UC Irvine

184 Pages·2014·0.99 MB·English

by  Mark Pangilinan

UC Irvine
UC Irvine Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Title
Haunting the Metropole: Return Effects, Screen Memories, and Figures of Exile in 20th
Century Filipino American Literature
Permalink
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/637649wt
Author
Pangilinan, Mark Phillip Acutina
Publication Date
2014

Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA,
IRVINE

Haunting the Metropole:
Return Effects, Screen Memories, and Figures of Exile
in 20th Century Filipino American Literature

DISSERTATION

submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

in Comparative Literature

by

Mark Phillip Acutina Pangilinan

Dissertation Committee:
Assistant Professor Adriana Michele Campos Johnson, Chair
Professor Jane O. Newman
Assistant Professor Christine Bacareza Balance

2014
© 2014 Mark Phillip Acutina Pangilinan
DEDICATION

To:

my mother, Jennifer Acutina Yatco, who waited

and

my father, Alberto Torrelino Pangilinan, who marched on Mendiola

In Memoriam:

my stepfather, Antonio Nicolas Lim Yatco
1960 - 2009

and

my mentor, Tracey Teets Schwarze
1961 - 2010

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv

CURRICULUM VITAE vi

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION viii

INTRODUCTION: 1

“All things that ghost our time”:
Recalcitrant Memory, Troubled Time, and Subversive Life
in the Philippine-American Context
CHAPTER 1: 23

Haunted “Nevertheless—”:
Unstable Origins, Figures of Exile, and the Poetics of Persistence
in Jessica Hagedorn’s Dream Jungle
CHAPTER 2: 58

“The Monkeys Have No Tails in Zamboanga”:
Balikbayan Tourism, Cinematic Memory, and the Politics of the Postnational
in R. Zamora Linmark’s Leche
CHAPTER 3: 111

“Panahon ng Digma”:
Grief, Revolt, and (Life)Times of War
in Joi Barrios’ Bulaklak Sa Tubig
AFTERWORD: 154

“Hindi ka nag-iisa. You are not alone”:
Noynoy Aquino’s inherited revolution and the dream of the national
BIBLIOGRAPHY 169 REFERENCES (OR BIBLIOGRAPHY) 240

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful and deeply humbled by the mentors, colleagues, friends, and family that have seen
me through my graduate student career and the completion of this project. The generosity of
time, patience, warmth, and spirit that I have been afforded over the course of this work make
any attempt to adequately express my gratitude seem pale and wanting, but I extend my thanks
anyway.

I am indebted to my advisor and chair, Adriana Michele Campos Johnson for the support and
mentorship she provided me from my first year at UC Irvine through to today. As my research
and methodological interests changed over the course of my graduate career, and especially
during the writing of my dissertation, she remained patient and encouraging, even while pushing
me further than I thought I could go. She has been a source of intellectual and pedagogical
inspiration, and I am grateful that she stood by me.

The other members of my committee also offered me invaluable encouragement and support,
both intellectually and psychically.

Jane O. Newman consistently and punctually gave me enough feedback to keep me reading,
thinking, and writing for years to come, and I thank her also for all of her translation workshop
facilitating and professionalization workshop organizing. Jane knows how to get things done,
and her example provides fantastic inspiration as much as formidable challenge. Christine
Bacareza Balance has been a principal influence in my movements towards involvement in and
literacy of Asian American Studies discourse and thinking, and the experiences I have had with
her in seminar and at colloquia have been indelibly formative. I thank her also for her warmth,
good humor, and pragmatic approach to thinking academy and life.

I would also like to extend my thanks to Gabriele Schwab, for the inspiration and encouragement
that she provided me early on in my time at Irvine, especially in two seminars that will stay with
me for some time. After hearing that I had told a new recruit at a department party that I thought
that she must have discovered the secret to happiness, she returned the compliment to me, which
was both wry and warm—a way of speaking simultaneous kindness and wit that I have yet to
fully master.

I would, of course, be remiss if I neglected to thank department administrator Bindya Baliga.
Bindya has kept this entire machine running smoothly for some time, and for that, I’m sure I am
not the only one entirely grateful.

Beyond the department, funding provided by the UC Irvine Humanities Collective and the
School of Humanities were integral to my completing archival research in the service of this
project. In this endeavor, I thank Patricio Abinales at the Center for Philippine Studies at the
University of Hawaii, Manoa, for hours of conversation and enough source material to help me
towards a post-dissertation project.

Many colleagues in several departments at UCI have also been essential to the management of
my productivity, health, and day-to-day life in Irvine. Victoria Hsieh, the thanks you extend to
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me are too generous; you were and are a force, and I miss you terribly. Rachel Mykkanen, Dan
Costello, Thomas Elliott, Matt Rafalow, and Alice Motes—you gave me life and levity. My love
to you all.

I thank Sally Terrefe and Tia Peterson Gilchrist for offering me asylum on their respective
couches during the writing of my qualifying exams and beyond. You are both in my work more
than you know.

Outside of UCI, I also found profound intellectual stimulation, community, and lasting
friendship with the Filipino Studies Reading and Writing Group. James Zarsadiaz, Mark John
Sanchez, Precious Singson, Joe Bernardo, and especially Nic Ramos and Emily Raymundo—
thank you for helping to make chapters 1 and 2 work, for fantastic discussions at AAAS and
beyond, and for being some of the best colleagues and friends I never thought I’d find.

