| The field of Filipino American studies is infused with discussions of invisibility and forgetting. Because of the colonial and postcolonial relationships between the U.S. and the Philippines, the invisibility of the Philippines, Filipinos, and Filipino Americans within American culture has served to maintain theories of American exceptionalism that "forget" histories of U.S. imperialism. By directing attention to Filipino American novels such as Linda Ty-Casper's Ten Thousand Seeds and The Stranded Whale, Cecilia Manguerra Brainard's When the Rainbow Goddess Wept, Tess Uriza Holthe's When the Elephants Dance, Ninotchka Rosca's State of War, Jessica Hagedorn's Dream Jungle, and Noel Alumit's Talking to the Moon, this dissertation traces those invisibilities and embarks on a project of remembering. Yet this project also highlights certain visibilities of the Philippines and of Filipino America that occur within the dominant American historiographic narratives that themselves are assumed to make them invisible.;Specifically, this project examines the ways these Filipino American novelists have represented historical moments that saw the most visible maneuverings of U.S. power in the Philippines, moments that have been almost erased from American popular memory: the Philippine-American War, World War II's Battle for Manila and the later repression of the Hukbalahap Movement, and the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship. In addition, the project's last chapter analyzes a novel that reimagines another moment erased from popular memory---the white supremacist murder of postman Joseph Ileto---and that also fictionalizes other moments of transnational, nation-state, and familial negotiations in the experiences of members of a Filipino American family living, and dying, in the U.S.;My project asks how Filipino American authors insert new voices and new possibilities into discourses about U.S.-Philippine history. Its goal is not simply to create new interpretations of these authors' works, but to shift attention to their existence as discursive forces that are contributing to public narratives constructed about the particular historical events addressed in each novel. |
