The politics of globalization in Filipino American cultur

Filipino America is a transnational social formation whose history, economy, and culture are tied to the interrelated histories of the Philippines and the United States. Through analyzing the cultural logic of globalization within Filipino American culture, my argument demonstrates the ways that Filipino Americans have encountered and challenged the uneven and unequal impacts of globalization. The "politics of globalization" refers to the intersection of American nationalism, U.S. imperialism, and transnational capitalism. Together, these forces have created contradictions that define the unique historical and epistemological situation of Filipinos in the U.S. To critique the politics of globalization, I investigate these contradictions and contribute to the emerging field of Filipino American studies and arguments on the interconnectedness of the global and the local within American, Asian American, and ethnic studies. More than simply inserting the subject of Filipino America within these debates, I examine the social and epistemological forces that have hidden the situation of Filipinos and Filipino Americans from American scholarship. In the first of four chapters, I trace the genealogy of Filipino American studies within the context of shifting field imaginaries to argue for Filipino American cultural critique. In Chapter Two, I investigate the literary production of Filipino American cultural identity through representations of gender, sexual, and spatial difference in Filipino American writing. Through a reading of Linmark's Rolling the R's, I argue that Filipino American writing critiques American developmentalism as a key component of the politics of globalization. I investigate the relationship between American colonial discourse and visual representations through examining a genealogy of Filipino American visual representations in Chapter Three. I analyze images from the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, Philippine Centennial commemorations, and Cordova's Filipinos: Forgotten Asian Americans. In Chapter Four, I examine community-based cultural labor through a reading of Fil-Am Arts' production of the Festival of Philippine Arts and Culture and the Pilipino Artists Network. Through analyzing a range of Filipino American cultural forms---such as academic discourse, literary writing, visual representations, and community-based cultural production---I illustrate globalization's multifaceted impacts on Filipino America to argue that Filipino American culture rearticulates and critiques the politics of globalization.