Annotation: Don Shewey’s “Theater; Filipino Life, Seen Through a Pop Culture Prism” (2001)

Peer-Review: 0

Shewey, Don. “Theater; Filipino Life, Seen Through a Pop Culture Prism.” New York Times 4 March 2001. Web.

In his article Shewey discusses how director Michael Greif commissioned Jessica Hagedorn to adapt her novel Dogeaters for the stage despite her original reservations about the feasibility to transforming her dense prose into a manageable dramatic form. Shewey suggests that Greif reworked the play from its premier performance in California at the La Jolly Playhouse “through a series of developmental workshops to a full production at the Joseph Papp Public Theater” in New York. The latter production is therefore framed as the complete, finalized version, which is supported by the fact that Hagedorn publishes this performance script as the official play text but for my project I am interested in examining the various revisions she makes from the novel to the two US productions and perhaps also the most recent production of Dogeaters in Manila.

Shewey importantly notes that the staging of Dogeaters in the public theater “brings the play as close to mainstream American culture as any dramatic work about Filipino life has ever gotten” (print 1). I wonder if writing for this mainstream audience in mind affected the types of revisions Hagedorn made to her play text.

Shewey cites Hagedorn’s comment on the postmodern structure of her novel: “Manila is a collage, from the very high to the very low, from the very pious to the incredibly depraved. It’s this wonderful tropical city that can’t be easily described or defined. So why should the novel be linear and regimented? It couldn’t, if I was to properly capture what I was trying to capture’ (print 2). In the New York production, however, Hagedorn eliminates the “novel’s split time frame” which Shewey suggests was in response to the reviews of the California performance where critics and viewers decried that the play was too confusing. Hagedorn cuts the scenes from Rio’s childhood and in my paper I will further explore the implications of this revisions.

Shewey finally concludes his article citing another revealing quote from Hagedorn where she explains Dogeaters’ focus on public and private lives as well as their surrealistic collapse: “I’m striving to show…how reality and what I call the dreamtime – escapism – can actually merge. You can lose yourself in this soap opera, but after a while the soap opera starts to reflect what’s really going on in your life. But what comes first, your real drama or the fake drama? Are we living according to what we’ve seen in movies? Is that how we expect romance to occur because we’ve seen it a million times in the movies?” (print 3).

Annotation: Rachel Adams’ “The Ends of America, the Ends of Postmodernism” (2007)

Peer-Review: 0

Adams, Rachel. “The Ends of America, the Ends of Postmodernism.” Twentieth Century Literature: A Scholarly and Critical Journal. 53.3 (2007): n. pag. Web. 12 Sept. 2010.

In this essay Adams asserts that postmodernism is giving away to a new phase of American literature, where authors pointedly explore the effects of globalization in a multicultural, transnational context beyond the borders of the US nation-state. She explicitly compares Pynchon’s canonical postmodern work, The Crying of Lot 49, with Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange, which she asserts is reflective of this new American literary globalism. She notes that unlike traditional postmodernist works, this emerging group of contemporary American writers are often immigrants themselves or come from an immigrant background and while they may rely on some familiar postmodernist forms they distinguish themselves through their acute concern about “the vast inequities, economic interconnections, and movement of people and goods associated with globalization” (print 2). Adams explains that Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange are apt for comparison because both novels take place in California and posit Mexico as a significant player in shaping US socioeconomic politics and identity.

She asserts that Pynchon presents California as:

a place that values superficiality over depth…where neighborhoods and downtowns have been eradicated in favor of vast, sprawling networks of freeway, and where faceless new information industries have made workers ever more alienated from the products of their labor (print 5)

Adams describes how the novel is characterized by an overwhelming sense of Cold War paranoia, political exhaustion and disillusionment towards potential for progress. Mexico just signifies another dead end, “adding to the clutter of signs whose meaning may amount to no more than endless deferral and information overload” (print 7).

