Belated Happy New Year to you all. I’ve been online, though mostly in work and research mode. I’ve been trawling the USF Gleeson Library online databases for my spring semester course, finalizing my syllabus, downloading readings (articles, literary work) from Project MUSE et al, and uploading these into Blackboard. I’ve been contacting local Filipino American artists and arts orgs. I should also say that my syllabus transformed itself from a dense and disorganized outline o’ stuff into something manageable, interesting, and hopefully fun; this has happened because I’ve been thinking about Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales and Valerie Soe, both of whom have taught the Community Arts course in SFSU’s Asian American Studies Department.
So this is what my course is becoming, a series of discussions of the work of local arts orgs and mostly local artists, in order to think about Fil Am arts advocacy and activism, at the same time, to engage the works for their historical and cultural themes (i.e. as historical documents), and to engage them as art (i.e. created by artists with some amount of education/training and technical expertise in their respective fields). Filipino American artists as cultural historians — that thing again, about how we can’t simply be “artists,” or “Artists,” that we must always create art that is relevant, accessible, and affirming to our communities, that our art must always be an autobiographical statement, that our art must always be historically and ethnically correct.
So then, I am wondering whether our art “suffers,” becomes stunted as art, as a result of these expectations of having to be ethnic identity based and “correct.” This comes up as I’ve been in contact with a very talented local filmmaker named Nara Denning, whose noir-ish, silent film work seems to me anything but Fil Am ethnic identity based. I have to figure out how to present and discuss this work in a Fil Am Arts course, so it’s a challenge to myself, but also I believe a challenge to those who hold rigidly to ethnic identity based art, with no “taint” of Western institutional, “Ivory Tower” influence. I say these things to underscore extremes, how they are unhelpful.
Which brings me to this. I’ve been thinking about autobiographical faithfulness, historical and ethnic correctness as pertains to Diwata. I’ve blogged here before about my apprehension that Diwata be read as accurate and faithful representation of Filipino mythology. Well, it’s not; it’s a whole lotta confabulation, which I have been explaining to my potential blurbers and cover artist. As well, since I’ve just been given an opportunity to contribute to the publicity materials for the book, I’ve written this: “The poems in Diwata are invented, reimagined, and rewritten mythologies in which my Filipina storyteller provides different circumstances and outcomes for her heroines….”
The poetic speaker is not me. The stories are and aren’t what I’ve been told. They come from Filipino sources, and not. They utilize Filipino oral tradition, and many other oral and written forms, including those which I made up.
I have also been thinking about “political” and “relevant,” and why these must be so intertwined with autobiography and “identity politics,” and so divorced from substantial, critical discussions on artistic process, and substantial, critical discussions about the details of the work itself.
In addition to Nara Denning, another artist whose work I am using this coming semester is Jenifer K. Wofford, specifically her MacArthur Nurses series. She has very generously provided me with her notes on this series, which was recently included in a Manila Contemporary Gallery exhibit. Here is one of the images in her series:
Beyond the more apparent influence of Douglas MacArthur’s infamous landing at Leyte Beach, Wofford’s notes include discussion of Hurricane Katrina, river baptisms in the American South, Gaugin, and Vermeer. So there’s a lot going on here in terms of composition, in terms of “Western” artistic and cultural influence and appropriation, in terms of Filipino history, diaspora, transnationalism.
OK. I haven’t resolved anything here, but rather, I’ve brain dumped. Well, it’s helpful for me as I try to get myself reorganized. Onward, I suppose.
Looking forward to Diwata.
love your description about diwata! and i look forward to future thots on “political and relevant, and why these must be so intertwined with autobiography and “identity politics,” and so divorced from substantial, critical discussions on artistic process, and substantial, critical discussions about the details of the work itself.”
so true
Thanks for your comments!
Craig, yes I see you’ve also mentioned something similar on Harriet re: ethnic poetry and being steeped in the obligatory identity stuff. So yeah, it’s stuff I have been and will continue to think about (and hopefully blog about).
Looks like it’s going to be a really good, expansive syllabus.
_So then, I am wondering whether our art “suffers,” becomes stunted as art, as a result of these expectations of having to be ethnic identity based and “correct.”_
Nicely put. In a comment I just posted to another blog, I worried out loud about the term “ethnic writer,” when it’s defined as being a writer who’s from an ethnic minority background– how this definition seems both too confining (for the writer) and too broad (for the body of work known as “ethnic literature,” which functions both as literature and the aesthetic wing of a larger political/cultural discipline & movement).
