| A discourse on Filipino American literature requires an understanding of the colonial relationship established by the United States with the seizure of the Philippine Islands in 1898. This trajectory of imperialism incorporated racist practices that circumscribed the lives of Filipinos under colonial rule which ended formally in 1946, but continues today in a neocolonial association with the U.S. The larger landscape of Asian exclusionary experiences is also discussed, and helps to situate Filipinos on this landscape. Filipinos, for example, are distinguished from other Asian groups because, as colonial subjects, they had been led to believe they were quasi-Americans through their colonial educational system that made them feel part of this colonial family until the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934.; This act turned Filipinos from wards of the colonial state to aliens which Filipinos understood as a betrayal by their colonial masters. The chapter titles, which follow, elaborate on the impact of U.S. imperialism/colonialism in Filipino American literature. Chapter One: Philippine/U.S. Imperial Dance; Chapter Two: Little Brown Brother, Savages, and Aliens---Racial Identities for the Colonized Filipino; Chapter Three: American Movies: Cultural Imperialism; and Chapter Four: Agrarian Revolt in the Fields of Central Luzon and California. The Filipino American artists, hence, speak to this colonial relationship in their fiction, and in their poetry beginning with N.V.M. Gonzalez, Marianne Villanueva, and Fatima Lim Wilson in the first chapter. The second chapter features M. Evelina Galang and Brian Ascalon Roley. The third chapter covers the work Jessica Hagedorn and Nick Carbo and in the fourth chapter, the personal histories of Philip Vera Cruz and Carlos Bulosan round out the literary pieces with non-fiction. With each chapter theoretical and historical contexts enhance the reading of the literature, and key scholars include Joel Kovel, E. San Juan, Michael Parenti, Stuart Creighton Miller, Carey McWilliams, Gabriel Kolko, Renato Constantino, Joel David, James S. Moy, Robert G. Lee, Leny Mendoza Strobel, Antonio Gramsci, and Karl Marx. |
