Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading

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Beyond the Nation
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se xual culture s
General Editors: Jos Esteban Muoz and Ann Pellegrini
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
Samuel R. Delany
Private Affairs: Critical Ventures in the Culture of Social Relations
Phillip Brian Harper
In Your Face: 9 Sexual Studies
Mandy Merck
Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America
Jos Quiroga
Murdering Masculinities:
Fantasies of Gender and Violence in the American Crime Novel
Greg Forter
Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest
Edited by Lauren Berlant and Lisa Duggan
Black Gay Man: Essays
Robert Reid Pharr Foreword by Samuel R. Delany
Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion
Edited by Mara Carla Snchez and Linda Schlossberg
The Explanation for Everything: Essays on Sexual Subjectivity
Paul Morrison
The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Gay Theater
Edited by Alisa Solomon and Framji Minwalla
Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism
Edited by Arnaldo Cruz Malav and Martin F. Manalansan IV
Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces
Juana Mara Rodrguez
Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance
Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini
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Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture

Frances Ngron-Muntaner
Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era
Marlon Ross
In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives
Judith Halberstam
Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch:
Essays on Race and Sexuality in the U.S.
Dwight A. McBride
God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence
Michael Cobb
Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual
Robert Reid-Pharr
The Latino Body:
Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory
Lzaro Lima
Arranging Grief:
Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America
Dana Luciano
Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity
Jos Esteban Muoz
Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism
Scott Herring
Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the
African American Literary Imagination
Darieck Scott
Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries
Karen Tongson
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Beyond the Nation

Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading
Martin Joseph Ponce
a
NEW YOR K UNIVER SIT Y PRE SS
New York and London
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NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York and London
www.nyupress.org
2012 by New York University
All rights reserved
References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing.
Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that
may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ponce, Martin Joseph.
Beyond the nation : diasporic Filipino literature and queer reading /
Martin Joseph Ponce.
p. cm. (Sexual cultures)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8147-6805-1 (cloth : acid-free paper)
ISBN 978-0-8147-6806-8 (pbk. : acid-free paper)
ISBN 978-0-8147-6807-5 (e-book)
ISBN 978-0-8147-6866-2 (e-book)
1. Philippine literature (English)History and criticism. 2. Philippine literature
History and criticism. 3. Homosexuality in literature. I. Title.
PR9550.P662011
810.9'89921073dc222011015710
New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper,
and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability.
We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials
to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.
Manufactured in the United States of America
c 10987654321
p 10987654321
A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative
publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers
University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia
Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For
more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.
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In loving memory of Minerva Nicolas Ponce

(19432002)
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Contents
Introduction 1
The Romantic Didactics of Maximo Kalaws Nationalism
29
The Queer Erotics of Jos Garcia Villas Modernism
58
The Sexual Politics of Carlos Bulosans Radicalism
89
The Cross-Cultural Musics of Jessica Hagedorns

Postmodernism 120
The Diasporic Poetics of Queer Martial Law Literature
153
The Transpacific Tactics of Contemporary

Filipino American Literature
184
Epilogue 221
Acknowledgments
233
Notes
237
Index
279
About the Author
289
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ix
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Introduction
F R O M T H E V A N TA G E point of the second millennium, the 1990s may

be regarded as a period of unprecedented cultural and scholarly ferment
by Filipinos in the United States. Ushered in by the publication of Jessica
Hagedorns National Book Awardnominated novel Dogeaters (1990),
the decade came to a close with numerous critical and collaborative
publications and events commemorating the centennial celebrations of
Philippine independence from Spain in 1898. The years between saw a
steady outpouring of literary production, and this literary renaissance1
continues to thrive in the first decade of the twenty-first century, with a
host of established and new Filipino writers not only seeing their work in
print but also winning major awards.
This cultural explosion is marked by a relentless thematic and generic diversity. The range of issues taken up in the literaturetransnational and international migration, generational conflict and continuity, gender and sexual nonconformity, assimilation and its inherent
failures, labor under late capitalism and the contradictory pressures
of upward mobility, racial misrecognition and differentiation, crosscolor affiliation and aversion, racial hybridity, geographical dispersal
and isolation, and historical reconstructions of the Philippine Revolution (18961898), the Philippine-American War (18991902), the
Japanese occupation (19421945), and Ferdinand Marcoss martial
law regime (19721986) in the Philippinesis matched by a broad array of literary formsnovels, short story collections, autobiographies,
personal essays, poems, plays, and anthologiesused to evoke these
themes. Even a cursory glance at this body of work makes evident that
there is neither an ascendant set of issues with which contemporary
Filipino literature has been engaged nor a particular form that writers have gravitated toward. And yet despite the tremendous growth
of Filipino studies scholarship in the United States since the 1990s,
this literary abundance has not been met with a corresponding critical
recognition. 2
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2Introduction
Beyond the Nation provides what might be termed a queer diasporic