I’ve been reading some of the later essays by Susan Sontag, where she talks about writers who were both great writers and ethically, politically engaged individuals. She also talks about this notion of “world literature,” by which she basically means great works of literature read across national & cultural borders, often in translation. In the same essay where she talks about Victor Serge, the ex-Bolshevik revolutionary novelist and political writer, she also cites Jose Rizal’s Noli me Tangere as being one of the great panoramic revolutionary novels of world lit.
So I’m wondering if this notion of the work of contemporary ethnic artists being “Western”-influenced can actually be recast as their work being “world”-influenced. Many of the aesthetic forms & conventions we recognize today as established or institutional did originate in the west, yes (specifically Europe, and not just the English-speaking parts), but Occidental art & thought has always been influenced by art & thought from other regions of the world, and vice versa, and once something gets put out into the world as literature & art, it does, on the most basic, ethically engaged level, belong to everybody. It’s like what Eileen Myles said in her Poetry Foundation interview of CA Conrad, that the interview could have been published in June, the month for queers, but it’s good it wasn’t because CA Conrad belongs not just to queers but to everyone.
There’s always the danger of remaining too provincial in one’s art. Sontag worries about what the hegemonic domination of English as the lingua franca of the scientific & business world means for world lit: according to her, it means the focus is too much on lit written in English and not enough on great lit written in other languages that don’t get translated into English. (Actually, I believe this is something that Kent Johnson has also worried out loud about quite a bit; maybe he and Craig have a future as Facebook buddies after all– but keep the poking between yourselves, boys!
)
Anyway, it’s important for ethnic writers who have a multivalent engagement with their communities to keep their ties to these communities and keep their work relevant to the local & pressing concerns of their communities, but for the sake of the art I think they could also, whenever possible, expand and look beyond the local, beyond the local U.S. landscape even, out into the landscape of world art, world thought, world affinities. And not just with the aim of building a separatist counter-canon, but of engaging with literature as literature, art as art. Then the notion of ethnicity in literature & art could be less a potentially provincial limit zone tied to identity, and more a contribution to the world at-large, a critical system, an engagement that captures the attention & respect of everybody.
I’d like to think about the ethics contained within ethnic.
p.s. BTW, I’m glad you’re still holding strong with the blog presence and commentbox dialoguing, and haven’t retreated into the closed system known as Facebook…
Excellent post, Barbara Jane which encapsulates a lot of the discussions I’ve been reading online from other FilAm writers, artists and activists. Not all at once or all the issues you mention at the same time, but there’s resonances.
Pam’s notation “.. it’s important for ethnic writers who have a multivalent engagement with their communities to keep their ties to these communities and keep their work relevant to the local & pressing concerns of their communities, but for the sake of the art I think they could also, whenever possible, expand and look beyond the local, beyond the local U.S. landscape even, out into the landscape of world art, world thought, world affinities…” is a great observation of how to creatively move forward. It limits the tendency toward nostalgia and essentialism.
In my own work, I’m looking at this idea of “art” – a couple of Native American artists I’ve talked with mentioned how in the older languages, there is no word for “art” – the decorations we find so fascinating in totem poles and bentwood boxes are identifiers of family and clan, or forms of self-expression borne of dreams. The piece still has to function – be a good box to cook in, be a solid marker bearing the prayers of the people, be something well-crafted so the representation is definitive and honor-bearing.
So I’ve been looking at how my writing functions, what is it doing, how do I place my mark upon it so it’s recognizable, how does it communicate in the communities I perceive myself as belonging to. I hope then that this translates into ‘authentic,’ from the heart, with no apologies or explanations of the self-expressive moment. But I’m in a pretty cloistered space, and haven’t had the more public experience others have, so I’m not sure if this will hold up in practice. I hope it does, though.
So BJ, this is so interesting to me because I recently wrote a story that isn’t like anything I’ve written before and which, coincidentally, doesn’t bear any Filipino or Filipino-American “markers.” It didn’t occur to me in any serious way to submit it here in the States, probably because of many of the things you refer to in this post. But I felt perfectly comfortable submitting it to a spec fiction anthology being published in the Philippines (by the wonderful Alfars), and they accepted it. I find it odd that submitting there relieved me of the sorta awkward way I felt at having not written something overtly Filipino. And where did that awkwardness come from anyways? Did I inflict it on myself, or what (um, rhetorical)?!
