Beyond the Nation

Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading

Martin Joseph Ponce

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780814768075
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series
Beyond the Nation charts an expansive history of Filipino literature in the U.S., forged within the dual contexts of imperialism and migration, from the early twentieth century into the twenty-first. Martin Joseph Ponce theorizes and enacts a queer diasporic reading practice that attends to the complex crossings of race and nation with gender and sexuality. Tracing the conditions of possibility of Anglophone Filipino literature to U.S. colonialism in the Philippines in the early twentieth century, the book examines how a host of writers from across the century both imagine and address the Philippines and the United States, inventing a variety of artistic lineages and social formations in the process. Beyond the Nation considers a broad array of issues, from early Philippine nationalism, queer modernism, and transnational radicalism, to music-influenced and cross-cultural poetics, gay male engagements with martial law and popular culture, second-generational dynamics, and the relation between reading and revolution. Ponce elucidates not only the internal differences that mark this literary tradition but also the wealth of expressive practices that exceed the terms of colonial complicity, defiant nationalism, or conciliatory assimilation. Moving beyond the nation as both the primary analytical framework and locus of belonging, Ponce proposes that diasporic Filipino literature has much to teach us about alternative ways of imagining erotic relationships and political communities.

1
The Romantic Didactics of Maximo Kalaw’s Nationalism

IN THE INTRODUCTION to the 1964 reissue of Maximo M. Kalaw’s The Filipino Rebel, Pio Pedrosa wonders why the author “turned to this literary form [the novel] as the vehicle for the message he sought to convey instead of using the essay or the treatise as was his wont.”¹ Prior to publishing his only novel around 1930,² Kalaw (1891–1955) had established himself as a staunch advocate of Philippine independence by writing several books on “the Philippine question,” including The Case for the Filipinos (1916), Self-Government in the Philippines (1919), and The Development of Philippine Politics, 1872–1920 (1926), as well as numerous essays for U.S. academic and mainstream journals. In light of this work, Pedrosa avers that the mix of fictional and historical characters in The Filipino Rebel enables Kalaw to present “the clashes of ideas, the conflict of beliefs, and the quarrel of philosophies” during the early colonial period and to draw portraits of “the opportunists and the principled, the chauvinists and the dedicated, the fence-sitters and the true nationalists” (xiv). For Pedrosa, Kalaw’s novel is little more than political theory and debate personified: The Filipino Rebel “is Maximo M. Kalaw all over again: political philosopher, essayist, teacher. Going through its argumentation is … like sitting once more in the small cubicle adjoining his Rizal Hall office as Dean of the College of Liberal Arts of the University of the Philippines” (xi).

Kalaw’s preface to the original edition tells a somewhat different story. Acknowledging “the difficulties” involved in writing one of the first Filipino novels in English, the author states that his pioneering endeavor was “induced” by his “studies of Philippine life, which revealed to me a wealth of heroic deeds, romantic episodes and dramatic changes which could be made the background of many novels” (xvii). While Pedrosa implies that the novel’s heavy-handed use of “didactic discourse” outweighs its “dramatic” elements (xiv), I focus here on its subtitle—A Romance of American Occupation in the Philippines. By marking the text as a “romance,” Kalaw intimates that the difference between his political writings and his novel lies in the centrality of the relationship between the revolutionary-cum-politician Juanito Lecaroz and the barrio woman–cum–diasporic nationalist Josefa. In counterpoint to what Nerissa Balce terms “the erotics of the American Empire, the discursive and material processes that created the sexual and racialized representations of the Filipina colonial subject in American popular culture,”³ this chapter explores the erotics of Philippine nationalism, the ways that the novel’s “message” is mediated through reproductive heterosexuality. The Filipino Rebel’s engagement with the politics of independence—more than a decade after the passage of the Jones Law in 1916 and several years before the Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934—seeks to recover what it deems the lost revolutionary spirit of 1899 by proffering the male offspring conceived by Juanito and Josefa in the “veritable Eden” of the guerrilla war as the nationalist promise of an independent future.⁴