history to this literary profusion by moving back in time and across the
Pacific. The study traces the roots of anglophone Filipino literature to
U.S. colonialism in the Philippines and examines how Filipino literature
in the United States is shaped by the overlapping forces of colonialism,
imperialism, and migration. Situated between the Philippine postcolonial and the U.S. ethnic, what I describe as diasporic Filipino literature exceeds the boundaries of either national frame in both its representational strategies and its performative articulations. Complicating
approaches to reading minority literature that privilege, in this case,
race and nation as the primary categories of analysis, Beyond the Nation
theorizes and enacts a model of queer diasporic reading that tracks the
ways that Filipino literature addresses multiple audiences at once and
how those multivalent addresses are mediated through gender, sexuality,
eroticism, and desire. This book seeks to elucidate how such complex articulations (expressions and linkages) contest, and sometimes capitulate
to, the normative compulsions of Benevolent Assimilation in the Philippines, Filipino (cultural) nationalism, and assimilation in the United
States, and how they proffer alternative relationalities and socialities that
surpass or elude the nation as the default form of imagining community.
Diasporic Filipino literature does not lend itself to the construction
of a national literary history whose consolidation would [guarantee] a
sense of cultural legitimacy, as Linda Hutcheon writes. 3 Since Filipino
literature in the United States has remained a peripheral and marginalized literature in the U.S. academy and in the wider reading public, it
may seem as though a familiar bedrock narrative of developmenta
teleological literary history that emphasizes the importance of origins
and the assumption of continuous, organic development (5)has to
be laid down first, before competing, correcting, or even counterdiscursive narratives can be articulated (13, my emphasis). Beyond the Nation
suggests instead that Filipino literature in the United States has long
been diasporic and queera dispersed, coreless tradition whose relation to conventional political and social histories has invariably been
oblique and ex-centric to the latters normalizing dictates.4 As such, this
traditions diachronic and synchronic contours can be mapped only
through an episodic, nonteleological literary history that does not inevitably betray the aleatory, accidental, contingent, random dimensions
of literary creativity.5 Such contingencies may indeed be surprising (if
not entirely random), but my readings neither familiarize the foreign nor
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Introduction3
discipline the disruptive, pursuing instead interpretations that underscore rather than underplay the literatures peculiarities in ways that render inadequate cultural nationalist models of reading and that respect
the wild heterogeneity of this literary archive. 6
Spanning the twentieth century and moving into the twenty-first, the
chapters examine how the intersecting sociopolitical issues of race, nation,
gender, and sexuality are evoked through various formal practices at specific historical junctures. Chapter 1 explores the relations among imperial
assimilation, independence politics, and the heterosexual erotics of Philippine nationalism in Maximo M. Kalaws work. Chapter 2 analyzes the invention of anglophone Filipino modernism as a queer literary practice in
Jos Garcia Villas work. Chapter 3 focuses on the gendering and sexualizing of Filipino radicalism and transnational anti-imperialism in Carlos Bulosans work. Chapter 4 examines how music as a gendered and sexualized
social and artistic practice becomes a dense site for producing cross-cultural
and diasporic affiliations in Jessica Hagedorns work. Chapter 5 looks at the
queer critiques of martial law and U.S. popular culture as staged in novels by
Bino Realuyo, R. Zamora Linmark, and Nol Alumit. Chapter 6 discusses
the transnational and cross-racial responses to racial misrecognition and
invisibility in the work of M. Evelina Galang, Brian Ascalon Roley, Patrick Rosal, and Barbara Jane Reyes. And the epilogue returns to the politics
of queer reading by meditating on a recent novel by Gina Apostol. While
emphasizing these diverse aesthetic and political practices, I locate the literature within shifting yet shared historical contexts of U.S. colonialism and
imperialism, migration, and assimilation and highlight how the politics of
gender and sexuality inflect their multivalent modes of address.
As a poetic-theoretical entry point into this arguments terrain, let me
turn first to a poem.
Cutting a Figure
In 1949, Jos Garcia Villa published a poem in Volume Two (actually his
fourth book of poetry, the second to appear in the United States) that
gestures toward the kind of reading practice endeavored in this book:
