THE INSOLENCE OF THE FILIPINAS: MOTHERING NATIONALISM, GLOBALIZATION, AND LITERATURE A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School Of the University of Minnesota By HARROD J SUAREZ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Roderick A. Ferguson, Adviser December 2010 © 2010 by HARROD J SUAREZ. All Rights Reserved. Acknowledgements. The wisdom I’ve inherited from my adviser, Roderick Ferguson, well exceeds the academic. His restless commitment to reinventing the world—as thinker, teacher, mentor, administrator—has delivered a critical model that continues to impress upon me. Josephine Lee has read everything I sent her way, and her feedback has always been timely, persistent, and instructive. She combines kindness with brilliance effortlessly, demanding an intellectual rigor that has sustained my project. The first time I met Jigna Desai, we went for coffee at the Kitty Kat Club in Dinkytown. The pleasantries were soon replaced by a stunning flow of words as she described her research to me. Without yet knowing my project, I hoped she would work with me, and this project is all the better for it. Kevin Murphy’s support has always been nearly palpable for me; his feedback has been abundant, gracious, and incredibly generative, and has greatly influenced the direction of this work. The Department of American Studies at the University of Minnesota has been a warm and inviting place to develop young scholars. Colleen Hennen, Marie Milstein- Fiedler, Melanie Steinman, and Laura Domine are at its core. David Noble, too—I am thankful for his tremendous kindness and support. Kale Fajardo introduced me to Kidlat Tahimik’s Mababangong Bangungot, a film I explore in my final chapter, which is indicative of the intellectual rapport we developed and which I hope to continue. I can’t say enough about the collegial and personal friendships I was fortunate to experience with other graduate students. The Asian American studies writing group that i Jo Lee organized was kind to include me as a telecommunicating penpal. Soojin Pate and Sonjia Hyon have been tremendous correspondents from New York to Minneapolis. I owe Jason Ruiz many thanks for guiding me through my early years. Chris Henninger has been a good friend since I met him studying Filipino in Madison, Wisconsin. Aaron Carico, Jill Doerfler, Michael David Franklin, Kim Park-Nelson, Trecia Pottinger, Thomas Sarmiento, and Heidi Stark also deserve my gratitude. Across the US, I have been intellectually and socially nurtured and nourished by Jan Christian Bernabe. He’s been incredibly important to my project and helps me envision a different kind of critique. In San Diego, I’ve had great intellectual exchange with Josen Diaz, Margaret Fajardo, Eugene Gambol, Amanda Solomon, and Thea Tagle, and undergraduates including Kathleen Baca, Kelly Chung, Joseph Ramirez, Angelica Tolentino, and Gracelynne West. Thanks to the UCSD Department of Ethnic Studies for inviting me to present at their colloquium. Reaching nearly a decade back, I want to express my gratitude to my mentors at Brooklyn College-CUNY who encouraged me to consider graduate school: Ray Allen, Moustafa Bayoumi, George Cunningham, Jeanne Theoharis, and Salim Washington, along with the assists thrown in by Gail Smith and Robert Viscusi through the wonderful CUNY Pipeline Program. Apart from my teaching appointments in San Diego and the CUNY Pipeline Program, in which I was a Diamond Fellow, I was supported by a Mellon Fellowship in Humanistic Studies, a Diversity of Views and Experiences Fellowship at the University of Minnesota, and Turpie-Bowron Fellowship and Mulford Q. Sibley Summer Research ii Fellowship in American Studies, along with several conference travel grants from both American and Asian American studies. I was also fortunate to spend two summers in Madison, Wisconsin, studying at the Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute under the auspices of Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowships and Foreign Language Enhancement Program Scholarhips through the Committee on Institutional Cooperation. Above all, there are two who have inspired me most—whose inspiration is (in) their production. My mother, Rose Suarez, continues to amaze me; her life has always been more interesting than mine, and I quite envy the courage she takes in persistently re- inventing herself. It is a condition she may have inherited from her mother, and passed onto my sister—and she demands nothing less of me, too. She may never admit it, but Gina Opinaldo has been a fount of wisdom, passion, and sustenance throughout this journey. Ours is a deep love and profound respect, a gift from a future written in the texts whose readers are already everywhere. In and under their direction, she