My analysis approaches the gendered and sexualized underpinnings of Philippine nationalism that a number of scholars have opened up through the issue of genre and the politics of address.⁵ Although The Filipino Rebel was published in the Philippines, Kalaw had spent considerable time studying and agitating for independence in the United States. Without constructing too rigid a binary linking genre and national audience, I would argue that Kalaw’s political science texts are predominantly oriented toward a U.S. readership, while his novel attempts to address and constitute (however selectively by writing in English) what he names in the dedication “ANG BAGONG KATIPUNAN.”⁶ The particular pressures imposed by the competing demands of these different audiences give rise to shifting strategies: the former marshals sociological data and hard-hitting critique, while the latter moves toward the realm of affect. Whereas scholars such as Reynaldo Ileto, Vicente Rafael, and Sarita See have examined the political work of mourning and martyrdom as productive of nationalist (or anticolonial) affect,⁷ I examine how “romantic” eroticism in The Filipino Rebel gets linked to nationalist feeling within the world of the novel and how it rhetorically seeks to inspire “a new nationalism,” as the dedication reads, among “ang bagong katipunan.”

My task in this chapter is twofold: to ground historically the argument that a focus on the politics of representation depends on an appeal to recognition by the imperial power and is therefore a fatal project, and to demonstrate the necessity of a queer diasporic reading practice given the heterosexual erotics and metaphorology of the family that suffuse dominant conceptions of Philippine nationalism. Maria Teresa Martinez-Sicat suggests in her analysis of The Filipino Rebel that the “representation of the Philippines in the international arena of nations as well as the address to an American public … may not altogether be without value. However, addressing foreign nations is only one recourse. Such an act is itself dependence; it is premised on independence granted by external forces, independence granted from without, in opposition to independence won by internal forces, independence gained from within.”⁸ Whereas the “external” address leads to further dependence on securing recognition from “an American public,” the winning of independence “from within,” I suggest, takes place on the terrain of the erotic. Kalaw’s writings illustrate both points. His political science work, addressed to the United States, fails to bring about the guarantees of independence that he and his elite cohort strive to effect, while his reorientation to the homeland in The Filipino Rebel seeks to rouse nationalist affect by recurring to heterosexual eroticism and reproductive futurity.

Addressing Annexation, Assimilation, and Independence

To gain a sense of where Kalaw’s strategies enter, one might consider how the debates between U.S. colonialism and Philippine independence were constructed. Though the war and colonialism may have since been forgotten or repressed by mainstream U.S. history, the disputes regarding the Philippine question at the turn of the twentieth century were widespread and vigorous. Rather than rehearse these debates in detail, my concern here is to show how an examination of the politics of address can illuminate not only who has the authority to speak or “represent” the parties involved but also who is imagined legitimate enough to be addressed in the first place.

The justifications for war and annexation—the idea that overseas expansion is merely an extension of westward “manifest destiny” and a divinely ordained mission to civilize the savages; the allied concept that empire constitutes a natural progression in the United States’ development as a world power; the notion that the Philippines represents a “stepping-stone” to China and its boundless markets; the proposal that war will reinvigorate a waning American manhood—have received critical attention by scholars. But the forms of those legitimations are equally significant. One of the loudest exponents of imperialism, Indiana senator Alfred J. Beveridge, for example, bellowed his position on the floor of the U.S. Senate on January 9, 1900:

Mr. President, the times call for candor. The Philippines are ours forever, “territory belonging to the United States,” as the Constitution calls them. And just beyond the Philippines are China’s illimitable markets. We will not retreat from either. We will not repudiate our duty in the archipelago. We will not abandon our opportunity in the Orient. We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee under God, of the civilization of the world. And we will move forward to our work, not howling at regrets like slaves whipped to their burdens, but with gratitude for a task worthy of our strength and thanksgiving to Almighty God that He has marked us as His chosen people, henceforth to lead in the regeneration of the world.⁹