Before , one , becomes , One ,
The , labor , is , prodigious!
The , labor , of , un-oneing ,
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4Introduction
To , become , a , One!
The , precision , of , un-oneing ,
The , procedure , of , dissembling ,
Is , the , process , of , expiation ,
For , the , sin , of , Nothing.
This , Absurdity , is Unification.7
As chapter 2 clarifies, poem 5 initially reads as one of Villas metaphysical allegories of the self whereby the human (one) and the divine
(One) are unifiedbut only after one has been divided from oneself,
has become other to what one was. The process of dissembling as expiation, / For , the , sin , of , Nothing is absurd since to dissemble is not
to deceive but to pursue the path toward godhood, which, paradoxically,
is always part of oneself.
Villas idiosyncratic theology aside, the lyrics formal experimentalism and effrontery, abstraction, and philosophical play with logic and
contradiction challenge what we might expect to find in Filipino literature. There are no obvious signifiers marking racial or geographic difference, no references to historical events or cultural traditions that might
augment its ethnic quotient.8 As one example of Villas infamous
comma poems, the poems rampant (but regular) insertion of commas
may recall the punctuational play of, say, e. e. cummings, but Villas poetics is neither derivative of Anglo-American modernism nor a politically radical act performed at the formal level.9
Deliberately bracketing authorial intentionality, I exploit here Villas tactic of abstraction and extrapolate the poems central neologism
as a flexible figure for framing, historicizing, and analyzing diasporic
Filipino literature. The remainder of the introduction uses the concept-metaphor of un-oneing to chart the arguments itinerary and
contentions, moving from considerations of framing, to the effects of
U.S. colonialism on Filipino migration and racialization, to the limits
of identity politics given the indeterminacy of the category Filipino
itself, to the politics of English, to a formulation of queer diasporic
reading that emerges out of these historical contexts and theoretical
concerns.
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Introduction5
Filipino Exteriority
Though Filipino literature in the United States is typically regarded as a
subspecies of Asian American literature, an examination of the inaugural
survey of this body of work reveals the problems with this classification.
Published in the landmark Asian American anthology Aiiieeeee! in 1974
and written by three writers of the Flips generation (Oscar Pearanda,
Serafin Syquia, and Sam Tagatac), An Introduction to FilipinoAmerican Literature begins on an inauspicious note: We were asked
to write a literary background of Filipino-American works....Here is
our stand. We cannot write any literary background because there isnt
any. No history. No published literature. No nothing.10 If the Flips
pronouncements seem unlikely given the prior seventy years of Filipino
migration to the United States, the subsequent statements create only
more ambiguity: No Filipino-American (Flip-born and/or raised in
America) has ever published anything about the Filipino-American
experience or any aspects of it. That is about two generations of an ethnic
group wiped out; simply literary genocide. In those lost generations,
there are good, maybe great writers. We think that Filipinos in America
can no longer afford to ignore these potentially great writers (3738).
Were these previous writers barred from publication due to the biases
of the literary marketplace? Was their potential never nurtured or
actively suppressed so that they were denied the opportunity to pursue
their literary ambitions? Or has their work simply been ignored and
consigned to irretrievable oblivion?
It is practically impossible to answer these questions since there
does not exist a comprehensive bibliography of Filipino literature in the
United States.11 What becomes clear from the rest of the essay is that the
declaration of no published literature is more polemical than empirical. Rather than abandon the task of writing a literary background to
their present, the authors go on to rehearse Philippine colonial history
and anglophone Filipino literary history, mentioning such writers as
Jos Garcia Villa, Juan C. Laya, Carlos Bulosan, Stevan Javellana, N. V.
M. Gonzalez, Bienvenido Santos, Carlos Romulo, and Linda Ty-Casper.
This historical outline, however, serves to distinguish what the Flips
were looking for: literature published by U.S.-born and/or -raised Filipinos, not adult immigrants who, they allege, wrote about the American
experience through Philippine heads (50). These demarcations enable
the authors not only to differentiate themselves from previous immigrant
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6Introduction
writers but also to ally themselves with Asian American literature by