Adams argues that Yamashita deliberately diverges from this representation of California as an entirely superficial, materialistic, alienating and dead city. Tropic of Orange conversely presents California as “a nodal point where globalization threatens to erupt into environmental and human catastrophe, but also where people find themselves creating unlikely coalitions that might work to remedy these problems” (print 3). While Adams admits that the Hypercontext Grid that prefaces the actual narrative offers readers a misleading sense of order, she emphasizes that characters such as Gabriel come to accept that chaos by “recognizing its likeness to the ubiquitous technology of the internet” (print 9). She notes that Emi is the character most deeply connected with the Internet and communications technology in the novel. Bitter and sarcastic, with little regard for the past or cultural diversity as a model for the future, Emi, Adams asserts, is representative of the traditional postmodern antihero. She further argues that Emi’s “unsentimental elimination” in Tropic of Orange suggests that the future has no place for such a character and “belongs instead to characters like Gabriel or the community organizer Buzzworm, who are both more respectful of the past and willing to harbor utopian visions of the future” (print 9).

Adams also notes how Yamashita diverges from the consideration of Cold War geopolitics of many postmodernist works, aligning the geographic and topographical shifts in her novel to “the massive demographic and perspectival shifts introduced by contemporary globalization and linked to the long history of conquest and colonization in the Americas” (print 10). She further emphasizes that Yamashita presents a vision where “America’s future is tied to Latin America and Asia” (print 10). Contrary to Pynchon’s representation of Mexico, Adams describes how Yamashita’s configuration of US-Mexico relations directly alludes to economic policies such as NAFTA and CAFTA (print 11).

She additionally discusses how this hemispheric focus is reflected in the very form of Yamashita’s novel, which employs a “creative fusion of Latin American-inspired magical realism with allusions to such Anglo-American sources as hard-boiled detective fiction and Hollywood film” (print 11). In addition to the movement of Southern people to the North and geographic border shifts, Tropic of Orange dramatizes the “melding of Northern and Southern cultural forms…evident in the novel’s structure, which vacillates between the linear, goal-oriented model of plot development of the Anglo-American detective novel and cyclical understandings of time indebted to Amerindian sources such as the Mayan codices” (print 11).

Adam emphasizes that Yamashita deliberately presents the voices and perspectives of racially marked characters that have been traditionally marginalized, silenced, or omitted from the historical archive. She notes that while globalization has “resulted in the dispersal and intensification of economic disparities,” it also opens up new possibilities for resistance and protest. Adams particularly points to the bands of homeless people who take over the abandoned cars on the LA freeway that have been entirely gridlocked by a major traffic accident. These individuals essentially create a functional society with its own system of order. She emphasizes that “the dreaded gridlock does not bring urban life to an end. Instead, the crisis forces people to see and feel the city differently, as they experience it by foot” (print 13). Adams accentuates that this a significant difference between Yamashita and Pynchon because the characters in Tropic of Orange do not become completely immobilized or wallow over their total lack of agency. She admits that the ending is rather ambiguous as Gran Mojado dies in his final match with SUPERNAFTA but notes that this defeat is matched “with the reunion of a truly global family—the Singaporean Bobby, Mexican Rafaela, and their son Sol,” which offers readers some sense of hope for the future (print 13).

Adams finally concludes her essay by expressing her enthusiasm over this new global shift in American literature, characterized by “the recent realignment of the field’s geographic parameters to reflect multiple Americas that are more mobile and expansive than the borders of the US nation-state” (print 14).

Oh sorry meant to point out the the (print #) citations are for my own personal reference because I pasted the essay into a word document. I just wanted an easier way to locate quotes and such. ^^

Annotation: Rachel C. Lee’s “Transversing Nationalism, Gender, and Sexuality in Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters” (1999)

Peer-Review: 0

Lee, Rachel C. “Transversing Nationalism, Gender, and Sexuality in Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters.” The Americas of Asian American Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999. 73-105. Print.

