UC Riverside

My dissertation project examines contemporary Filipino American novels to describe the aesthetics and inner-workings of everyday Filipino performances, or what I call “the Filipino style of being.” My selection of novels (which includes Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters, Gina Apostol’s Insurrecto, and R. Zamora Linmark’s Leche) shows how a specific postcolonial context gives rise to new literary forms that cannot be accounted for by the Western theory of the novel. Through Filipino vernacular languages and practices, I argue that the standard developmentalist and nationalist genealogy of narrative, which is novelistic, is out-of-place in the Philippine context. I also draw on different vernacular modes of performance or arte (puro arte, walang arte, tuliro, bangungot, tsismis, and talak) as counterpoints to understanding the Filipino American novel and to expand the critical vocabulary for Filipinx cultural and literary study. Drawing on bakla (queer) Filipino performativity, my formulation of arte also locates transnational queer of color subjectivities and cultural productions. For example, I use the queer Filipino speech act talak (fast talk) to describe the non-developmentalist/heteronormative/nationalist lifeways of queer Filipinx YouTube content creators like Brenda Mage (a play on “brain damage”). The “Filipino Style of Being” claims that the importation of both the novel and commodity/media culture gave Filipinos an opportunity for inventiveness and transformation—a room to play. In other words, I describe in my project the ideological function of narrative—its bourgeoise aesthetic promises of coherence, fluency, and mastery—to in turn highlight the aesthetic quality, the style, of the Filipino culture that is in excess of Western narrative and linguistic traditions.