And, of course, out here, in the world, I cannot begin to thank the ones closest to me for picking
me up, dusting me off, and keeping me writing (or not writing, as some times called for).

Charlene Engle, my best friend, you are joy and rigor and life and love. I can’t even without you.
Love isn’t even the word.

Ryan Burke, Charlie Castillo, Marc Aquino, and Marcus Cortez, you all believed I would finish
even when I didn’t. Thank you for that. And for many things.

And lastly, my love and gratitude to my family, especially my parents: Jennifer Yatco, Alberto
Pangilinan, and Antonio Yatco.

v
CURRICULUM VITAE

Mark Phillip Acutina Pangilinan

2006 B.A. in English (with minor in Spanish)
Christopher Newport University, Newport News, Virginia

2009 M.A. in Comparative Literature,
University of California, Irvine

2014 Ph.D. in Comparative Literature,
University of California, Irvine

FIELDS OF STUDY

Translation Theory and Practice, Asian American Studies,
20th Century Filipino American Literature
Postcolonial and Transnational Theory and Literature

PUBLICATIONS

Barrios, Joi. Bulaklak sa Tubig: Mga Tula sa Pag-ibig at Himagsik. Flowers in Water: Poems on
Love and Revolt. Trans. Mark Pangilinan. Anvil Publishing: Manila, 2010. 232 pages.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

University of California, Irvine:

Teaching Associate, Humanities Core Course, 2011 – 2013 (5 Quarters).
Teaching Assistant, Asian American Studies, Fall 2012 (1 Quarter, 2 Sections)
Teaching Assistant, Writing 39 Series, 2008 – 2011 (11 Quarters)
Christopher Newport University:

Student Director, Alice Randall Writing Center, 2004 - 2006
Writing Consultant, Alice Randall Writing Center, 2004 – 2006

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CONFERENCES AND COLLOQUIA

“The Monkeys Have No Tails in Zamboanga: Balikbayan Tourism, Cinematic Memory, and the
Politics of the Postnational in R. Zamora Linmark’s Leche.” Presented at the 2013 Asian
American Studies Conference: The Afterlives of Empire, Seattle

“Haunted ‘Nevertheless’: Figures of Exile in Jessica Hagedorn’s Dream Jungle.” Presented at
the 2012 Asian American Studies Conference: Expanding the Political, Washington D.C.

“A Poet and Her Translator: Joi Barrios and Mark Pangilinan.” 2011 Roundtable Workshop
presented by the Department of Comparative Literature, U. California, Irvine

“Translating Babel: Reading Sur-vival in Borges’s ‘La Biblioteca de Babel’.” Presented in 2009
at the Politics and Ethics of Translation Workshop, U. California, Irvine

“Icarian Games in Allison Bechdel’s Fun Home and James Joyce’s Ulysses.” Presented at the
2009 Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900, Louisville

FELLOWSHIPS, GRANTS, & HONORS

Summer Dissertation Fellowship, 2013, School of Humanities, U. California, Irvine
UCI Humanities Collective Research Grant, 2012, Humanities Center, U. California, Irvine
Gintong Aklat Award (2012 National Golden Book Award) for translation of Joi Barrios,
National Book Development Board, Manila
Regents Fellowship, 2006 – 2007, U. California, Irvine

SERVICE

Colloquium Co-Organizer, UCI English and Comparative Literature Graduate Dissertation
Colloquium, 2012 – 2013, U. California, Irvine
Graduate Mentor, Undergraduate Conference in Critical Theory, May 2011, U. California, Irvine
Comparative Literature Graduate Committee Representative, CLCWEGSA, U. California, Irvine
Conference Co-Organizer, “The Politics of Crisis: 4th Annual Comparative Literature Graduate
Conference, U. California, Irvine
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ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

Haunting the Metropole:
Return Effects, Screen Memories, and Figures of Exile
in 20th Century Filipino American Literature

By

Peter Mark Pangilinan

Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature

University of California, Irvine, 2014

Assistant Professor Adriana Michele Campos Johnson, Chair

In the works of Jessica Hagedorn, R. Zamora Linmark, and Joi Barrios, Martial Law
under the Marcos Regime (1965 - 1986) is as much a recurring trope that works to maintain the
mythos of American exceptionalism and discrete national border as it is a material period of
Philippine history. In the novels and poetry of these authors, I map the interlocking processes by
which late 20th century Filipino American literary objects alternately corroborate and challenge
broadly conceived notions of American democratic pluralism. On either side of the Philippine-
American dyad, the exilic figure remains recalcitrant, unsettles the logic of nationalism, and
survives collective forgetting and historical erasure in a dynamic state of “nevertheless.” From
the particular vantage point offered by the Filipino American context, the contemporary moment
of crisis in local American as well as international and transnational (specifically in the so-called
“third world”) contexts exposes its genealogy in the modes of violent globalization and
circulation of labor that continue to characterize the Philippine-American relationship.
Collectively, these authors explore Martial Law as an inescapable past that bleeds into the
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