American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America

Critical American Studies

by Allan Punzalan Isaac

In 1997, when the New York Times described Filipino American serial killer Andrew Cunanan as appearing “to be everywhere and nowhere,” Allan Punzalan Isaac recognized confusion about the Filipino presence in the United States, symptomatic of American imperialism’s invisibility to itself. In American Tropics, Isaac explores American fantasies about the Philippines and other “unincorporated” parts of the U.S. nation that obscure the contradictions of a democratic country possessing colonies. Isaac boldly examines the American empire’s images of the Philippines in turn-of-the-century legal debates over Puerto Rico, Progressive-era popular literature set in Latin American borderlands, and midcentury Hollywood cinema staged in Hawai‘i and the Pacific islands. Isaac scrutinizes media coverage of the Cunanan case, Boy Scout adventure novels, and Hollywood films such as The Real Glory (1939) and Blue Hawaii (1961) to argue that territorial sites of occupation are an important part of American identity. American Tropics further reveals the imperial imagination’s role in shaping national meaning in novels such as Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart (1946) and Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters (1990), Filipino American novels forced to articulate the empire’s enfolded but disavowed borders. Tracing the American empire from the beginning of the twentieth century to Philippine liberation and the U.S. civil rights movement, American Tropics lays bare Filipino Americans’ unique form of belonging marked indelibly by imperialism and at odds with U.S. racial politics and culture. Allan Punzalan Isaac is assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University.

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2006

Reviews

[sdw · Rating 4 out of 5]

American Tropics resituates the imperial construction of the Philippines in the American imagination. Isaac suggests the Philippines and Filipino Americans are rendered invisible by the Imperial logic of the United States. The work seeks to place an analysis of the racial construction of the Philippines and an analysis of Filipino American literature as part of an “American Tropics” discourse of unincorporated territories rather than seeing Filipino authors and the Philippines as part of a dominant immigration-exclusion paradigm in Asian American studies. The opening of the book lays this theoretical groundwork, particularly in relationship to popular culture references that I apparently missed when they occurred (namely Filipino American serial killer Andrew Cunanan), and an incisive legal analysis focused on the “Insular Cases.” [Remember learning about them in high school? Remember how they forgot to explain we were learning about U.S. imperialism?]

The book then moves to a reading of turn of the century boy scout novels set in Mexico, Panama, and the Philippines and post-WWII movies set in the Pacific Islands (like Elvis’ Blue Hawaii ). These were pretty enjoyable to read and remarkably clear. (Who doesn’t want to hear about “The Case of the Missing Class Conflict”?) The final two chapters are literary analysis. The first compares Bulosan’s America is In the Heart to Piri Thomas’ Down These Mean Streets and John Dominis Holt’s Waimea Summer and Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters. These chapters demonstrate how these works construct a Filipino subject to speak back to the “imperial grammar” with a “postcolonial syntax.”

If you aren’t into literary analysis I think you might still enjoy 2-4 (Just don’t let the theory-crazy intro and the continuation of intimidating chapter names – like “Disappearing Clauses” and “Moral Sentences” - scare you). I think the final two chapters are harder to enjoy if you haven’t read the texts.

[Teshamae · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first couple chapters presented a fascinating look at how Filipinos are caught between being part of the US and not a part following 50 years of colonialism. This should be a part of all American history classes.

It is particularly interesting to me as a Minnesota historican as he focuses on a murderer (Filipino American) who murdered a man in Chisago County, Minnesota. Andrew Cunanan went on to kill Gianni Versace as well, part of a five-person killing spree that spanned the United States.