-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4273-1
| Winner of the Association for Asian American Studies' 2006 Book Award in the Cultural Studies
How America’s image of the Philippines reflects the U.S. inability to see its own imperialism.
In 1997, when the New York
Times described Filipino American serial killer Andrew Cunanan as appearing “to be everywhere and nowhere,” Allan Punzalan Isaac recognized confusion about the Filipino presence in the United States, symptomatic of American imperialism’s invisibility to itself. In American Tropics, Isaac explores American fantasies about the Philippines and other “unincorporated” parts of the U.S. nation that obscure the contradictions of a democratic country possessing colonies.
Isaac boldly examines the American empire’s images of the Philippines in turn-of-the-century legal debates over Puerto Rico, Progressive-era popular literature set in Latin American borderlands, and midcentury Hollywood cinema staged in Hawai‘i and the Pacific islands. Isaac scrutinizes media coverage of the Cunanan case, Boy Scout adventure novels, and Hollywood films such as The Real Glory (1939) and Blue
Hawaii (1961) to argue that territorial sites of occupation are an important part of American identity. American Tropics further reveals the imperial imagination’s role in shaping national meaning in novels such as Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart (1946) and Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters (1990), Filipino American novels forced to articulate the empire’s enfolded but disavowed borders.
Tracing the American empire from the beginning of the twentieth century to Philippine liberation and the U.S. civil rights movement, American Tropics lays bare Filipino Americans’ unique form of belonging marked indelibly by imperialism and at odds with U.S. racial politics and culture.
“Isaac is bold in his examination of America’s images of the Philippines and Filipinos as depicted in law, media coverage, literature, and Hollywood
cinema.” —Colonial Latin American Historical Review
“Isaac commands the reader’s attention through his thoughtful, consistent, and serious critique of hypocrisies and aporiae within empire, as well as by his smart and engaging narrative. American Tropics is a noteworthy and important text, one that will compel scholars to redraw the cartographies of Filipino/American imaginaries.” —Journal of American Ethnic History
Allan Punzalan Isaac is assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University. 256 pages | 5 7⁄8 x 9 | 2006
Critical American Studies Series
TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. American
Tropics Part I. An Imperial Grammar
2.
Disappearing Clauses: Reconstituting America in the Unincorporated Territories
3. Moral Sentences: Boy Scouts and Novel Encounters with Empire
4. Imperial Romance: Framing Manifest Destiny in the Pacific Part II. Toward an American Postcolonial Syntax
5. Reconstituting American Subjects: Proximate Masculinities
6. Reconstituting American Predicates: Troping the American Tour d’Horison Coda
Notes
Index
Model-Minority Imperialism Victor Bascara
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$22.50 Paper
ISBN: 0-8166-4512-4
ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4512-1
$58.50 Cloth
ISBN: 0-8166-4511-6
ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-4511-4
| Understanding the legacy of U.S. imperialism through Asian American culture. At the beginning of the twentieth century, soon after the conclusion of the Spanish-American War, the United States was an imperialistic nation, maintaining (often with the assistance of military force) a far-flung and growing empire.
After a long period of collective national amnesia regarding American colonialism, in the Philippines and elsewhere, scholars have resurrected the power of “empire” as a way of revealing American history and culture.
Focusing on the terms of Asian American assimilation and the rise of the model-minority myth, Victor Bascara examines the resurgence of empire as a tool for acknowledging—and understanding—the legacy of American imperialism. Model-Minority Imperialism links geopolitical dramas of twentieth-century empire building with domestic controversies of U.S. racial order by examining the cultural politics of Asian Americans as they are revealed in fiction, film, and theatrical productions. Tracing U.S. economic and political hegemony back to the beginning of the twentieth century through works by Jessica Hagedorn, R. Zamora Linmark, and Sui Sin Far; discourses of race, economics, and empire found in
the speeches of William McKinley and William Jennings Bryan; as well as L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and other texts, Bascara’s innovative readings uncover the repressed story of U.S. imperialism and unearth the demand that the present empire reckon with its past.
Bascara deploys the analytical approaches of both postcolonial studies and Asian American studies, two fields that developed in parallel but have only begun to converge, to reveal how the vocabulary of empire reasserted itself through some of the very people who inspired the U.S imperialist mission. “Model-Minority Imperialism is a complex, stimulating, and rich text with a multitude of intriguing cases for scholars of Asian American studies, ethnic studies, and American and global studies more generally.” —MELUS
Victor Bascara is assistant professor of English
and Asian American studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. 232 pages | 5 7⁄8 x 9 | 2006 TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface
Introduction: We Are Here Because You Were There 1. Unburdening Empire: The Cultural Politics of Asian American Difference
2. An Ever-Emergent Empire: The Discourse of American Exceptionalism
3. “The American Earth Was Like a Huge Heart”: Old Dreams and the New Imperialism
4. Uplifting Race, Reconstructing Empire
5. “Everybody Wants To Be Farrah”: Absurd Histories and Historical Absurdities Epilogue: Pay Any Price, Bear Any Burden Notes |
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| Migrants for
Export
How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World
Robyn Magalit Rodriguez | 
| $22.50 paper
ISBN 978-0-8166-6528-0
$67.50 cloth
ISBN 978-0-8166-6527-3
| How the Philippines transformed itself into the world’s leading labor brokerage state
Migrant workers from the Philippines are ubiquitous to global capitalism, with nearly 10 percent of the population employed in almost two hundred countries. In a visit to the
United States in 2003, Philippine president Gloria Macapagal Arroyo even referred to herself as not only the head of state but also “the
CEO of a global Philippine enterprise of eight million Filipinos who live and work abroad.” Robyn Magalit Rodriguez investigates how and why the Philippine government transformed itself into what she calls a labor brokerage state, which actively prepares, mobilizes, and regulates its citizens for migrant work abroad. Filipino men and women fill a range of jobs around the globe, including domestic work, construction, and engineering, and they have even worked in the Middle East to support U.S. military operations. At the same time, the state redefines nationalism to normalize its citizens to migration while fostering their ties to the Philippines. Those who leave the country to work and send their wages to their families at home are treated as new national heroes.
Drawing on ethnographic research of the Philippine government’s migration bureaucracy, interviews, and archival work, Rodriguez presents a new analysis of neoliberal
globalization and its consequences for nation-state formation.
Robyn Magalit Rodriguez is assistant professor of sociology at Rutgers University.
208 pages | 24 b&w photos | 2 tables | March 2010
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