In her essay Lee asserts that the representation of popular American in Hagedorn’s Dogeaters calls attention to US neocolonialism in the Philippines. She suggests that Hagedorn depicts a world where “Manila residents take pleasure in and identify with icons of U.S. popular culture” which inform their desires (75). But while Lee recognizes American film as means of cultural imperialism, she argues that it also serves as potential grounds from which a collective Filipino identity can be fashioned. Lee notes that Hagedorn presents characters with different colonial mentalities, some hopelessly seduced by Hollywood dreams and others who eventually achieved a “political ‘awakening’” (74). She accentuates that this “awakening” takes many different forms that extend beyond the patriarchal nationalist paradigm as Hagedorn narrates important “feminist and gay awakenings” (74). Lee calls attention to how the novel is not told “from the perspective of elected officials and their military henchmen, but from the perspective of these leaders’ mistresses, sisters, daughters, and wives” (74).

Lee begins her essay by responding to the prevailing critiques of Hagedorn’s putatively “postmodern” literary style. Critics have denounced the novel for its loose treatment of history and lack of realism. Lee, however, places Hagedorn’s novel in the tradition of “decolonizing writing,” which Lisa Lowe describes as possibly “includ[ing] features associated with postmodernism (such as nonlinear, antirepresentational aesthetics), emerges not from a terrain of philosophical or poetic otherness within the West but out of the contradictions of what Bipan Chandra has called the ‘colonial mode of production’”(81). Lee emphasizes that Hagedorn’s shift between multiple perspectives is productive because it compels the readers to recognize how a particular incident is seen, experienced, and represented differently with respect to the narrator’s social relations and status. She offers Pucha’s first hand letter to Rio at the end of the novel as one example. There Pucha speaks extensively for the first time, challenging her cousin’s representation of her, which in turn causes the reader to question the information we have been presented thus far and even more importantly, our ideological assumptions. Lee further notes how Hagedorn’s novel offers different visions of reality that significantly conflict with official narratives by “intellectual such as the nineteenth century French traveler Jean Mallat and the Aemrican president William McKinly” (79).

Lee spends the later half of her essay discussing Hagedorn’s deliberate attention to the “perpetual nonsubjects of history,” particularly the experiences of “feminine postcoloniality” (82, 74). She demonstrates how women in the novel have severely limited societal roles and are deeply constrained within them. Lee notes how the “bomba star,” Lolita Luna, is an incredibly famous actress with an enormous fan but her agency is still deeply circumscribed by masculine power (82). Lolita yearns to escape to America and start a new life there, but to do so she must appeal to “her sexual patron, General Ledesma,” who ultimately refuses, or submit to being the object of an experimental film that intends to feature invasive camera close-ups of her vagina (82). Lee asserts that “Hagedorn’s novel continually stresses how politics—the legacies of colonial power relations, machismo, and patriarchal sentiment—impinge upon the intimate venues of sex, seduction, and family” (85).

But while American movies emerge as a form of US cultural imperialism in the Philippines, Lee argues that Hagedorn does not imply that the people are merely passive recipients of these American images and ideals, “us[ing] the penetrating force of cinematic gaze to reverse the usual power relations between spectator and spectacle” (87). Lee suggests that the gaze Hagedorn attempts to subvert is simultaneously masculine and imperialistic and she does so by focusing on the often overlooked women of the Philippines. Lee asserts that nationalism has historically had an antagonistic relationship with feminism as a predominantly patriarchal movement forwarded through the policing of native women. She notes, however, that Hagedorn’s character, Daisy Avila reconciles nationalism and feminism in the novel. Lee emphasizes that Daisy’s subsequent retreat from the public after winning the beauty contest, stirs “a national crisis because it defies the traditional role of the Filipina to serve her country through self-exhibition” (91). While Daisy must eventually appear on television and turn herself into a spectacle, she mobilizes the media to denounce the beauty contest as perpetuating a harmful pattern of female objectification, something her father, Senator Avila failed to notice or address.

