Filipino American Studies AAS 151K/SocSci 178KFall 2017 Prof. Christine Bacareza Balance em: cbalance@uci.edu

Mobilizing working-class transgender hairdressers and beauty queens, the dynamic leaders of the world?s only LGBT political party wage a historic quest to elect a trans woman to the Philippine Congress ? Culminating on election day, OUT RUN provides a unique look into the challenges LGBT people face as they transition into the mainstream and fight for dignity, legitimacy, and acceptance across the globe.

Oct ober 17t h (6-8pm )

Fi lm Screening of Out Run , followed by post-screening Q&A with director S. Leo Chiang

Hum anit ies Gat eway 1010?

For more information, contact

Prof. Christine Balance (cbalance@uci.edu) ?Please RSVP to Jasmine Robledo (robledj1@uci.edu) by Friday, October 13th.

For today’s class:

I. Politics of Knowledge

II. Cultural Citizenship/Belonging

III. Politics of Memory

AMERICA AMERICAN

I. First 3-5 wordsII. Briefly defineIII. How do you know its meaning?

FILIPINO/A/X PHILIPPINES

I. First 3-5 wordsII. Briefly defineIII. How do you know its meaning?

NationalGeographical(Naturalized)

Borders

“FILIPINO”

the sons and daughters of

Spanish parents born in las Islas

Filipinas

“FILIPINO”still higher ranking than

Sangley (Chinese)

“FILIPINO”forefathers of the Philippine nation, who fought and advocated for independence from Spain

NATIONALISM “[In an era marked by diaspora] nationalism has provided a language for organizing and mobilizing overseas and immigrant

communities in response to racial and sexual discrimination and

often in alliance with similarly marginalized groups, both in the host country and the Philippines.” (Rafael, 13)

AND YET “[nationalism] has also functioned to reify identities,

freeze the past, and encourage the commodification of ethnicity that situates Filipinos abroad in a touristic—that is to say,

neocolonial—relationship with the Filipinos at home” (Rafael, 14)

“Imaginary topographies that construct the United States and the Philippines as physically contiguous are part of many Filipino immigrant narratives. Roberto, one of my informants, told me that while he was growing up he had always thought that America was just an hour bus ride away, hidden by the mountains of his home province. As a child, he had watched gray buses containing dozens of young American men with crew cuts running down the main highway near his home on their way to some spot in the mountains. It was only when he was 11 and he took a trip to Olongapo City that he learned that the America he thought was in the mountains was in fact a military facility and that America was indeed very far away.” (Manalansan, 12)

What are other places (or events) that you have

been to where you could say that the Philippines

and America felt “physically contiguous”?

Describe elements, characteristics of that place

that made it feel that way.

What does this re-imagining of “Filipino America” allow us to do?

A. Re-imagine or re-think the notions of

immigration and diaspora

B. Draw our attention to the lives and realities of Filipino migrants and labor

C. Re-think the double meaning of “belonging”

“Cultural citizenship [therefore] is constituted by unofficial or vernacular scripts that promote seemingly disparate views of membership within a political and cultural body or community.

Citizenship requires more than the assumption of rights and duties; more importantly, it also requires the performance and

contestation of the behavior, ideas, and images of the proper citizen….Cultural citizenship [then] is not about monolithic constructions of identity and belonging, but rather about

competing cultural traditions and ideologies of self and personhood.” (Manalansan, 14)

Politics of Memory: Historical Forms!

EPIC!

EPISODIC!

!

“Few countries give the observer a deep feeling of historical vertigo than the Philippines. Seen from Asia, the armed uprising against Spanish rule of 1896, which triumphed temporarily with the establishment of an independent republic in 1898, makes it the visionary forerunner of all other anti-colonial movements in the region. Seen from Latin America, it is, with Cuba, the last of the Spanish imperial possessions to have thrown off the yoke, seventy-five years after the rest. Profoundly marked, after three and a half centuries of Spanish rule, by counter-Reformation Catholicism, it was the only colony in the Empire where the Spanish language never became widely understood. But it was also the only colony in Asia to have had a university in the 19th century….Today, thanks to American imperialism, and the Philippines’ new self-identification as ‘Asian,’ almost no one other than a few scholars understands the language in which the revolutionary heroes communicated among themselves and with the outside world—to say nothing of the written archive of pre-twentieth century Philippine history. A virtual lobotomy has been performed.” – (Benedict Anderson, “The First Filipino”)