Postcolonial Configurations: Dictatorship, the Racial Cold War, and Filipino America

by Josen Masangkay Diaz

Overview

In Postcolonial Configurations Josen Masangkay Diaz examines the making of Filipino America through the dynamics of dictatorship, coloniality, and subjectivity. Diaz explores how the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship and US policies during the Cold War that supported the regime defined the relationship between “Filipino” and “America” in ways that influenced the creation of a gendered and racialized Filipino American subject. By analyzing Philippine-US state programs for military operations, labor and immigration reform, and development and modernization plans, she shows how anticommunist liberalism and authoritarianism shaped the visibility and recognition of new forms of Filipino subjectivity. Tracing the rise of various social formations that emerged under the Marcos regime and US programs for liberal reform, from transnational Filipino and US culture and the immigrant returnee to the New Filipina woman and the humanitarian English teacher, Diaz positions literature, film, periodicals, and other cultural texts against official state records in ways that reconceptualize the meanings of Filipino America in the Cold War.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478016694
Publisher:	Duke University Press Books
Publication date:	01/03/2023
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Josen Masangkay Diaz is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of San Diego.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction: Unmaking Configurations  1
1. The Fictions of National Culture  27
2. Balikbayan Movements  58
3. The New Filipina Melodrama  85
4. The Filipino Humanitarian  113
Conclusion: Reckoning with the Body  138
Notes  153
Bibliography  187
Index

What People are Saying About This

Remaindered Life - Neferti X. M. Tadiar

“Josen Masangkay Diaz offers us a beautiful, daring reimagining of Filipino America, unmaking its figurations for global recognition and the heroic, heteronormative politics upholding our dominant global order. She reads for other subjectivities that US imperial liberalism and Philippine authoritarian nationalism obscure through narratives of empowerment, emancipation, and liberation. Questioning the very bounds of Filipino America and refusing to resolve the tension between diaspora and homeland, Diaz demonstrates that what is most near and intimate to us might also be the consequence of what seems most far away. An illuminating interpretation of racial formation under empire, this is critical ethnic and postcolonial studies at its transnational best.”

Empire’s Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper - Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez

“This compelling, generative reframing of US-Philippine relations during the Cold War illuminates how a transnational Filipino America emerged as a particular kind of Cold War racial assemblage during the Marcos era. Incisively and persuasively argued, Postcolonial Configurations grapples with the kinds of world-making possibilities this subjectivity engendered at a time that was simultaneously postcolonial and authoritarian.”