Time Lags And Differential Pace: Bullet Time, William Faulkner and Jessica Hagedorn

This chapter begins with the way Wesely’s record-breaking pinhole photographs from Open Shutter (2004) use the effect of blur to connect relative rates of movement to larger histories as such. Similarly, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (1929) is focused on racialised time lag not simply between two points on a single historical line, but between different histories that move at different rates and go their own ways. Here, the temporal aspect of double consciousness – of always living in someone else’s time and yet also located in a distinctive history marked by laggy access – connects with postcolonial treatments of time lag and the way in which historical behindness opens onto the tangle of histories that appears synecdochically in the plane of the present as heterogeneity. Finally, Hagedorn’s Dream Jungle (2003) stages the collision, overlap and differences between the story of Magellan’s ‘discovery’ of the Philippines, the 1970s hoax of the uncontacted ‘Stone Age’ Tasaday people, the filming of contemporary US history in Apocalypse Now in Mindanao, and the long-running Moro insurgency. Each of these texts contains a bullet-time scene in which the dilation of the encounter of disjunctive rhythms reveals a heterochronic assemblage of time-paths and historical frames.

“Come Almost Home”

Chapter Two reads the novels A Gesture Life by Chang-rae Lee and Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn alongside the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in order to describe the seemingly impossible political subjects that might be granted standing, or the fundamental “right to have rights,” in a transnational human rights imaginary.

The Work of Mothering

The Work of Mothering: Globalization and the Filipino Diaspora argues for a strict relationship between the world-historical situation of the Philippines under empire, nationalism, and globalization and the phenomenon of overseas domestic labor, drawing on the contours that inform the latter but arguing that it is part of a much larger framework of nurture, care, and service structuring the relationship between the postcolonial Philippines and the world. It analyzes maternal figures in novels by Carlos Bulosan, Jessica Hagedorn, and Brian Ascalon Roley; short stories by Nick Joaquin and Mia Alvar; poems by Luisa Igloria; and a film by Kidlat Tahimik. By developing incisive readings of subtle, passing moments in these texts, The Work of Mothering opens up narratives within which the cultural, political, and economic logics of overseas Filipina/o migration, especially but not only domestic labor, emerges. It does so by advancing an archipelagic reading practice that addresses diasporic literatures and cultures without reinscribing them either within nationalist or global paradigms. In doing so, it draws crucially on debates within the sociology of globalization and cultural studies, offering a critical and innovative vantage point that identifies alternative practices of the maternal, pushing up against the historical and political conditions that manage Filipina/o identity for nationalism and globalization.

Consuming (Post)Colonial Culture

This chapter examines how travel guides and ethnic novels, despite being mainstream cultural representations, reproduce hegemonic narratives of U.S. exceptionalism by enabling consumers to experience the “authentic” postcolonial other. It analyzes three different sets of texts that all serve to deliver the colonized other to a mainstream U.S. public that is specific to its particular historical context: Our Islands and Their People (1899), the popular travel guide Lonely Planet: Philippines and Lonely Planet: Puerto Rico, and the novels Dogeaters (by Jessica Hagedorn) and América's Dream (by Esmeralda Santiago). The chapter shows how these novels and travelogues reproduce narratives of U.S. exceptionalism and affirm U.S. global power independently, without overt ties to the U.S. government. It argues that the ethnic novel delivers the postcolonial other for consumption by a mainstream U.S. audience while the travel guide recommends how best to consume the postcolonial nation.

Dancing to Rock & Roll Poetry

On October 30, 1975—a historical pivot point between 1930s film noir and 1990s gangsta rap— Bay Area poet Nashira Priester introduced to San Francisco State University’s (SFSU) Poetry Center audience the city’s latest musical outlaws: the West Coast Gangster Choir, a multi-racial ensemble of vocalists and musicians led by then-emerging poet Jessica Hagedorn. This article chronicles Hagedorn's development as a poet and performer, analyzing the cultural and political work done by the Gangster Choir as a Third World movement with an internationalist perspective on local issues.