Actress Claudine Barretto swears (sorry, you have to be Filipino to get this); so does Tom Brokaw (the latter link swiped from Gawker).

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From Metafilter:

Loaded guns pointed in faces, people made to crawl on their hands and knees, police officers clearly exacerbating a tense situation by kicking in doors, taunting, keeping their fingers on the trigger even after the situation was under control.

Jason Halperin, on being raided while eating at an Indian restaurant. Courtesy of the PATRIOT Act.

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Tim Yu writes:

Here’s my question, though–and I don’t have an answer: What is the difference, then, between the category “good poets who happen to be Asian American” and “the fantasy of social colorblindness”? If we reject the idea that the category “Asian American writing” has determinate content, then what does it mean to employ the category at all? In particular, what’s “Asian American” about a text whose only racial marker is the ostensibly Asian name of its author?

(I had to snip a delicious tidbit about a couple of poets that he asked me not to post, alas.)

But let me take a hastily written stab at it: I’m not so sure that I’d agree that “Asian American writing” doesn’t exist as a category, or that it refers to nothing on the ground. I simply reject what “Asian American writing” as a
discursive category has evolved (or devolved) into, as an Orientalist beast defined from within and without. Eileen‘s recovery/rescue of Jose Garcia Villa (in her edited volume of Villa’s work, The Anchored Angel) into the Asian American canon represents a main phase of this project: interrogating what Asian American literature has narrowly come to be. In turn, Tim’s excellent essay argues for Villa as a “proto-transnational” figure, haunting the borders of both “American” literature and “Asian American” literature and whose work, shorn of the usual ethnic signifiers, provides an excellent entry into questioning the notion of Asian American lit per se.

(Villa’s position in Filipino literature is a different story all together. My mother went to school in the ’50s and majored in English, which was why I was exposed to Villa at a young age. (One of her brothers was a poet, another was a critic, and so there was always poetry around the house.) In any case, she was totally into his coconuts/nipples poem, and was trying to explain it to me — now that I think about it now, it seems a little disturbing.

But by the time I went to college in the ’80s, the ’60s had happened, and the world had changed. A lit professor of mine in the Philippines was talking about how literature had to be socially engaged for it to have any relevance, and should not be created as simply art for art’s sake — “like those poems by that American, Jose Garcia Villa,” he said with barely disguised contempt. True story. It’s either that kind of dismissal, or Villa is way too canonized in the Philippines as a kind of distant literary father — enough so that people don’t have to read him anymore.)

(And I’ll digress and muddy the waters even further: if Tchaikovsky was gay, then would “The Nutcracker” be gay music? Or is he simply a good composer who happened to be gay? Does one runs the risk of devaluing sexuality if one says no? Or is there a huge gap in terms of content between music and poetry, i.e., is it less possible to be “ethnic” in music than in poetry?)

There are a couple of positions one can take regarding ethnicity, for instance, but it’s clear that there’s always a dynamic tension between both poles:

1. Ethnicity is elective. That is, all those ethnic markers — whether it be food, or language, or clothing, however seemingly arbitrary they may be — are things to be deployed, to be operationalized, and as such, ethnicity is malleable and flexible and highly contextual.

2. But many people labor under particular ethno-national categories imposed on them by states or other people, and so in that sense they have little choice in the matter. Tagalogs, for instance, like to think of everyone else in the Philippines as Filipino, even though that lived experience of being “Filipino” may be extremely different to, say, a Muslim resident in Mindanao. Ethnicity therefore can be shot through with unequal power relations and as such isn’t all that fluid.

3. And we know in any case that those ethnic choices are a fiction as well, since I have to wear my brown skin all day. Such colorblindness (or generic Americanness) does not exist in the same way for the person of color, as s/he is always/already marked as Other. The idea of race as a cultural construction may have been fostered by well-meaning sociologists and anthropologists, but one cannot wish away those pesky phenotypical differences (regardless of whatever cultural significance is accorded to them). In contrast, an Anglo American can wear four-leaf clovers and drink green beer and, in short, be Irish American for just one day, then retreat to Vanilla American the rest of the year. Asian Americans simply don’t have the “luxury” of retreat. (But to digress again: can literature give the writer that illusion of momentary retreat? But can the text be so easily demarcated from “real life?”)

