Asian American Miscegenation And Susan Koshy's Sexual Naturalization

I just had to say this: Susan Koshy rocks. And while she isn't Filipino American, she is a real Filipino Americanist scholar, one of the few scholars of Asian American studies who actually reads and uses the good shit that has come out of Filipino American studies from the last thirty years. Her book, Sexual Naturalization (Stanford UP, 2004), isn't all about Filipino Americans but it does take Filipino American history seriously.

Her work reconsiders the tired old discourse on miscegenation in Asian American historiography and cultural studies, discourse that has focused heavily on Chinese, Japanese, and even Korean relations with whites, blacks, etc. Instead, she rigorously historicizes the emergence of Asian-white "miscegenation" as both legal and literary/filmic trope and also considers the interracial relationships of Filipino and Asian Indian migrants, two Asian American groups that have been underrepresented in Asian American studies in general. Her argument is that these different focal points--texts produced by whites and Asian Americans--give us a wider view of both the effects and genealogies of representations of Asian men and women's sexuality in the United States. The practice, legal prohibition, and discursive representation of miscegenation in two places--within the national borders of the United States, and extraterritorially--also give us insight into the (hetero)sexual constitution of the nation.

She's an English professor (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), so her chapters are in essence historicist literary criticism, but, she argues, it is important to look at "the role of literary and filmic texts in educating desire and directing it toward its appropriate subjects" (17). She claims that analyzing the cultural imaginary produced by these particular texts illuminates their deep significance in the sociological, interracial formations of American society:

A striking feature of [early] stories of white-Asian miscegenation is their remarkable popularity at a time when the extent of white-Asian sexual contacts was rather limited and restricted to specific locations. The lack of correspondence between fiction and sociological reality has drawn comment from scholars, but its significance has not been probed further. However, I argue that this very discrepancy between fiction and sociology is the key to unlocking the cultural power of these scripts. These narratives are important precisely because they invented and therfore preceded the racialized sexual cultures that in subsequent decades attained greater sociological solidity. Myths of white-Asian desire were productive of, rather than reflective of, the sociological reality of white-Asian miscegenation, helping shift the meanings of Asian American masculinity and femininity over the decades.

...

Thus far, narratives of white-Asian miscegenation have received little scholarly scrunity because of their axiomatic status as productions of white fantasy. Critics have pointed to their Orientalist tropes and stereotypical representations of Asians in explaining their popularity with a white mainstream public. However, this study uses the popularity and fascination exerted by narratives of miscegenation to argue for their importance, not their irrelevance. It places the cultural work of these texts at the center of analytic attention and demonstrates the instability of their identifications, which have been viewed reductively as either fixed or simply false. This book foregrounds the complexity of the negotiations performed by texts within this tradition. (18-19)

She first looks at the American cultural imaginary on "Oriental" sexuality in works like "Madame Butterfly" (the original short story by John Long published in 1898) and the film Broken Blossoms (1919) directed by D.W. Griffith (of Birth of a Nation infamy). Her third and fourth chapters then look at Bulosan's America Is in the Heart (1946) and Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine (1989). The structure of her book thus corresponds to the historical evolution of white-Asian narratives of miscegenation: "Early in the [20th] century, whites used [this narrative] to reinforce or interrogate dominant perceptions of the assimilability of Asians, and later it was appropriated by Asian Americans to naturalize their claim to America even as they sought to redefine, subvert, or expand the meanings of Americanness in the name of socialist, international, or multicultural projects" (20).

It's a real pleasure to read something as astute and well-written as Koshy's work. She doesn't use a lot of confusing jargon, and she maps her arguments for the reader so you know exactly where you're heading. You can tell she's really writing for her reader's comprehension, and that's really welcome in a literary and cultural studies text. Plus, hey, it's about sex and sexuality, so already I'm interested. ;)

More on the Carlos Bulosan chapter in a follow-up post.... (Who knew Bulosan would have such a critical revival in the early 2000s?)