Lee concludes her essay by focusing on “Rio’s transnationalism,” a female character who does manage to successfully escape to the United States (99). She asserts that Hagedorn presents the US as “the site for women’s escape from…[the] male authoritative gaze” (99). Lee emphasizes that Rio wants to go to America, not to become an actress but rather make films. In this manner Hagedorn opens the possibility “where women’s desires might exceed the terms set up by male producers and where women can both produce themselves and inappropriately choose their lovers” (100). Lee offers numerous textual examples alluding to Rio’s lesbian/queer sexual identity and importantly notes that she never gets married, suggesting that such a single independent life is possible in the United States. Yet, Lee also calls attention to the failures of “Rio’s transnationalism,” emphasizing that her escape to America is essentially viewed as an act of betrayal within the nationalistic paradigm because she supposedly allows “foreign men’s appropriation of native men’s possessions” (99).

Lee ultimately emphasizes that Hagedorn does not present Daisy or Rio as perfect models of resistance to imperialistic, sexist forces. Rio refuses to forsake her “deviant” sexual desires “to fight the nationalistic cause, since the prospects of her benefiting from the success of that revolution is question” and as Daisy mobilizes a political resistance movement, her feminist concerns are relegated to a subservient level of importance (102). Joey, the other prominent narrator in the novel, who possesses a queer sexual identity does join Daisy’s political project but at that point his queer-ness is also notably submerged. Lee ultimately accentuates that Hagedorn does not theorize queer subjectivity as “a positive counterhegemonic representational strategy,” offering instead, “space for alternative, as-yet-unrealized identifications to emerge” (103). Hagedorn’s novel reveals that in light of multiple oppressions, multiple strategies are necessary to overcome them.

Annotation: David Porush’s “Hacking the Brainstem” (1994)

Peer-Review: 0

This annotation was written in reference to my paper on Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, as yet, still untitled. See my prospectus here.

Porush, David. “Hacking the Brainstem: Postmodern Metaphysics and Stephenson’s Snow Crash.” Configurations 2.3 (1994): 537-71. Print.

In this article Porush discusses how cyberspace is often presented in literature as offering the possibility for transcendence of the physical body. Users traverse and operate in this new cyberspatial terrain through a “‘meta’ body in the brain” (538). Porush essentially asserts that postmodern cyberpunk novels deal explicitly with meta-physics and meta-physical modes of existence. He emphasizes that this link has been often overlooked by critics because postmodernists are uncomfortable with the spiritual connotations of metaphysics. Yet, Porush argues that postmodern fiction’s “critique of rationalism, and of the scientific/technological project of our culture in particular,” suggests an embracement of irrationality that is very much a part of metaphysical thought and even more importantly, the experience of cyberspace itself (539). Porush emphasizes that users have to delude themselves into believing that they can temporarily dissociate from their material bodies and exist in a meta-physical form of disembodied consciousness in order to fully inhabit cyberspace. In the latter part of his essay Porush examines how Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash presents transcendent views of cyberspace, which is interestingly called the “Metaverse” in the novel, but ultimately rejects those meta-physical visions because of an enduring attachment to rationalism. Porush discusses how the Snow Crash virus destabilizes the distinction between the real world and virtual reality by affecting both digitized avatars and the material human brain, suggesting a transcendence of space and human-machine dichotomies. He emphasizes the that virus also reveals a universal tongue embedded deeply within the internal structures of the human brain, which suggests another form linguistic transcendence. Porush notes, however, that by the end of the novel this universalism is denounced by rationalistic deductions that this transcendent commonality between humans can be dangerously exploited.

Porush’s analysis of the metaphysics of cyberspace will be helpful in formulating my own thesis as I extend his argument to consider how this meta-physicality affects race, which is often associated with phenotypical characteristics of the physical human body. As he asserts that cyberspace requires a delusion of sorts, I will interrogate what kinds of delusions users have about race. Particularly important to my own paper is Porush’s own “delusion” of Hiro’s racial, national identity as he asserts “Hiro is a Japanese American hacker living in L.A” (561). This statement suggests an egregious erasure of both his Korean and African American heritage, which can be a telling slippage of how cyberspace is racialized and those identities that are excluded.