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Reviews
| American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America. By Allan Punzalan Isaac. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. xxx + 205 pp. Notes and index. $20.00 (paper).
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An ambitious attempt to reconstitute the willful amnesia of the Philippines from the U.S. imagination, Allan Punzalan Isaac's American Tropics is a welcome and original contribution to the recent surge of scholarship on Filipinos and Filipino Americans and their wide-ranging coordinates within the U.S. imperial cosmology. Through the interdisciplinary study of law, literature (from the rhetorically troubling Boy Scouts novels of 1911 to the brilliantly cacophonous Dogeaters [1990] of Jessica Hagedorn), and films and musicals rhapsodizing about an American Pacific, Isaac navigates not only the "mobile borders" of Filipino America, but also its "mobile bodies" (p. xxv). Initially pondering the spectral Andrew Cunanan—the serial killer notorious for killing Gianni Versace—Isaac argues that as the American public misrecognized Cunanan's Filipino heritage, the United States has historically refused to acknowledge both the presence of Filipinos in America and the facticity of the U.S. empire itself. |
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Drawing on the work of Hayden White, Isaac illuminates the dark shadow cast by the "American Tropics" within that empire. As he puts it, "Focusing on the Philippines and Filipino America as crucial parts of that shadow, the American Tropics turns upon 'America' to demonstrate how America not only is itself a trope but continually gyrates and generates tropes about itself to underscore its identity ... against its perceived others" (p. 1). More than a story about metropole and periphery, Tropics innovatively maps the postcolonial Filipino imagination within "dislocated American island spaces" (p. xxx), proffering a new and convincing narrative turn in American culture. |
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Proposing a theoretical framework of "enfolded borders" (p. 47), Isaac manages to encompass much more than a simple, dichotomous analysis of the United States and the Philippines in building upon the foundational work of Sharon Delmendo's Star-Entangled Banner (Piscataway, NJ, 2004). Pushing towards a comparativist focus on literary and filmic texts, he deftly draws connections (and contrasts) among Filipinos, Hawaiians, Chamorros, Samoans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Mexicans. Isaac saves his best analysis for last, intertwining the writings of Piri Thomas, Carlos Bulosan, John Dominis Holt, and Hagedorn, persuasively arguing that through such readings, "7,100 islands did, in fact, float away from Latin American shores to settle for the moment in Asia, only to shuttle back and forth across the Pacific and the Caribbean" (p. 178). |
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As a result, Isaac assiduously earns his bona fides amongst the likes of David Eng and Kandice Chuh, critics ingeniously reorienting (Asian) American literary studies. It would, nonetheless, be interesting to place Isaac's work in conversation with historian Catherine Ceniza Choy's Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino America (Durham, NC, 2003) or Paul Kramer's The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Baltimore, MD, 2006). While strongly persuaded by the argument of a "ghostly" Filipino and an American Tropics that should keep the empire febrile and sweating, I would relish more insertion of the individuals—the people themselves—who historically inform this discussion. To wit, the monograph is at its best when describing the authors, Cunanan, legal plaintiffs, or recent presidential candidate Fernando Poe Jr. These historical actors ground Isaac's analysis within specific times and spaces, even if we acknowledge the shifting and floating nature of these contextual land- (and sea-)scapes. |
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In the end, though, Isaac commands the reader's attention through his thoughtful, consistent, and serious critique of hypocrisies and aporiae within empire, as well as by his smart and engaging narrative. American Tropics is a noteworthy and important text, one that will compel scholars to redraw the cartographies of Filipino/American imaginaries.
Matthew M. Briones
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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