Beveridge effortlessly combines expanding capitalist markets and opportunities with Christian duty as justifications for imperialism, while perversely invoking the racialized figure of slaves “whipped to their burdens” to shame and cajole his colleagues into accepting their providentially ordained “mission” (recall that Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” was published less than a year earlier in 1899).¹⁰ The address to the president and the Senate enables Beveridge not only to cast Filipinos as “a barbarous race” who are “not capable of self-government,” as he goes on to proclaim, but to constitute “we” as a “chosen people” without having to consider or consult Filipino perspectives (19). While this might seem obvious and inherent to the structure of colonial discourse, the point is that the “candor” with which Beveridge speaks acquires its urgency from U.S. anti-imperialists. Although Filipino views did make it into the pages of some U.S. magazines and periodicals with the assistance of the Anti-Imperialist League,¹¹ such views did not even warrant rebuttal since the only viewpoints that mattered were those held in the Senate itself.

The experiences of Felipe Agoncillo, one of political leader Emilio Aguinaldo’s diplomatic emissaries, exemplify how the debates about imperialism actively shut out Filipino voices. A year before Beveridge’s ringing oration, Aguinaldo sent Agoncillo to Washington, D.C., “to represent the Philippine Republic and begin negotiations with the American government.”¹² Such negotiations in August 1898 sought recognition for the recently declared Philippine Republic and tried to intervene in the conversations leading up to the signing of the Treaty of Paris between Spain and the United States on December 10, 1898, and the treaty’s ratification by the Senate on February 6, 1899. Stuart Creighton Miller describes Agoncillo’s reception in Washington and Paris: “McKinley handled the situation in his usual style. He received Agoncillo and spent an hour talking to him, but refused to give him any assurances about the future of the Philippines since that was still being negotiated in Paris. Agoncillo then went to France in an attempt to testify before the Peace Commission. There he was completely cold-shouldered, and he ‘returned to the Philippines with considerable bitterness toward the American government’” (46).

Spurred by “the ardent desire to let the American people know the whole truth,” Apolinario Mabini, architect of the Philippine Republic’s constitution and prominent member of Aguinaldo’s cabinet, puts it more bluntly: Agoncillo was given “instructions to lay before President McKinley the grievances of the Filipinos and to ask for the recognition of the independence of the Philippines, in fulfilment of the promises made by the Americans generals … [but] was not received by the President, nor heard by the American Commission in Paris.”¹³ While Agoncillo’s voice would probably not have made much difference in the treaty talks (since Spain and the United States had already decided that they were the only two powers with the authority to negotiate) or with the Senate vote, the point is that the strategy of attempting to address the U.S. government was based on a politics of recognition that enabled the power-holding entity not merely to decline the validity of the “grievances” but to deny their very hearing.

Whereas Beveridge’s speech and Agoncillo’s rejection indicate how U.S. imperial discourse excluded Filipino perspectives by ensuring that Americans would only be talking and listening to each other, one might think that Mark Twain’s famous essay “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901) would attempt to speak to Filipinos. Despite its title and anti-imperialist thrust, however, it, too, remains addressed to other Americans. Framed as a broad critique of bungled and violent attempts by various European powers to bring the “Blessings of Civilization” to distant lands and peoples (the Boxer Uprising, the Boer War, Russian aggression against Japan and in Manchuria), the satire turns to U.S. involvement in Cuba and then to “the Philippine temptation.”¹⁴ Twain’s rhetorical approach shifts here, not simply voicing what “the Person Sitting in Darkness” must think of these imperialists’ exploits but also articulating what Americans should say to that person. On the one hand, Twain speculates, “The Person Sitting in Darkness is almost sure to say: ‘There is something curious about this—curious and unaccountable. There must be two Americas: one that sets the captive free, and one that takes a once-captive’s new freedom away from him, and picks a quarrel with him with nothing to found it on; then kills him to get his land’” (170). On the other hand, Twain ironically inhabits what he refers to as “the Master’s” position. Given this split, hypocritical image of “two Americas,” Twain writes, “We must arrange his opinions for him” (170). He then rehearses the events from Dewey’s defeat of the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay in May 1898 through the Treaty of Paris and up to the essay’s present when the brutality of the war, theretofore filtered through the War Department’s censors, had finally reached the public.

