American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America (Critical American Studies)

In 1997, when the New York Times described Filipino American serial killer Andrew Cunanan as appearing “to be everywhere and nowhere,” Allan Punzalan Isaac recognized confusion about the Filipino presence in the United States, symptomatic of American imperialism’s invisibility to itself. In American Tropics, Isaac explores American fantasies about the Philippines and other “unincorporated” parts of the U.S. nation that obscure the contradictions of a democratic country possessing colonies. Isaac boldly examines the American empire’s images of the Philippines in turn-of-the-century legal debates over Puerto Rico, Progressive-era popular literature set in Latin American borderlands, and midcentury Hollywood cinema staged in Hawai‘i and the Pacific islands. Isaac scrutinizes media coverage of the Cunanan case, Boy Scout adventure novels, and Hollywood films such as The Real Glory (1939) and Blue Hawaii (1961) to argue that territorial sites of occupation are an important part of American identity. American Tropics further reveals the imperial imagination’s role in shaping national meaning in novels such as Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart (1946) and Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters (1990), Filipino American novels forced to articulate the empire’s enfolded but disavowed borders. Tracing the American empire from the beginning of the twentieth century to Philippine liberation and the U.S. civil rights movement, American Tropics lays bare Filipino Americans’ unique form of belonging marked indelibly by imperialism and at odds with U.S. racial politics and culture. Allan Punzalan Isaac is assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University. In 1997, when the New York Times described Filipino American serial killer Andrew Cunanan as appearing "to be everywhere and nowhere," Allan Punzalan Isaac recognized confusion about the Filipino presence in the United States, symptomatic of American imperialismʹs invisibility to itself. In American Tropics, Isaac explores American fantasies about the Philippines and other "unincorporated" parts of the U.S. nation that obscure the contradictions of a democratic country possessing colonies. Isaac boldly examines the American empireʹs images of the Philippines in turn-of-the-century legal debates over Puerto Rico, Progressive-era popular literature set in Latin American borderlands, and midcentury Hollywood cinema staged in Hawai'i and the Pacific islands. Isaac scrutinizes media coverage of the Cunanan case, Boy Scout adventure novels, and Hollywood films such as The Real Glory (1939) and Blue Hawaii (1961) to argue that territorial sites of occupation are an important part of American identity. American Tropics further reveals the imperial imaginationʹs role in shaping national meaning in novels such as Carlos Bulosanʹs America Is in the Heart (1946) and Jessica Hagedornʹs Dogeaters (1990), Filipino American novels forced to articulate the empireʹs enfolded but disavowed borders. Tracing the American empire from the beginning of the twentieth century to Philippine liberation and the U.S. civil rights movement, American Tropics lays bare Filipino Americansʹ unique form of belonging marked indelibly by imperialism and at odds with U.S. racial politics and culture Contents......Page 8 Acknowledgments......Page 10 Introduction......Page 16 1. American Tropics......Page 32 I. An Imperial Grammar......Page 52 2. Disappearing Clauses: Reconstituting America in the Unincorporated Territories......Page 54 3. Moral Sentences: Boy Scouts and Novel Encounters with Empire......Page 79 4. Imperial Romance: Framing Manifest Destiny in the Pacific......Page 110 II. Toward an American Postcolonial Syntax......Page 150 5. Reconstituting American Subjects: Proximate Masculinities......Page 152 6. Reconstituting American Predicates: Troping the American Tour d’Horizon......Page 180 Coda......Page 209 Notes......Page 216 C......Page 232 G......Page 233 M......Page 234 S......Page 235 Z......Page 236 In American Tropics, Allan Punzalan Isaac explores American fantasies about the Philippines and other ""unincorporated"" parts of the US nation that obscure the contradictions of a democratic country possessing colonies. Isaac examines the American empires images of the Philippines in Hollywood films such as Blue Hawaii and novels such as Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart and Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters An investigation of African homosexuality under globalization.