Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature in Malaya, the Philippines and Asian America

Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature in Malaya, the Philippines and Asian America Christopher B. Patterson A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2013 Reading Committee: Alys Weinbaum, Chair Francisco Benitez Gillian Harkins Chandan Reddy Program Authorized to Offer Degree: English © Copyright 2013 Christopher B. Patterson University of Washington Abstract Transitive Cultures: Anglophone Literature in Malaya, the Philippines and Asian America Christopher B. Patterson Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Associate Professor Alys Weinbaum Department of English This dissertation treats novels by Anglophone Southeast Asians who see their ascribed multicultural identities (Malaysian, Filipino or Asian American) as conflating notions of race, sexuality, nationality and labor. Southeast Asian Anglophone narratives allow us to trace contemporary global multiculturalism as a strategy of governance that emerged from three historical conditions: British colonial pluralism in Malaysia and Singapore, American colonization in the Philippines, and regimes of liberal tolerance in the United States. Whereas these histories are rendered invisible or incoherent by U.S. nationalist narratives and literary canons, Southeast Asian Anglophone texts expose them as legible counter-narratives. This dissertation is inspired by the Malaysian literary theorist Lloyd Fernando, who, in 1975, envisioned migrant cultures as “part of an unceasing process” that are “capable of continuing as if an infinite series” (14). I dub this unceasing process "transitive culture" and trace its appearance as a theme in Southeast Asian Anglophone literature that sees migrants as self- consciously managing and reinterpreting multiculturalist identities. This dissertation builds on work by scholars such as E. San Juan, Jodi Melamed and Vijay Mishra who argue that the narrative of western multiculturalism often bolsters the U.S. as an exceptional power, giving legitimately to U.S. military and political interventions abroad. I engage with an overlooked archive of Anglophone writing to account for the multiple origins of multiculturalism that U.S. literature and discourses have helped obscure. While recent scholarship has used a framework of diaspora to disrupt nationalist formations, this has often marginalized the Anglophone cultures that imperial encounters have also helped produce. I adopt the label "Anglophone" to argue that texts from writers in Southeast Asia and in the diaspora allow us to see global multiculturalism as a governing strategy that conflates nation and ethnicity to mark national identities as befitting particular types of labor, and to cast “multicultural” nation-states like the U.S. as an exceptional force in global politics. By revealing the imperial strategies and historical emergence of global multiculturalism, Southeast Asian Anglophone texts disrupt the conflation of race, nation and ethnicity, and offer transition as a means of resisting rigid identity types. Dedication To my family Table of Contents Introduction: Multiculturalism on the Defense, on the Rise?……………………………………..1 Chapter 1: Do You Want to Join This Society or Not?: Multiculturalist Umpires and Transitive Culture in Lloyd Fernando's Scorpion Orchid..40 Chapter 2: So That The Sparks That Fly Will Fly in All Directions: Alfred Yuson's Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café and Revolutionary Identity……..94 Chapter 3: The Southeast Asian Migrant in Space of Liberal Tolerance: Satire and Reciprocity in Peter Bacho’s Cebu and Lydia Kwa’s This Place Called Absence…………………………………………………………………………………151 Chapter 4: The Neutral Cosmopolitan and the Transitive Service Worker: Cynicism and Ecstasy in Hwee Hwee Tan's Mammon Inc. and Han Ong's Fixer Chao.208 Coda: Songs of Transition: Speculative Fiction and the Southeast Asian Anglophone……………………………..263 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………….282 i Acknowledgements This dissertation was made possible by relationships that were scholarly, personal, and a mixture of the two. Friends, family, colleagues, mentors and loved ones all contributed to its development. Various intellectual communities have grounded this dissertation and have been crucial to maintaining my own confidence in its arguments: The Asian American Studies Research Collective, especially Simeon Man, Michael Hodges, Vanessa Au and Alan Williams; For a Democratic University, especially Ariel Wetzel and Caitlin Palo; the University of Washington community, especially Christopher Martin, Bob Hodges, Allen Barros, and Maya Smordinsky; The Critical Filipino/Filipina Studies Collective, especially Michael Viola, Valerie Francisco, Amanda Solomon and Freedom Siyam; and