Revisions Of Carlos Bulosan

I think it's interesting that two different essays on Carlos Bulosan doing rather similar things have come out around the same time. Both Augusto Fauni Espiritu and Martin Joseph Ponce seem to be trying to revive the critical tradition on Carlos Bulosan by delving deeper into Bulosan's oeuvre and life. While Ponce argues that equal time must be given to Bulosan's minor works in order to gain a fuller understanding of America Is in the Heart, Espiritu's biographical study of Bulosan suggests that the author's life sheds new light on his oeuvre, and vice versa.

Augusto Espiritu's essay is the second chapter of a quite wonderful book, Five Faces of Exile: The Nation and Filipino American Intellectuals (Stanford UP, 2005), putting Bulosan in the company of other intellectuals and writers from the early period of American colonialism like Carlos P. Romulo, Philippine diplomat extraordinaire; José García Villa, American modernist poet and Philippine poet laureate; and N.V.M. Gonzalez and Bienvenido Santos, fiction writers who were both literature professors in the West Coast and the Midwest, respectively. Extremely well-researched, well-written, and convincing, the book makes a claim for a more expanded meaning/definition of "Filipino American" and who ought to be included in this category. With the exception of Bulosan, these intellectuals and their works have often been considered more Filipino or Philippine than Filipino American. Espiritu's work on Bulosan is thus part of a larger project that revisions Filipino American studies itself in very specific ways--i.e., that Filipino American studies should be transnational in scope, should consider bi- and even multi-nationality, and should start with American colonialism. But the author's specific interventions in the critical tradition on Bulosan consist of his explanation of Bulosan's love-hate relationship with the Filipino elite in the United States and, more interesting for me, his reading of Bulosan and his works through the lens of the Christian narrative of the passion or pasyon, following the arguments in Reynaldo C. Ileto's excellent book, Pasyon and Revolution (1979). In other words, rather than just read Bulosan through his undeniable Marxist affiliations and politics, Espiritu argues that there were other things going on in Bulosan's artistic and political practices. In the first instance, Bulosan wanted to enter into the inner circle of elite Filipino exiles in the United States but was barred because of his lower-class upbringing. This elite group only grudgingly accepted him as a fellow intellectual when Bulosan's works, especially America Is in the Heart (1946), gained national attention from Americans. But this grudging acceptance was quickly and easily withdrawn when Bulosan lost a case of plagiarism in which he was the defendant (53-60).

In the second instance, Bulosan's reliance on Philippine oral and artistic traditions and forms, which is difficult to explain through a Marxist reading, indicates that something else was going on, to wit, Bulosan's advocacy for the lower classes in the Philippines and in the United States can also be seen in the light of the revolutionary Philippine folk/peasant practices that draw from the narrative of the pasyon: "The themes of the pasyon [...] permeate Bulosan's America Is in the Heart, a book whose connections to Philippine tradition are deeper than the modernistic readings of critics have yet to allow" (67). Moreover, this different critical framework offers a useful reading of sentiment in the book:

The sadness of the book is not maudlin sentimentalism [...] but the narrator's attempt to empathize with the plight of his brothers and sisters, to evoke feelings of damay (empathy) or awa (pity) for the suffering, Christlike figure in readers, inviting a similar work of suffering. In this context, the final passages of the book assume a different meaning than critics have ascribed to it. The emphasis on sacrifice, toil, and suffering symbolized by "America" seems far from the popular conception of a land of opportunity waiting for every profit-seeking immigrant or Horatio Alger. Rather, Bulosan's American hearkens to an idiom of protest in which compassion and empathy for the sufferings of others are paramount values, alongside an alacrity for self-sacrifice that is motivated by the attempt to give back to "others" (e.g., Christ, [Philippine national hero José] Rizal) for their sacrifices.