In any case, there probably shouldn’t be any absolute position — or, ultimately, it may all be a matter of semantics, and the debate becomes pointless after a while. The statements about the Wayne Wang films in my previous entry are, according to Eileen’s criteria, both accurate. But if someone were to say that Chan Is Missing is a “more” Asian American film than Smoke, surely one would agree, and one doesn’t have to be acceding to Orientalist criteria to say that.

I’ll end with something from Dana Takagi, from her essay “Maiden Voyage: Excursion into Sexuality and Identity Politics in Asian America” (found in Russell Leong’s edited volume, Asian American Sexualities: Dimensions of the Gay & Lesbian Experience):

A politics of identity and whatever kind of politics ensues from that project — multiculturalism, feminism, and gay movements — is first of all a politics about identity. That is, about the lack of a wholistic and ‘coherent narrative’ derived from race, class, gender, and sexuality…

And later on in the essay:

The gist of this essay has been to insist that our valuation of hetereogeneity not be ad hoc and that we seize the opportunity to recognize non-ethnic based differences — like homosexuality — as an occasion to critique the tendency toward essentialist currents in ethnic-based narratives and disciplines. In short, the practice of including gayness in Asian America rebounds into a reconsideration of the theoretical status of the concept of “Asian American” identity. The interior of the category “Asian American” ought not be viewed as a hierarchy of identities led by ethnic-based narratives, but rather, the complicated interplay and collision of different identities.

All right, back to grading.

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In response to a recent posting by Eileen Tabios, who writes, in part:

I’m sure the sunny professor doesn’t realize he struck a nerve with me (or perhaps he does). You see, prior to tending my grape vines (all one stalk of them), I was fairly active in the Asian American literary scene…..but what I noticed is that much of my work never gets classified as “Asian American” or “Filipino American” literature. Why? Because I don’t write the kind of stuff that has mostly become classified (as Timothy has observed) as Asian American works by referencing biography, food and ethnicity. I am not the only “Asian American” poet who’s ranted before at this practice.

I really didn’t mean to strike a nerve — though I realize that now — but my initial hesitation to classify her as such was partly in reaction to what Tim Yu wrote earlier. That is, I didn’t want to simply pigeonhole her poetry as “Pinoy poetry,” as poems (or as a blog) that is only brought up within that Asian context. (Not that that’s a bad thing, but I think the readers know what I mean.) Both Asian Americans (and well-meaning non-Asian editors, etc., out to “diversify” their anthologies) are complicit in fashioning particular tired images, narratives, paradigms, and so on that keep Asian Americans in safe, domesticated categories. And that was what I was reacting to when I wrote what I wrote — I think Eileen and I agree about things, only I came about it the other way round. For instance, I think Lew’s Premonitions is important precisely because it does not simply proclaim Asian American poetry as an “Other voice.” Not all Asian American poets may want their work to be (“merely”) classified as “Asian American poetry,” with all that that label, positive and negative, entails.

She writes as well:

Let me spell it out: if the author is Asian American, that makes the works “Asian American” — the work itself doesn’t have to fit your preconceived paradigms. Kapisch?!

Oh, I completely agree. But — hee hee — let me play devil’s advocate and present a couple of statements:

Chan Is Missing is an Asian American film.
Smoke is an Asian American film.

Both may be true, but is one truer than the other? =)

(There will be a Part 3 to this entry as well, including a response to a letter by Tim Yu, and Dana Takagi gets thrown in there somewhere.)

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Swiped from Metafilter is an excellent exhibit of tabloid photographs from the Los Angeles Herald Express, curated by Diane Keaton. But aside from the lurid nature of the photographs — it looks like a James Ellroy gallery come to life — the high aesthetic quality of the images cannot be denied either. (This has already been explored in, for instance, Luc Sante’s Evidence, the Police Pictures exhibit at SFMOMA a few years back, and Sean Tejaratchi / Katherine Dunn’s Death Scenes, not to mention Weegee’s place in the photographic canon.)

The caption reads:

Mrs. Shirleen Kunin
March 27, 1948 Saturday
“Dennie got so many Christmas presents! But the dreadful accident happened 10 days before Christmas.

What’s striking about the photograph is not just the Diane Arbus-like quality of the image, but the way the light falls on her unreadable (rapturous?) face and how her gaze similarly follows the light. It’s almost reminiscent of a shot in La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc!

Compare this, for instance, with Carol Jo Pivar’s portrait, which looks like a Cindy Sherman “film still” — she looks like she just stepped out of some noir film.

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