'Our new possessions': Race, empire, and postcoloniality in American literature and culture

A study of the literary and cultural representations of national memory, this interdisciplinary thesis describes the emergence, suppression, and stakes of U.S. postcolonial discourse. Unlike other Western colonial projects, U.S. imperialism divests itself of imperialism, producing a national culture of compulsive omission. American culture does not merely forget imperialism: It forgets that it forgets imperialism. Filipino/American postcoloniality emerges out of this insidious disarticulation of empire, and it inhabits the peripheries of both ethnic Americanist and postcolonial studies.;The first half of the dissertation theorizes and historicizes the disarticulation of imperialism in relation to race and the aftermath of the Civil War. If wars compete for U.S. national memory, the Civil War clearly wins, while wars of imperialism such as the Philippine-American war clearly lose. Symbolizing two competing legacies of "Yankee" imperialism in the Philippines and in the American South, the juxtaposition of William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters shows that the investigation of Filipino/American postcoloniality enables the identification and critique of white postcoloniality. An analysis of the 1996 Okinawa trial of U.S. Black soldiers for the rape of an Okinawan demonstrates that key mythologies from the postbellum era---like the Myth of the Black Rapist and its counterpart of violated white femininity---sometimes sustain the elision of the U.S. military presence in Asia.;The second half of the dissertation focuses on the Filipino/American literary and cultural response to imperial disarticulation. The theme of postcolonial loss and melancholia pervades the work of artist Manuel Ocampo, videomaker Angel Velasco Shaw, and playwright Ralph Pena. Their work features recurrent images of physical injury and humorous yet hurtful jokes, a pattern of violence that counters the numbing, amnesiac effects of imperial disarticulation. Paradoxically in these texts, that which hurts also heals. Using psychoanalysis and ethnic joke theory, the dissertation concludes that Filipino/American texts imagine and create a kind of cultural, communal memory that is based on the recognition of intra-group structures of oppression. This recognition allows the reader and spectator both to trouble and to invest in the still powerful ideas of the community and the nation.