denoting both as ethnic in relation to dominant U.S. culture.
Distinct from Philippine literature in English (those writings of
Filipinos in the Philippines about the Philippines [37]), from Filipino immigrant literature, and from mainstream U.S. literature, Filipino American literature also turns out to be distinct from Asian
American literature.12 In the anthologys preface, the general editors
announce that Filipino America differs greatly from Chinese and
Japanese America in its history, the continuity of culture between
the Philippines and America, and the influence of western European
and American culture on the Philippines. The difference is definable
only in its own terms, and therefore must be discussed separately.13
The introduction to the volume, subtitled Fifty Years of Our Whole
Voice, is thus not whole but split into two parts: An Introduction
to Chinese- and Japanese-American Literature followed by An Introduction to Filipino-American Literature. What the editors gloss over,
of course, is precisely what subsequent scholars have sought to foreground. The influence of western European and American culture on
the Philippines is hardly accidental but a consequence of Spanish and
U.S. colonization of the Philippines and the continuing neocolonial relationship between the latter two countries.
Without detracting from the important Asian Americanist scholarship on Filipino American literature, this book discusse[s] separately the latter, building off the premise that Filipinos and their
practice of cultural production [should] no longer be subsumed under the rubric of Asian-American, as E. San Juan Jr. has argued.14
The interethnic approach cannot account for what Oscar Campomanes calls the irreducible specificity of the Filipino predicament
in the United States and, corollarily, of the literary and cultural expressions that [they have] generated.15 U.S. colonialism and imperialism constitute crucial contexts for apprehending what Kandice
Chuh refers to as the paradigmatic exteriority of Filipino America
from the dominant practices of Asian American studies.16 Furthermore, by construing ethnic difference as simply one of several axes
marking Asian American heterogeneity, as Lisa Lowe refers to it,
one is led away from perceiving the very basic point that the category
Filipino (in this case) is itself heterogeneous.17 Filipino identity is
an intensely convoluted project whose genealogy is anything but a
straightforward affair.
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Introduction7
Filipino In/Visibility
If generating a framework that begins with the notion not of immigration but of imperialism has become the point of departure for comprehending Filipino social life and cultural production in the United
States,18 then it is necessary to consider the conduct and consequences
of U.S. imperialism in the Philippines. The conceptual-metaphoric language in Villas poem 5 helps here. Many historians have noted that
one of the central debates between U.S. imperialists and anti-imperialists at the turn of the twentieth century revolved around whether the
United States would follow the lead of its European predecessors and
embark on the path of colonialism, or remain true to its supposed revolutionary ideals and republican political form.19 The prodigious labor of
un-oneing that the United States undertook in becoming an overseas
empire (presaging the One superpower?) involved not only the massive deployment of the war machine (armed forces, supplies, budget appropriations) but also a concerted pacification effort that included both
genocidal killing and ecological ruination (reconcentration camps, death
zones, scorched-earth tactics, burned villages, indiscriminate shootings,
water-boarding torture tactics, howling wildernesses) as methods for
dealing with the treachery and incivility of guerrilla warfare, 20 as well as
extraordinary exercises in ideological dissembling, pronounced most
fatefully in William McKinleys declaration of Benevolent Assimilation
(see chapter 1).
Clearly, the United States has never bothered to expiate its criminal acts of aggression against Filipinos because it sees no sin in its benevolent sacrifice to shoulder the white mans burden and remake the
Filipino savage into a self-governing subjectbecause it can countenance Nothing that would absurdly contradict its mythos of freedom,
altruism, and uplift. As Stuart Creighton Miller argues, the triumph
of American innocence was poised to take over as soon as the war had
been declared over by Theodore Roosevelts presidential fiat on July 4,
1902, despite military operations against Muslims in Mindanao persisting well into the twentieth century. Amnesia over the horrors of the war
of conquest in the Philippines set in early, during the summer of 1902,
writes Miller, while the war of conquest and its atrocities and courtsmartial have been all but lost to Americas collective memory.21
What the United States could not, and still cannot, repress or forget,
were and are the effects that overseas imperialism would have within its
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8Introduction
domestic borders. In becoming an empire, the United States not only

