7 - Filipino and Filipina Voices

Summary

This chapter discusses Filipina/o American literature, which speak of the vexed history of Filipino migration to the United States. The circumstances of Filipina and Filipino literary production in the early twentieth century were transpacific, influenced by the occupation of the Philippines and U.S. imperial history, and by factors that range from the social and cultural to the aesthetic and representational: public discourse surrounding Filipina/o bodies in the United States, the intersection of the Filipina feminist movement with global women's suffrage, shifting notions of gender and sexuality, and experiments in literary form. Developments in Filipina transpacific feminism are conversant with, and contribute to, literary engagements with male migrant and exilic experience. The chapter deals with the works of Felicidad Ocampo, José Garcia Villa and Carlos Blouson, and others such as Bienvenido N. Santos and Yay Panlilio who highlight the gendered and classed dimensions of forming national communities in the postwar era.