'Body beautiful': Exposing the postcolonial mystique in Filipino novels.
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TextDescription: 178 pSubject(s): Literature, Asian | Language, Modern | 0305 | 0291Dissertation note: Thesis (Ph.D.)--Drew University, 1999. Summary: Recent scholarly investigations express contradictory opinions regarding postcolonial residues. While some studies highlight economic development and its concomitant progress, others dismiss the material rewards that ultimately erase a culture's indigenous identity. This paper demonstrates how the female body in fiction as portrayed by male Filipino writers inscribes the traumas and wounding of a once-colonized nation. The various representations of that colonial blight, as the sundered homeland in the novels of Carlos Bulosan, the divided womb in the novels of Nick Joaquin, and the “bisected, cleaved antithetical” land in the novels of Eric Gamalinda usher in the female body as a register of social and political analysis. The female anatomy as social corpus becomes fundamental not only in decoding postcolonial residues but also in structuring larger grammars of resistance.¹ This discursive mode of resistance is also significant in interrogating the unique cultural phenomenon of ‘serial colonization’ as exemplified by the Philippines under Spain, America and, briefly, Japan. This paper, therefore, attempts to address this problem of marginalization by exploring various ways in which the female presence asserts itself in finding a common cause with their male counterparts in emancipationist movements.Summary: Specifically, all three authors use novels to alert the readers to the need to suture the bifurcated cultural umbilical cord traumatized under colonial rule. By ‘figuring out the female body,’ these novels map out the inscription of colonial encounters on the native body politic; reconstruct colonial wounds and traumas through a careful recording of the interaction between the indigenous and the borrowed cultures; retrace the original data of collective memory from such a cross-cultural engagement; and, finally, in their reinvention of the ‘nation,’ actively invoke to repair the damage.
Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 60-09, Section: A, page: 3369.
Chair: Wendy Kolmar.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Drew University, 1999.
Recent scholarly investigations express contradictory opinions regarding postcolonial residues. While some studies highlight economic development and its concomitant progress, others dismiss the material rewards that ultimately erase a culture's indigenous identity. This paper demonstrates how the female body in fiction as portrayed by male Filipino writers inscribes the traumas and wounding of a once-colonized nation. The various representations of that colonial blight, as the sundered homeland in the novels of Carlos Bulosan, the divided womb in the novels of Nick Joaquin, and the “bisected, cleaved antithetical” land in the novels of Eric Gamalinda usher in the female body as a register of social and political analysis. The female anatomy as social corpus becomes fundamental not only in decoding postcolonial residues but also in structuring larger grammars of resistance.¹ This discursive mode of resistance is also significant in interrogating the unique cultural phenomenon of ‘serial colonization’ as exemplified by the Philippines under Spain, America and, briefly, Japan. This paper, therefore, attempts to address this problem of marginalization by exploring various ways in which the female presence asserts itself in finding a common cause with their male counterparts in emancipationist movements.
Specifically, all three authors use novels to alert the readers to the need to suture the bifurcated cultural umbilical cord traumatized under colonial rule. By ‘figuring out the female body,’ these novels map out the inscription of colonial encounters on the native body politic; reconstruct colonial wounds and traumas through a careful recording of the interaction between the indigenous and the borrowed cultures; retrace the original data of collective memory from such a cross-cultural engagement; and, finally, in their reinvention of the ‘nation,’ actively invoke to repair the damage.
School code: 0064.
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