The Historical Condition of Filipino America

THE HISTORICAL CONDITION OF FILIPINO AMERICA Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition by Dylan Rodriguez. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2010. Pp. 272, including 5 blackand-white photographs. $75.00 cloth, $25.00 paper.Ever since the United States purchased the Philippine Islands from Spain at the turn of the twentieth century, the status of Filipinos in relation to the United States has dynamically reflected America's anxiety with race and empire. Oscar V. Campomanes points to this unease in his pivotal 1995 essay on representations of Filipinos in American discourse by arguing that Filipinos suffered from an inherent "unrepresentability" and "unassimilability" because of the absence of discussions of American empire in American academic and cultural discourses.1 Similarly, Luis H. Francia observed the enfolding complexity of the "Filipino condition" in his exhibition essay for the 1997 visual art exhibition, "Memories of Overdevelopment":True children of the electronic age, objects of America's Asiatic thrusts, we know all about America even before we come. Remembering the future, we arrive here strangers in a familiar land, revisiting places we had never set foot on, renewing friendships that had never begun.2Both Campomanes and Francia describe the logic of strangeness that structures Filipinos' epistemologica! framework as a recursive matrix that defines the Filipino condition in relation to an imagined and deferred America. Suspended Apocalypse extends Campomanes's argument about the epistemological condition of Filipinos to a broader on tological inquiry. Dylan Rodriguez's text addresses the underlying alienation identified in Francia's observation through a theoretically engaged and critical genealogy of Filipino American discourse. Arguing that previous analyses of "the Filipino condition" neglect a broader theoretical approach, Rodriguez's central argument is that "the production of the 'Filipino American' is defined - essentially and fundamentally - by a complex, largely disavowed, and almost entirely undertheorized relation to a nexus of profound racial and white supremacist violence" (11). Rodriguez's intent is to provide precisely this broader theoretical engagement.3 He shifts our attention away from the characterization of the Filipino condition as residing solely within a binary of Philippine and US historical experience to a broader concern for disparities of power that are transhistorical and global, from benevolent assimilation to white supremacist genocide. Interdisciplinary and wide-ranging, Rodriguez's polemical text deepens our understanding of the ontological status of "the Filipino" and, more broadly, the reproduction of epistemologies of dominant ideologies against and within those of the oppressed.In each chapter, Rodriguez engages with insightful examples of the Filipino condition to illustrate the ways that Filipinos have confronted and addressed the pervasive power of white supremacist genocide. Chapter 1 explains Rodriguez's key concern about the ways that the production of the Filipino condition disenables engagement against the very ideological discourses that create the Filipino condition. Rodriguez juxtaposes Pilipino Cultural Night, the popular cultural performance and event held annually by students on many campuses, with a student-led protest by the Third World Liberation Front at University of CaliforniaBerkeley against Proposition 209, California's 1996 anti- affirmative action measure. For Rodriguez, Filipino American students' conscious practice of Filipino Americanism was a form of identity politics that illustrates the normative Filipino condition. Rodriguez asserts that the individual subjectivity and shared community that Pilipino Cultural Night offered is inherently aligned with state power and, consequently, Filipino Americanism negates the possibility of engaging in critical political practices.Chapter 2 elaborates on Filipino Americans' conflicting affiliation with America. …