orients me. iii For my mother iv Abstract. My dissertation, THE INSOLENCE OF THE FILIPINAS: MOTHERING NATIONALISM, GLOBALIZATION, AND LITERATURE, reads diasporic Filipina/o literatures that destabilize the dominant representations which position Filipinas as “mothers” in and of the global economy and Philippine nationalism. The project is situated after the moment of US imperialism, as attempts to deliver a materially prosperous and psychologically uplifting national identity coincided with the rise of post- fordist global economic strategies, the results of which were the brokering and exporting of Filipina/os overseas. As the nation struggled to assert itself under poor and corrupt leaders, as the social unrest of anti-imperialist organizing did not wane but transformed into anti-capitalist critiques, establishing a formal global visibility for Filipina/o workers became imperative to assuage political, economic, and cultural uncertainties. The turmoil would culminate in the 1974 Presidential Decree 442, which authorized and institutionalized overseas employment as a state-managed program. The role diasporic Filipina/os play in the global economy—participating in older, traditional industries such as logging, manufacturing, and shipping, to newer service industries such as nursing, domestic help, and call centers—has been well-documented in recent scholarship, identifying the national service being performed. As numerous reports indicate, Filipina/os send more than ten billion dollars in remittances not just to families, but also to the nation. Such financing is so critical for the national economy that Philippine presidents have hailed them as both “national heroes” and “overseas investors.” This workforce is not only highly gendered insofar as it is predominantly v feminized, but it may be further specified as having a maternal character—literally but also, more broadly, symbolically. If nationalism and globalization work in tandem to inscribe Filipinas as a transnational, maternal underclass, what is the significance of texts that do not cohere with this inscription? My dissertation contends that in order to disrupt the authority of nationalism and globalization, which despite their differences collude to represent and employ Filipinas, one must destabilize those racialized, gendered, and sexualized representations. My dissertation thus seeks to bring to crisis the transparent and empiricist epistemologies that underwrite nationalism and globalization, outlining the ways that diasporic Filipina/o literatures critique these state-sanctioned ways of knowing and being. My first chapter, “Mother, Navel, Nation: Disseminating the Dictionary of Philippine Heteronationalist Globalization,” lays out the theoretico-political scope of the project by reading Nick Joaquin’s short story, “The Woman Who Had Two Navels.” It is an appropriate text with which to begin, given both Joaquin’s role as a leading nationalist writer in the early phase of independence as well as given the dubious rumor that circulates in the story, spread by a young woman who, along with her mother, entices and repulses various male suitors. The story represents the postwar Philippines as a gendered landscape, newly independent and luring Filipino men who have left for other shores to return—only to offend and threaten them, driving them back overseas. While it explicitly negates the role of Filipina mothers, I draw on certain moments that reveal a more complex theorization of gender and sexuality for both nationalism and global capitalism. The contemporary neoliberal consensus collaborates with Philippine nationalism to vi produce Filipina-as-mothers as ideal subjects according to particular racial, gender, and sexual categories. This reading contributes to the genealogy of hetero-masculinist nationalism I trace within the chapter. As many scholars have analyzed and often reproduced, “revolution” has circulated as an “unfinished” discourse emerging from within anti-imperialist mobilizing in the Philippines. Not unlike both liberal and revolutionary nationalisms around the globe, the dominant character of such discourse has proven to be profoundly and constitutively heteropatriarchal. The mourning that is concomitant with the notion of an “unfinished” or “incomplete” “revolution” can thus be understood as a mourning of the failure of native masculinities to protect their families, women, and land. Building on postcolonial feminist critiques of nationalism as well as recent conceptualizations of the rhizomatic, biopolitical field of global empire, the chapter critiques nationalism not only for its unexamined heteropatriarchy, but also its potential obsolescence given the complicity of revolutionary and liberal Philippine nationalisms with global capital.