exposed the procedure of dissembling that has persistently contravened
its national mythography but also made itself susceptible to another influx of brown hordes as racist anti-imperialists feared, un-oneing yet
again its preferred racial stock and cultural lifeways. U.S. colonialism led
to the government-sponsored pensionado program that sent Filipino students to study in U.S. universities for the purposes of nation-building, as
well as to mass Filipino migration to Hawaii, Alaska, and the mainland
during the second and third decades of the twentieth century, peaking
at between 120,000 and 150,000 individuals in 1930. After a lull during
the period between the restrictive immigration policy that accompanied
the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 and the granting of independence in
1946, Filipino immigration would pick up again (about 65,000 people
between 1946 and 1965). But it was not until the 1965 Immigration and
Naturalization Actwhich abolished national-origin criteria and introduced the family reunification and occupational preferencesthat
Filipino immigration increased exponentially. The 2007 U.S. Census
reports about 4.3 million Filipinos in the country. 22 In the most basic
terms, Filipino migration to the United States was and is a direct consequence of U.S. colonialism and neocolonialism: Filipinos went to the
United States because Americans went first to the Philippines.23
But if the war with and colonization of the Philippines needed to
be repressed or retroactively dissolved into that splendid little war
of 1898 against Spain to preserve the ideology of U.S. exceptionalism,
then Filipinos themselves must be disappeared along with that history.
In his touchstone essay Filipinos in the United States and Their Literature of Exile, Campomanes traces the sense of nonbeing that stalks
many Filipinos in the United States to the immediate and long-term
consequences of American colonialism: The invisibility of the Philippines became a necessary historiographic phenomenon because the annexation of the Philippines proved to be constitutionally and culturally
problematic for American political and civil society around the turn of
the century and thereafter.24 The turn to empire in recent Filipino studies evidently seeks to redress this institutionalized invisibility and to
disrupt what Campomanes calls the unbroken continuity of this historic amnesia concerning the Philippines to maintain Americas innocent self-conception.25 Although there had been books published on the
Philippine-American War and U.S. colonialism in the Philippines prior
to the 1990s, the renewed interest in U.S. imperialism over the past two
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Introduction9
decades has redirected attention on the war and early colonialism and
shown just how racially visible Filipinos were during that moment. 26
Colonial amnesia was further abetted by the representational absence
of this historical drama in U.S. literature of repute. Nick Joaquin notes
that the romance of the early American soldiers, teachers, and missionaries in the Philippines has been ignored by American literature and
that the Empire Days, a theme worthy of a Kipling or a Maugham, have
become merely an ironic footnote to history.27 Miller speculates that
this literary lacuna is an unconscious means of forgetting an unpleasant
history.28 The implications of this lacuna for postcolonial literary studies cannot be overstated. Wondering why there is a dearth of critical
attention on the Philippine colonial experience as literary theme, Jaime
An Lim offers an astonishing answer in his 1993 monograph Literature
and Politics: One likely explanation...is the fact that no significant
Western writer has appropriated that theme in an important work. No
colonial novelist, no Spanish, American, or even Japanese writer of international stature has dealt with the issue of Philippine colonial experience.29 Lims observation implies that critics of colonial literary discourse have been solely interested in those geopolitical areas first represented by renowned Western or colonial writers, and only subsequently
by native or postcolonial writers. The usual procedure of approaching
postcolonial literature as a critique of Western tradition involving the
rewriting of specific works (The Tempest and Heart of Darkness, for instance)30 thus proves problematic in this context since there exist no
U.S. analogues to Shakespeare or Conrad. Without an equivalent to The
Tempest or Heart of Darkness, how are we to determine what colonial images, literary strategies, and political effects Philippine literature is endeavoring to revise or remake if understood as postcolonial? What is
more, like their counterparts in the Philippines, Filipinos in the United
States have not been portrayed in U.S. literature of stature either. As
Elaine H. Kim writes, There had been Filipino characters in the writings of Peter B. Kyne, Rupert Hughes, William Saroyan, and John Fante,
although they were never as grotesquely omnipresent in American culture as Chinese and Japanese caricatures had been.31
To the extent that identity politics typically operates by locating and
contesting the material and ideological means through which a minority group is subordinated and denigrated, 32 one might posit that invisibility names the negativity that currently afflicts Filipinos in the United
States. Although Filipinos were not (and have not been) depicted widely
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10Introduction
in canonical U.S. literature, they were, of course, represented in other

