The Historical Condition of Filipino America

Abstract

THE HISTORICAL CONDITION OF FILIPINO AMERICA Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and Condition by Dylan Rodriguez. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2010. Pp. 272, including 5 blackand-white photographs. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.Ever since United States purchased Philippine Islands from Spain at turn of twentieth century, status of Filipinos in relation to United States has dynamically reflected America's anxiety with race and empire. Oscar V. Campomanes points to this unease in his pivotal 1995 essay on representations of Filipinos in American discourse by arguing that Filipinos suffered from an inherent unrepresentability and unassimilability because of absence of discussions of American empire in American academic and cultural discourses.1 Similarly, Luis H. Francia observed enfolding complexity of in his exhibition essay for 1997 visual art exhibition, Memories of Overdevelopment:True children of electronic age, objects of America's Asiatic thrusts, we know all about America even before we come. Remembering future, we arrive here strangers in a familiar land, revisiting places we had never set foot on, renewing friendships that had never begun.2Both Campomanes and Francia describe logic of strangeness that structures Filipinos' epistemologica! framework as a recursive matrix that defines condition in relation to an imagined and deferred America. Suspended Apocalypse extends Campomanes's argument about epistemological condition of Filipinos to a broader on tological inquiry. Dylan Rodriguez's text addresses underlying alienation identified in Francia's observation through a theoretically engaged and critical genealogy of American discourse. Arguing that previous analyses of the neglect a broader theoretical approach, Rodriguez's central argument is that the production of 'Filipino American' is defined - essentially and fundamentally - by a complex, largely disavowed, and almost entirely undertheorized relation to a nexus of profound racial and white supremacist violence (11). Rodriguez's intent is to provide precisely this broader theoretical engagement.3 He shifts our attention away from characterization of condition as residing solely within a binary of Philippine and US historical experience to a broader concern for disparities of power that are transhistorical and global, from benevolent assimilation to white supremacist genocide. Interdisciplinary and wide-ranging, Rodriguez's polemical text deepens our understanding of ontological status of the Filipino and, more broadly, reproduction of epistemologies of dominant ideologies against and within those of oppressed.In each chapter, Rodriguez engages with insightful examples of condition to illustrate ways that Filipinos have confronted and addressed pervasive power of white supremacist genocide. Chapter 1 explains Rodriguez's key concern about ways that production of condition disenables engagement against very ideological discourses that create condition. Rodriguez juxtaposes Pilipino Cultural Night, popular cultural performance and event held annually by students on many campuses, with a student-led protest by Third World Liberation Front at University of CaliforniaBerkeley against Proposition 209, California's 1996 anti- affirmative action measure. For Rodriguez, American students' conscious practice of Americanism was a form of identity politics that illustrates normative condition. Rodriguez asserts that individual subjectivity and shared community that Pilipino Cultural Night offered is inherently aligned with state power and, consequently, Americanism negates possibility of engaging in critical political practices.Chapter 2 elaborates on Americans' conflicting affiliation with America. …