Re-encodation of GUMIL Hawaii Writers’ Association as a Diacritic Site for Ilocano Hawaiian Representation

Abstract

The Filipino immigrants in Hawaii, particularly the Ilocanos, an ethnolinguistic group coming from the Northern part of the Philippines write not only narratives about their diasporic lives but work towards redefinition of themselves through GUMIL Hawaii writing. The study particularly recuperates and re-encodes GUMIL Hawaii (a collective writers’ association), as a diacritic site and discourse in the reterritorialization and contestation of space in multiethnic Hawaii and US as a monologic culture. Thus, the very contour that Ilocano-Hawaiian diasporic writing takes, through GUMIL Hawaii writers’ association is reactive and largely determined by their history as US’s colonial and neocolonial subjects, their history as sugar plantation labor, the pressures and specificities of Hawaii as a host culture and more broadly, America’s ideological imperatives and dehistoricizing logic.