Twain’s rendering of these events and its expression of sympathy for the Filipino cause—arguing that “the Filipino nation” ought to have been returned to its “rightful owners” upon Dewey’s victory (171); that the U.S. military and government deceived the Filipinos by first aiding their war against Spain and then wresting “the Archipelago” from those “patriots struggling for independence” (172); and that this deception undermined the sovereignty of “a just and intelligent and well-ordered republic” (174)—are still directed toward Americans. Indeed, Twain frames these attempts to “arrange” the “opinions” of the person sitting in darkness with the phrase “Let us say to him” (171). However, he proceeds not to address a “you” but to continue to refer to “them” over there: “We knew that they were fighting for their independence, and that they had been at it for two years. We knew they supposed that we also were fighting in their worthy cause—just as we had helped the Cubans fight for Cuban independence—and we allowed them to go on thinking so. Until Manila was ours and we could get along without them” (171). In short, Twain’s rhetorical modes of address either ventriloquize and thereby silence the Filipino voice (“The Person Sitting in Darkness is almost sure to say …”) or venture and ultimately fail to address the person sitting in darkness. Though perceptive of U.S. deceit and hypocrisy, Twain leaves the titular person still shrouded in darkness, unseen, unheard, and unrecognized.

One of the most important documents to set the tone and terms of the Philippine debate was President William McKinley’s Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation, delivered on December 21, 1898. The document sought to claim “the authority of the United States” and guide U.S. colonial policy in the Philippines following “the surrender of the Spanish forces” and the signing of the Treaty of Paris only eleven days earlier.¹⁵ McKinley infamously heralded the “benevolence” of U.S. control by stating, “It will be the duty of the commander of the forces of occupation to announce and proclaim in the most public manner that we come, not as invaders or conquerors, but as friends, to protect the natives in their homes, in their employments, and in their personal and religious rights.” Such friendliness, “support and protection,” however, would be extended only to those “who, either by active aid or by honest submission, co-operate with the Government of the United States to give effect to these beneficent purposes.” “All others,” McKinley ominously warned, “will be brought within the lawful rule we have assumed, with firmness if need be, but without severity, so far as possible.” After promising to protect “private rights and property” and pursue “the repression of crime,” McKinley closes by articulating the meaning of “benevolent assimilation”:

Finally, it should be the earnest wish and paramount aim of the military administration to win the confidence, respect, and affection of the inhabitants of the Philippines by assuring them in every possible way that full measure of individual rights and liberties which is the heritage of free peoples, and by proving to them that the mission of the United States is one of BENEVOLENT ASSIMILATION substituting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule.

Many historians have noted the fundamental discrepancy between rhetoric and reality that this proclamation prophesied, documenting the ways that U.S. colonial policy and practice was overtly or insidiously less than “benevolent.”¹⁶ But what did “assimilation” mean at this moment? Paul Kramer writes that the term “held more than a hint of malice: the very fact that it required the adjective ‘benevolent’ to soften it suggested more or less directly that there were kinds of assimilation that were not.”¹⁷ Kramer’s gloss implies that “assimilation” was something that the United States would do to Filipinos. That is, the U.S. government and its many civic, educational, political, and economic projects would assimilate the Filipino—if not to itself (Filipinos would not be given access to U.S. citizenship until after independence was granted in 1946) then at least to its cultural, capitalist values.¹⁸

In contemporary discourse, assimilation typically means the opposite, a process that the “foreigner,” immigrant, or marginalized outcast undertakes or undergoes if he or she is to become a participating member in society and be granted the rights and responsibilities of national citizenship. In this sense, assimilation is conservative in that the receiving society seeks to remain unchanged by the presence of newcomers and outsiders. McKinley’s proclamation, by contrast, placed the United States in the active role of assimilating foreign Filipinos, and it should hardly be shocking therefore that the United States did not remain impervious to this campaign.¹⁹ Indeed, by leaving its borders op...