my dissertation writing group, including Jessie Kindig and Annie Dwyer. I have also gained from my work with the Seattle Asian American Film Festival, and the Simpson Center for the Humanities. The mentorship and kindness I have gained as part of the Asian American Studies community has kept me inspired. I will always be grateful for the sacrifices these mentors made for me even when they had little to gain from it: Robyn Rodriguez, Steve Sumida, Rick Bonus, Weihsin Gui, Vicente Rafael, Moon-Ho Jung, Peter Bacho, Connie So, Martha Cutter, Shawn Wong, Catherine Fung and Martin Joe Ponce. The support from my committee throughout my time at graduate school has been unwavering. Chandan Reddy, thank you for your probing questions and steadfast support. Gillian Harkins, thank you for your frank feedback and your openness as a mentor, even when I interrupted your lunches just to chat. Francisco Benitez, thank you for your invaluable advice ii and your persistency in pushing my arguments further. The enthusiasm and joy you express for intellectual projects has been crucial to helping me pinpoint my own passions. To my chair, Alys Weinbaum, your example as a scholar and professor convinced me to stay in graduate school numerous times. Your belief in holding my work to a high standard has pushed me to perform at my peak, and your constant support has rescued me in moments of self-doubt. I sincerely hope to one day mirror your mentorship style for my own students. Finally, I want to thank my partner, Su-Ching Wang. Your devotion to social justice has left an imprint throughout this dissertation. Your kindness and attention to the overlooked, the marginalized and the erased has helped inspire every argument in this project. Thank you. 1 Introduction Multiculturalism on the Defense, on the Rise? On April 23, 2010, Arizona governor Jan Brewer signed into law SB 1070, which required all suspected undocumented immigrants to have registration documents at all times and allowed "reasonable suspicion" to emerge on the basis of race and language capability. Because the law found any persons who had not fully assimilated into Anglo-Saxon cultural norms (language, appearance, culture, religion) to be suspect, SB 1070 was depicted as an explicit attack on multiculturalist ideals of tolerance, cultural preservation and diversity (Martell-Gámez). What was striking about the law was that it was highly favored in national polls, marking what seemed like the end of multiculturalist acceptance just as the 2008 economic crises and discourses of economic scarcity also took hold. One of the most outspoken opponents of the law, the U.S. Representative from Arizona, Gabrielle Giffords,1 became a symbol of the rising tension when Giffords was shot in the head at point-blank range in Tucson, Arizona, while speaking to supporters in January 2011. A mere six months later, Indiana, Georgia, and South Carolina passed measures similar to Arizona's SB 1070, causing an exodus of Hispanics to states where they might face less discrimination. The attack on multiculturalist values has put leftist educators on the defense, making critiques of multiculturalism appear inherently conservative or racist, so that multiculturalism continues to act as the dominant anti-racist discourse. In the academy, this defensive posture has been felt in the erasure of Ethnic Studies programs in Arizona, which has reversed a tide of 1 Giffords has said of SB 1070 that it "stands in direct contradiction to our past and, as a result, threatens our future" (Martell-Gámez). 2 multiculturalist inclusion and education that has been ongoing since the 1980s. Yet American- style multiculturalism has also had ambivalent effects on people of color in the United States and around the globe. Multiculturalism's reliance on identities that conflate race, ethnicity and nation can make it seem powerless against discourses that scapegoat immigrants, and can also bolster support for overseas wars by highlighting the diversity of the American military and in contrast, the racial or religious intolerance of national enemies like Osama Bin Laden. Indeed, since its emergence during the Cold War, American-style multiculturalism has been strategically employed as "multicultural exceptionalism," a way to cast the United States as a morally superior power in order to legitimate imperial and capitalist projects abroad. As the scholar Lewis Feuer has pointed out, American-style multiculturalism has come precisely at a time when throughout the world it is the American-English language, its literature, its motion picture art, and its democratic political culture that holds primacy…Not since the amalgam of Roman-Hellenic culture swept the Mediterranean region has the like been seen. (22) The imperial dimension to American-style

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