The Day the Dancers Stayed: Performing in the Filipino/American Diaspora

by Theodore S. Gonzalves

Overview

Pilipino Cultural Nights at American campuses have been a rite of passage for youth culture and a source of local community pride since the 1980s. Through performances—and parodies of them—these celebrations of national identity through music, dance, and theatrical narratives reemphasize what it means to be Filipino American. In The Day the Dancers Stayed, scholar and performer Theodore Gonzalves uses interviews and participant observer techniques to consider the relationship between the invention of performance repertoire and the development of diasporic identification.

Gonzalves traces a genealogy of performance repertoire from the 1930s to the present. Culture nights serve several functions: as exercises in nostalgia, celebrations of rigid community entertainment, and occasionally forums for political intervention. Taking up more recent parodies of Pilipino Cultural Nights, Gonzalves discusses how the rebellious spirit that enlivened the original seditious performances has been stifled.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781592137305
Publisher:	Temple University Press
Publication date:	09/25/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	228
File size:	349 KB

About the Author

Theodore S. Gonzalves is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 
Prologue 
Introduction 
1. The Art of the State: Inventing Philippine Folkloric Forms (Manila, 1934) 
2. “Take It from the People”: Dancing Diplomats and Cultural Authenticity (Brussels, 1958) 
3. Dancing into Oblivion: The Pilipino Cultural Night (Los Angeles, 1983) 
4. Repetitive Motion: The Mechanics of Reverse Exile (San Francisco, 1993) 
5. Making a Mockery of Everything We Hold True and Dear: Exploring Parody with Tongue in a Mood’s PCN Salute (San Francisco, 1997) 
Conclusion 
Epilogue: Memoria 
Notes 
Bibliography 
Index

Editorial Reviews

"With acumen, verve, and a politics of style that effect an important counter-appropriation of performance studies in today's American academy, The Day the Dancers Stayed offers a differently historicized analysis of the processes by which cultural—kinetic, aural, visual—knowledges get produced, repeated, and transformed. Gonzalves shows us or, more precisely and more crucially, reminds us how and why culture dies. And how it always lives on."
—Sarita Echavez See, University of Michigan

From the Publisher