![]() How is this feat possible? Can we believe a mimicry or facsimile is better than the original-unless the original itself has lost its foundational, originary virtue and become a simulacrum?Īre we now, by that token, postcolonized and cast into what Aijaz Ahmad (1995) calls "the infinite regress of heterogeneity"? Is the Filipino experience of subjugation by and resistance to U.S. On this last difference, Arjun Appaddurai, a postcolonial expert, thinks it's negligible on the testimony of worldtraveller Pico Iyer who swears that Filipinos can sing American songs better than Americans themselves. Most Americans who have visited the Philippines after 1945 confirm this dependency: Filipino society is a nearly successful replica of the United States-except that its citizens are mostly dark-skinned, poor, ostensibly "Roman Catholic" in faith, and also speak a variety of American English. Despite the removal of the bases, however, most Filipinos have been so profoundly "Americanized" that the claim of an autonomous and distinctive identity sounds like plea-bargaining after summary conviction. military installations, dependent politically, economically, and culturally on the rulers in Washington. Throughout the Cold War epoch, the Philippines remained a virtual possession, a neocolony if you will, with over a dozen U.S. ![]() citizens parity in exploiting the country's natural and human resources. Independence was given soon after-but under duress: the Philippine Constitution had to be amended to give U.S. In search of a springboard to the China market, the United States suppressed the Philippine Republic in the Filipino-American War of 1898-1902 by killing a million resisting Filipinos and converting the rest into what William Howard Taft called "little brown brothers." During World War II, Filipinos under the American flag died fighting against the Japanese. My mailing address is no longer Manila, Philippines-for about half a century a bona fide colony of the United States and once administered under the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Philippine Islands was granted formal independence in 1946.ġ998 marks the centennial of the first Philippine Republic born from the fires of the 1896 revolution against Spain. Unless you happen to be from East Timor, Corsica, Kurdistan, or nearer our shores, Puerto Rico, in which case your postality is in danger of evaporating. It seems almost an unavoidable if somewhat comic necessity now, at least in the academic world, for someone who appears to be from a minority enclave to be labelled a "postcolonial" scholar or expert. Transforming Identity in Postcolonial Narrative: An Approach to the Novels of Jessica Hagedorn
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