My head hurts now.
Hey folks, wow, thanks for all these great comments. I think this necessitates an additional blog post, but for now:
@Bec: I am still grappling with “usefulness,” as pertains to art. Or pre-”art,” then the practicality and again, usefulness of story/storytelling. More on this soon.
@Ver: I hear you on that self-consciousness about ethnic markers. I think if we have them, we should just let them be a fact of our work, the world of our work, and not any kind of fetishized thing. And if we don’t have them, then we don’t, and it’s not a big sin. So, like you, I anticipate editors (Fil Am or not) not thinking my stuff is ethnic in the way they want me to be ethnic, easy for all to digest. This is also my “beef” with that autobiographical expectation.
@Pam: I also prefer “world influence” over “Western influence,” and agree with you on this: “.. it’s important for ethnic writers who have a multivalent engagement with their communities to keep their ties to these communities and keep their work relevant to the local & pressing concerns of their communities, but for the sake of the art I think they could also, whenever possible, expand and look beyond the local, beyond the local U.S. landscape even, out into the landscape of world art, world thought, world affinities…”
OK, more soon! Thanks again!
After seeing Ver’s comment about her dilemma of where to submit a story without obvious “markers,” and remembering that this post is about compiling a syllabus for college students, I feel like adding this: setting all theoretical & ideological thoughts aside, it helped me tremendously when I was a young student, debating about whether to keep going with my attempts at writing, to have been introduced to writers whom I could identify with (I’m thinking in particular of Berssenbrugge & a couple others), who were writing in ways that didn’t fit the expected, markered, whatever, norms that they had undoubtedly felt pressured to fill. And yet I could perceive how their experiences of otherness, hybridity, whatever, still filtered through their work in however indirect and oblique ways. And how this implicitness rather than explicitness functioned itself as a kind of larger commentary (another e.g.: the Premonitions anthology) and was something that resonated with me both personally and aesthetically in a big way. And I felt encouraged as never before.
So this is my more personal comment contradicting my more polemical comment above: the big plus side of organizing a syllabus around ethnicity proper and opening it up to a variety of works that may or may not fit competing notions of what ethnic work should or should not be, is that it benefits the students, exposes them to a diversity of perspectives and a diversity of possible ways to read, view, write, create, and be. Young people, esp. young people who may feel isolated in any number of ways, need to experience identification. And it’s a gift to be able to give them as many opportunities of identification to choose from as humanly possible.
Hi Pam, re: “I could perceive how their experiences of otherness, hybridity, whatever, still filtered through their work in however indirect and oblique ways. And how this implicitness rather than explicitness functioned itself as a kind of larger commentary.”
Yes, absolutely! I like the idea of applicability rather than strict adherence to explicitly “ethnic” themes. This is one thing I’m thinking about re: Nara Denning’s film, Madalien the Small (you can find this link in my Twitter feed), the theme of coming from elsewhere, and having to find your way in the big city/metropolis, etc.
Wow, yeah, I see what you mean. I was able to watch about two-thirds of Denning’s film before it got lost over my bad network connection, will have to watch the rest when I have a wired conenct– the theme of coming from elsewhere seems to function as both a metaphorical and allegorical hook. It resonates on a number of different levels of applicability, as you say: ethnicity (this being film, the race & physical attributes of the characters can’t be ignored), gendered experience (classic tale of little girl goes to the big city), and just the plain old trials & tribulations of being an outsider/newcomer. It’s both general and specific, a bit like Kafka, the estrangement that’s hard to reduce or pinpoint.
The silent film format also made me see Madalien as a visitor from another time, as well as place. Maybe this is just me, feeling shock whenever I see an Asian face pop up in a film or photographic context that appears to be U.S./Europe in the 1920s/30s. Of course Asians actually existed in this context, but not that many, and I can hardly fathom what it must have been like to live as an Asian person in that context, before anything like an Asian American or Filipina American identity had been formulated the way it is today, post 1960s immigration wave. So ethnicity in this film also looks like a kind of time graft, a metaphor perhaps of Denning (is that her playing the protagonist?) inserting herself as filmmaker into the timeline of a historically Caucasian-centric cinema.