Thought I’d post this, from Robyn Rodriguez, friend, colleague, and Ph.D candidate in Sociology at UC Berkeley:

Filipino-American Scholars Lead API Colleagues in Protest

MEDIA RELEASE:
For additional information contact: Robyn Rodriguez
510-364-3252

The Critical Filipino Studies Collective (CFSC) is calling on Asian-American Studies professors, researchers and professionals to live up to their historic mission and oppose the Bush administration’s global “War on Terror” at the annual Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) conference next month. The AAAS conference will take place at the Cathedral Hill Hotel from May 8-10, 2003 in San Francisco.

In addition to the resolution, the CFSC will be sponsoring an exhibit of Asian American photographers who have been documenting Asian Americans’ leadership and involvement in San Francisco’s anti-war protests, as well as a benefit for the Filipino immigrant airport screeners who unfairly suffered a mass lay-off at Bay Area airports in the wake of the 9/11 tragedies.

Dozens of highly respected Asian-American and Pacific Islander professors from around the country have added their names to the anti-war resolution sponsored by the CFSC, an organization of Filipino studies scholars. The Filipino and Asian American scholars denounce the recent war of aggression and subsequent occupation of Iraq. According to the CFSC-sponsored resolution to be presented on May 9 at the AAAS business meeting, “This war is a manipulation of the American public’s grief over the 9/11 tragedy, an illegal and undemocratic campaign to further U.S. multinational corporate interests.” CFSC calls on the Association to “actively defend and support the academic freedom of its members’…in challenging this imperial ‘War on Terror’.” Moreover, the CFSC calls for “the Association [to] form a task force to organize a national day of action and produce educational materials.”

Asian-American studies along with other ethnic studies programs and departments trace their histories to the 1960’s anti-imperialist movements and struggles for Third World self-determination, including, most notably, the San Francisco Ethnic Studies Strike of 1968-9 (for reference see: http://www.library.sfsu.edu/strike/). The AAAS will hold its annual meeting in San Francisco, the very site of these historic struggles and the recent anti-war protests.

Events:
May 8-10:
Association for Asian American Studies Annual Conference, Cathedral Hotel, San Francisco

May 8:
Critical Filipino Studies Collective Public Meeting, 11-1 at SF Public Library

CFSC Organized Events:
May 9
3-5PM: Presentation of CFSC-Sponsored Anti-War Resolution to Board
7:30-11PM: “Filipino Activism and Immigrant Rights in the Bay Area Benefit” (co sponsored by Asian American Studies and Philippine Studies, USF and Asianweek) and “Rise Up, Stop the War! Asian Americans in the Anti-War Movement” Photo Exhibit. The theme of the exhibit will be “Strength in Unity, Peace through Justice Now”

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(I’m totally blushing. And you should see Eileen’s comments on my blog! Brown skin doesn’t blush easy, but in this case…)

Anyhow, this will be a more rambling entry than usual. The title of the entry came to me as I (thoughtlessly) clicked on the category “Pinoy” (look to your right for the category archives) after I posted the entry on Eileen Tabios’s WinePoetics blog. This was, of course, technically true — she is Filipina, after all — but the entry wasn’t really Filipino in content, and neither is her blog very Filipino either. Whatever “Filipino” means, anyway.

And then a very nice mention from Mac Diva on her Mac-a-ronies blog (a must-read, by the way, along with her other blog, Silver Rights), where she calls my blog “an olio of news, entertainment, poetry and material about the Philippines.” But I feel I’ll let some people down, because I hardly post on Filipino or Filipino American things, really.

Much of this is going through my head lately because of Tim Yu’s tympan blog, where he has a hilarious and thought-provoking entry on writing an “Asian American” poem — link swiped from WinePoetics, natch. (See also his equally interesting response to a post by Ron Silliman.) Or rather, parodies of the four categories of Asian American poems he has seen:

–the grandparents poem
–the family photograph poem
–the exotic food poem
–the erotic poem, usually employing imagery from the exotic food poem

Yeah, it is indeed a little snotty, as Yu put it, but not inaccurate. I can think of a few elements contributing to and mitigating this phenomenon:

1. I see this more often in small student-edited collections: young poets learn from those “Asian American” models (and may be given the same writing exercises, i.e., “write what you know”) and (unwittingly) imitate them. Nothing wrong with this in general, but…

2. This also operates on a “culturalist” level, i.e., stop a random Chinese American person (for instance) walking in the street and ask her or him what “Chinese culture” is all about, and it is likely that family, respect for ancestors, food, etc., will be invoked. Again, nothing wrong with this in general, but…

3. Unfortunately, this becomes reified uncritically as “Asian culture,” and editors/reviewers looking for “a distinctive Asian voice” or something with “an Asian sensibility” would end up selecting an ancestors poem or a food poem because they are coded as Asian. Writers like Amy Tan have been living off the proceeds of this “sensibility” for years.

4. And if outfitting oneself in Asian drag sells, well… this may explain the success of all those footbinding memoirs. How many permutations of “golden,” “lotus,” “heaven,” “jade,” and “dragon” could there be? Thus, the reproduction of Orientalist cliches, both internally and externally.

5. But if ethnicity, in opposition to a “biological” category like race (yes, I know both are culturally constructed), is a combination of “culture” and descent, then it would make perfect sense to have a family poem and a food poem (and food preferences, as Bourdieu argues, are practically seen as hard-wired, and integral to notions of culture) as the two models of the “ethnic poem.”

Something like Walter Lew’s Premonitions was, perhaps conceived to escape those four walls of the Asian American poem-jail (kind of like the prisonhouse of language?). As Maria Damon writes on the backcover blurb:

Neither a multiculti feel-good anthology, an instrumentalist teaching anthology that condescends to its audience and subject matter, nor an Orientalist rehearsal of anti-Orientalism, this book will liberate the reader from the strictures of the known at all levels.

She makes it sound like acid! But that’s beside the point: I think what she means is that the poems contained inside weren’t selected to communicate an Asian American sensibility (though some do), but perhaps because they were written by good poets, to paraphrase Ron Silliman in his post, who happen to be Asian American.*

I’m preparing for two sections of an “Asian American culture” class in the fall, and as an anthropologist, I taught my previous sections from a social sciences angle, only to be told later on that the classes were meant to deal with “the expressive arts.” But while reading through different anthologies recently, I found myself stupidly passing over the fiction and poetry that weren’t specifically coded as “Asian American,” i.e., those pieces that didn’t deal with language or racism or food or repressive tradition, as if “Asian American” couldn’t encapsulate anything else. And so I was therefore unwittingly duplicating some Orientalist notion of what Asian or Asian American meant. In any case, the discussion in class should be interesting next year.

*It should be made clear, though, that this is very different from the fantasy of social colorblindness.

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