Decolonizing Bodies, Reinscribing Souls in the Fiction of Ninotchka Rosca and Linda Ty-Casper

Abstract

While many Filipino American women writers are immigrants who have lived much of their lives in the US, their work tends to center on a Philippine setting. This might be easily dismissed as a nostalgic attempt to return to a lost ancestral Eden, but their focus reflects a more complex project of negotiation between past and present, between physical and psychic relocation. These writers reconstruct their country of origin as a means of reaching back through the barriers and dislocations caused by colonial history and' migration, and thus aim at a recovery of the Filipina I and the Filipino American woman as colonial and neocolonial subject. The writers examined in this essay explore issues of postcoloniality in a variety of its manifestations; one of the central figures in these writers' project of reformulation is the postcolonial body. Filipino American literary critic Oscar Campomanes states that by its very nature, Filipino American culture is '"marked by chronic and multiple displacements," as its texts '"were and continue to be created under material, historical and political conditions that are better described by the (post)co!onia! analogy of world literature rather than the 'immigrant analogy' 0f US multiculturalism" (Gonzalez and Campomanes 74). While the tenn "postcolonial body" is often posited as monolithic and essentialist, these Filipino American women's fiction examines its layers of complexity, syncretically appropriating colonial structures, texts, and narratives.

‘You like to Mix things up on Purpose …? Hoy, what are you trying to Prove?’: Representations of Recent (hi)Stories in Jessica Hagedorn's The Gangster of Love

“…Such blends of feminist, postcolonial and postmodern strategies are often deployed by Asian American and US minority women writers. Regarding Filipina American authors in particular, thematic and stylistic parallels have been established between Hagedorn and contemporary authors such as Cecilia Manguerra Brainard, Marianne Villanueva, Ninotchka Rosca, Linda Ty-Casper and M. Evelina Galang (De Manuel, 2004;Grice, 2004). These authors deal with how colonial and neo-colonial forces disrupt a society's relationship with its past and its cultural identity.…”