PALENGKE POLITICS & TRANSNATIONAL FILIPINO

AMERICAN IDENTITIES

Making Home

Woman & Nation

Woman’s body as synecdoche of national body Synecdoche – when a part comes to symbolize

a wholePossession of woman’s body &

possession of land Examples: Miss Lien & Ika Interlocking systems of colonial/militarized

domination and patriarchal dominationWoman as bearer of national culture &

reproducer of nation Protection of women parallels protection of

land – anticolonial yet patriarchal nationalisms Burden of women as symbol of national &

cultural purity

ao dai pageants & politics

ao dai as counter-symbol of Communist uniform and symbol of alternate Vietnamese nationalism

ao dai pageant: as celebration of Vietnamese

feminine beauty in opposition to white beauty standard

as tool for shaping 2nd generation ethnic identity

Ao dai pageant contradictions “hybridized beauty”?

Cultural Politics & Imaging National Identities

What is “cultural politics”? culture (n) – the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and

practices that characterize an institution, organization or groupHow are those shared attitudes, values, goals and

practices created? How do people come to identify as belonging to a common culture? Primarily through symbolism, narrative, ritual and

creative productions you come to imagine yourself in community with others that all share the same culture

Cultural Politics as tool to imagine/enact ethnic identity in US

Palengke Politics

What is “palengke-style politics”? “Filipino American ‘politics’ is

constituted in and through maps of historical memories of immigration and settlement, of links between original homeland and new destination, of mainstream and informal/alternative political practice, and of ‘Filipinoness’ and ‘Americanness’” (94)

Seeming chaos of hybridized political and cultural practice

Palengke & Pageants

How do beauty pageants in the Filipino American community compare/contrast with the ao dai pageants? Emphasis on “bonds of

caring” & “common goals” transnational connections –

damayan and bayanihan “alternative spaces of

collective action” given racist exclusion from mainstream politics (94)

Palengke Politics and Gender

“Some of them told me about feeling exploited as women, although they also said such pageants do have a redeeming value in the ways they support local and Philippine-based communities” (125)

Multiple meaning of beauty (kagandahan) aesthetic value vs moral value

“manok” – fighting rooster

Questions, Chs 1-4 of Homebound

What does it mean to say that” home is both an imagined and an actual geography” (2)?

What are the macro and micro forces that influence Filipino immigration into the US (24)?

What does YLE mean when she states that the position of Filipinos in the US is one of “differential exclusion”47?

How do transnational ties sustained by Filipino immigrants resist this position of “differential inclusion” (71)?