Meanwhile, Martin Ponce's chief argument is that Bulosan's published letters suggest that Bulosan be understood as a transnational figure. In this essay, titled "On Becoming Socially Articulate: Transnational Bulosan" (Journal of Asian American Studies, February 2005), Ponce argues that Bulosan was "socially articulate" in more ways than one: 1) he speaks about social ideas, 2) he speaks to the Filipino masses, and 3) he is a joint, an articulation, between the Philippines and the United States (the transnational argument). The author points to an overemphasis on "America" in critical readings of America Is in the Heart. Rather, there is a "doubleness" to Bulosan's address in that book: "'Letter to a Filipino Woman' makes explicit what I will argue is implicit in America Is in the Heart: that Bulosan addressed his narrative not only to the U.S. as an indictment of racial and class brutality, but also to the Philippines as an indictment of what he considered the under-politicized literature being produced in his homeland" (52). In America Is in the Heart, Ponce claims, Bulosan attempts to create "a transnational narrative that not only interprets Filipino peasant life from a 'materialist, dialectical point of view,' but also links that condition to Filipino working-class life in the United States" (64). Like Espiritu, Ponce notes that Bulosan was drawing from the pasyon, along the lines of Ileto's theory. (Indeed, Ponce cites Espiritu's 2000 dissertation, on which Five Faces is based.) But instead of focusing on the revolutionary proletarian elements of Christ-like suffering, Ponce highlights the theme of renewal after death that marks Bulosan's "narrative violence," in which he kills off all of the socially articulate characters in order to enhance the voice of the narrator, who then inherits the revolutionary spirit of those dead characters (64-8).

In the final sections, Ponce also makes a claim for Bulosan's formal innovation in juxtaposing the pastoral with social analyses in his narrative. Counter to Sau-ling Wong's critique of the narrative's "undisciplined movement" in her ground-breaking Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance, Ponce contends that Bulosan's work should not be read as a badly drawn bildungsroman; rather, the second part of America Is in the Heart, when the narrator is in the United States, dramatizes the betrayed expectations of the Filipino characters in the book: "the text's restlessness--no reconciliation of the narrator with social institutions as the end of the bildungsroman, no assimilation as the end of immigration, no return as the end of exile, no apocalypse or utopia as the end of revolution--arises from the absence of any U.S. counterpart to the lyrical world of Bulosan's imagined childhood [as described in the first part of the book]" (72).

So we have a literary critical essay and a historiography on Bulosan, one published in the academic journal of the Association for Asian American Studies and the other published by a major academic press, both in 2005 and written by specifically Filipino Americanist scholars. Espiritu and Ponce seem to believe that it is time for a reconsideration and even defense of the book widely considered to be Carlos Bulosan's best and most major work. This is certainly in part a reaction to the exhaustion or dismissal that Filipino American and other writers and scholars have expressed towards the now canonized America Is in the Heart. In Jessica Hagedorn's novel, The Gangster of Love (1996), the character Rocky Rivera heatedly declares, "Bulosan's a bore.... A noble martyr. An overrated sentimental writer. A mediocre poet" (qtd. in Ponce 53). And I must admit, after having been assigned the book three times when I was an undergraduate, I became heartily sick of it, despite the fact that one of my professors wrote a fabulous essay on it for her book. At this point in my studies in Filipino American history and literature, however, I realize that I really appreciate these new revisions of Bulosan. I appreciate the new historical context provided by these two essays (especially Espiritu's), and I find them both well-wrought and thought-provoking.

More Acquisitions

Exchanged the collected Hawthorne today for Allen Ginsberg, Frank Norris, and Twain. Feel much better.

An Accounting

I knew that acquiring the books I need for orals studying would add significantly to the drudgery of studying itself.

During this sniffly, sneezy long-weekend, when I couldn't get myself to do any productive work, I decided to start taking account of all my books because I found out that I spent $15 on a used volume of Hawthorne's collected novels when I already had the three Hawthorne novels that I needed hiding in a bookshelf (I hadn't read them yet as I only recently filched them from my older sister's neglected library--but not so recently that I remembered they were now in my home). That's $15 I can put towards acquiring other needed books. So far, it's been a slow process inputting all the book information in ProCite (which is why I never got around to doing it before), but at least now I know which books I still need and which I can stop worrying about. I've convinced myself that this is a productive thing.

Some Book Purchases

Spent a lovely afternoon with Arcadia chatting at a café and then buying used books at Moe's in downtown Berkeley for my orals reading. After we parted, I actually went to Pegasus (it was right next to my bus stop) and bought more used books. What's in the shopping bags? For the 19th-century list: Hawthorne, James, and Melville. For the 20th-century list: Barnes, Baldwin, Cather, Faulkner, and Toomer. It remains to be seen when I'll get to them, but at least I now have access.