forms of colonial discourse. Rather than arrive at a definitive crystallization of racial negativity, however, tracking some of these figurations
leads only to further ambiguity. From a juridical standpoint, the status
of the Philippines, Filipinos, and Filipinos in the United States during
the U.S. colonial period was deeply vexed, shifting, and uncertain. Allan
Punzalan Isaac has analyzed how legal decisions produced the indeterminacy of the Philippines and other overseas lands as unincorporated
territories and, in so doing, created the ambiguous category of Filipinos as U.S. nationals. Doubly negated for racial and cultural reasons as
noncitizen nonaliens, Filipinos were allowed unrestricted entry into
the United States prior to the 1934 Tydings-McDuffie Act for economic
purposes through a process that Yen Le Espiritu terms differential inclusion.33 Dissenting Justice Fuller in the 1901 Downes v. Bidwell case
described the colonized Filipino national as a disembodied shade, in
an intermediate state of ambiguous existence for an indefinite period.34
If the U.S. imperial project legalistically produced subjects positioned in a twilight zone of indeterminacy,35 it simultaneously reembodied its new colonial subjects by shading in their racial contours, in
part by drawing on preexisting racial stereotypes of African Americans
and American Indians to characterize Filipinos as uncivilized savages, bestial rapists, effeminate Orientals, or infantilized inferiors,
as Kristin Hoganson notes. 36 Nerissa Balce similarly has examined how
earlier representations of black and native subjects...merged and coalesced to produce the figure of the Filipino savage, and notes how
often white soldiers referred to Filipinos as niggersa racial slur that
heightened the dissonance on the part of African American soldiers between patriotism and racism and led to some defections. 37 Complicating
what he calls the export view of imperial racialization, Paul Kramer has
argued that U.S. colonial administrators further differentiated the Hispanicized elite, with whom they could negotiate in colonial statecraft,
from the non-Christian tribes and moros (Muslims) who would be
brought into the national fold by force if necessary. 38 Whether derived or
invented, such productions of racial difference sought to cast Filipinos as
lacking the rational masculinity necessary for self-government and thus
in need of colonial tutelage.
While cross-racializations of Filipinos regularly occurred throughout the twentieth century (see chapter 6), it is important to recognize
that constructions of Filipino nationalism were no less contentious.
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Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading

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. May not be reproduced in any form without permission

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Academic Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed

Beyond the Nation

Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture

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Beyond the Nation

Martin Joseph Ponce

New York and London

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

In loving memory of Minerva Nicolas Ponce

This page intentionally left blank

The Romantic Didactics of Maximo Kalaws Nationalism

The Queer Erotics of Jos Garcia Villas Modernism

The Sexual Politics of Carlos Bulosans Radicalism

The Cross-Cultural Musics of Jessica Hagedorns

The Diasporic Poetics of Queer Martial Law Literature

The Transpacific Tactics of Contemporary

About the Author

This page intentionally left blank

F R O M T H E V A N TA G E point of the second millennium, the 1990s may

Beyond the Nation provides what might be termed a queer diasporic

writers but also to ally themselves with Asian American literature by

domestic borders. In becoming an empire, the United States not only

in canonical U.S. literature, they were, of course, represented in other

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