THE QUESTION OF

RACE
LESSON 14 – ESSAY
EDDING & WALI
DEFINITION OF TERMS
EXPATRIATES LIMINALITY INCONGRUITY
: A person who lives in : metaphysical state of : The quality of being
a foreign land being neither here nor incongruous
:BANISH, EXILE there : Strange because of
not agreeing with what
is usual or expected

CONCESSIONAIRE ALIENATION
: a person or business POIGNANT : a withdrawing or
that has been given the : causing a strong separation of a person
right to sell something feeling of sadness or a person’s affections
on property owned by from an object or
someone else. position of former
attachment
FILIPINO-AMERICAN WRITING
Literary texts that
explore the personal, social,
cultural, and even political
issues that Filipino-Americans
confront as they experience
life in the United States.
 THE PIONEERS
01 “ those who (sketched) a new territoriality that recovers the

“THREE
colonized land imaginatively”

CRITICAL 02 THE SO-CALLED FLIPS

“those who wrote from an alienation that is double-sided as

PHASES OF
they (addressed) their own historical absence in the United
States and remain implicated in the historic invisibility of the
nation that permanently identifies them”

FIL-AM
WRITERS” 03 POLITICAL EXPARIATES
“ the political exiles from the Martial Law period”
-According to literary critic,
Oscar V. Campomanes
limina
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO
BE A FILIPINO-AMERICAN?
This incongruity between mind and
body is one instance of liminality because you are

lity
not quite sure where you are truly situated and
present.
HOMECOMING
UNDER MY INVISIBLE
UMBRELLA
by Laurel Fantauzzo
USA
 Laurel Fantauzzo is a
Filipino-Italian by
ethnicity but was born in
the United States.
UNDER MY INVISIBLE UMBRELLA

"Under My Invisible Umbrella" is a good example

of a creative nonfiction which can be read from
a postcolonial viewpoint.
• text documents that the author woes &
adventures as she struggles to integrate
herself in her mother's homeland while at the
same time dealing with the discomfort she
feels in her privileged situation.
• prose is noted for its fast and upbeat tone;
filled with action & conversation and
highlights remarkable shift tense
UNDER MY INVISIBLE UMBRELLA
The essay is all about the life experience of Laurel
Fantauzzo here in the Philippines and how she
maneuvered through race and class privileges.

Here are some scenarios of privilege the author

experienced:

“I accepted the man’s service without

question, as if he had been standing at the doorway of
the Olongapo office building waiting only for me. As if I
knew he would head into the downpour, open his
umbrella, hold the tenuous shelter of it over my head,
and walk at my pace, getting wet himself.”
UNDER MY INVISIBLE UMBRELLA
“The man was not holding an umbrella above
me. He was holding the umbrella above my whiteness. He
was holding it like a flag for everything he assumed my
whiteness represented: my wealth, my station in life.”

“I spent only 40 pesos at an upscale café in

Greenbelt mall to wait out a cloudburst. I used the café’s Wi-
Fi for hours, while servers impatiently thrust menus at more-
melanined customers who had dared sit for too long.”

“I crossed a restricted area to use the much less

crowded staff restroom. Four guards said nothing.”

“English speaker + pale face + black hair =

foreigner… she looks like the rulers—Spanish, or American…
she merits extra courtesy.”
THE FILIPINO PEOPLE’S
WHITE LOVE
 WHITE
LOVE

BENEVOLENT
ASSIMILATION
THE FILIPINO-AMERICAN
AS PERSPECTIVE
THE FILIPINO-AMERICAN AS PERSPECTIVE
EXPERIENCE
AS IDENTITY
PERSPECTIVE

LIMINALITY MOVEMENT
 “For a chance at the social mobility I
perform effortlessly, many Filipinos,
waiting forever, unprotected, outside
barred mansions, will leave. They will hope
for work in a place—Europe, or my birth
country—that helped create and enforce
the intractable inequity forcing their
displacement today.”
—Laurel Fantauzzo
 THANKS!
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