Feeling in Counterpoint: A Playlist

Abstract

Feeling in Counterpoint:A Playlist Broderick D. V. Chow The essay that this piece accompanies, which appears in the September 2018 issue of Theatre Journal 70, had a long and difficult journey to publication. It began as an invitation in 2015 to present work-in-progress research at the London Theatre Seminar. The invitation coincided with a contemporaneous obsession I had with a particular mode of Philippine digital-cultural production: basically, Filipinos performing American pop music and doing it really, really well. I did not know how to theorize what I was seeing, but I loved watching these videos. Ever the Icarus, I jumped at the invitation to submit this work to Theatre Journal. That 2015 talk was a mess. I leaned heavily on a body of Philippine theatre scholarship that was (at the time) totally unfamiliar to me and I threw everything in a paper about three YouTube videos. I tried to write a "grand theory" of Filipino performativity. With hindsight, my scholarly overreach had something to do with my complex feelings about being a Chinese-Filipino-Canadian academic in the historically white space of the academy. As an Asian person, I felt a strong desire to avoid being marginalized by the disciplinary labels of "ethnic studies" or "area studies"; but I also felt a responsibility to tell our stories, which raised more difficult feelings of guilt, shame, and being an imposter. Who am I to tell our stories? We are not supposed to talk about feelings in our research. Donatella Galella, in her article "Feeling Yellow," writes that "[w]hen I first began grappling critically with my emotional responses to musicals, I hesitated to narrate my experiences because I had been conditioned to think that theorizing my feelings did not constitute legitimate scholarship."1 But Galella's feelings turn out to be the very archive upon which she is able to launch a critique of the racist practice of yellowface. Similarly, in composing my essay, it is the complex feelings around race, diaspora, and authenticity that accompany my writing about the Philippines that I turn into performance theory. In the essay, I theorize what I call "feeling in counterpoint." The concept draws on Edward Said's idea of "contrapuntal reading,"2 which comes from music theory—two melodic lines moving in different directions at the same time—and that posits the necessity to analyze texts from the points of view both of the colonizer and the colonized. Feeling in counterpoint is spectatorship that describes the multidirectionality of "feelings" (by which I mean both affect, which I interpret as bodily response, and emotion, which is socially recognized), history, coloniality, and migration. It is about identifying a colonial and racialized formation—for example, what it means to call something a "Filipino performance"—but also showing how that formation is moving and dynamic. [End Page E-7] I apply this spectatorial lens to several performances of what has, in previous scholarship, been called Filipino "mimicry"—performances where Filipinos are perceived to perform like Westerners.3 The content of these performances (American pop songs and musical theatre) did not suggest anything Filipino, and yet they felt, to me at least, deeply Filipino. The performance went beyond mimicry—a term that suggested a oneway direction of colonial influence. And these performances resonated with me, as a diasporic Filipino person, in a way that I could not put my finger on. I could analyze them in materialist terms, in political terms, their place in a digital economy, and their relation to the Philippines' neocolonial relation to the United States. What I could not rationalize was how they made me feel. Thus feeling in counterpoint became a way to hold in mind both the historical, political, and material contexts and the feelings that the performance provoked; it was a way to listen for the lived experiences that often resist incorporation into a larger historical interpretation or narrative. Or, perhaps feeling in counterpoint was also a way of coming to terms with my own "bad objects"—those cultural objects we are attracted to but feel conflicted about.4 After all, these performances are meant to be evidence of a "colonial mentality"—the internalized oppression that Filipinos...