Half a century after its independence from the United States, the Philippines is still very much in a neocolonial stage.¹ Epifanio San Juan Jr. notes that “the Filipino has been produced by Others (Spaniards, Japanese, theAmerikanos), not mainly by her own will to be recognized” (Articulations of Power,118). Filipinos are transnational subalterns, used in many countries as cheap and temporary labor: the “‘warm body export’ of Filipino workers to the Middle East; Filipinas as ‘mail-order brides,’ ubiquitous prostitutes around enclaves formerly occupied by U.S. military bases; and ‘hospitality girls’ in Tokyo, Bangkok, Okinawa, and Taipei” (San Juan, The...

This Place Called Absence,by Asian Canadian Lydia Kwa, andFox Girl,by Asian American Nora Okja Keller, are novels that bear witness to the horrors of being a prostitute to foreigners either in one’s own or in another country. Kwa’s work recreates the lives of two young “ah ku” who work in the brothels of Singapore in the early 1900s, while Keller’s book recounts the makeshift and desperate existence of two teenage prostitutes in Korea in the 1960s. Carefully researched by the authors, both novels attempt to give voice to women whose stories have not been well documented in...

That our bodies have been the site of various socially constructed meanings has been recognized by a number of feminist critics from Simonede Beauvoir to Judith Butler. In the past decade, cultural and race theorists have also argued that race is ideologically constructed and that racial identity is a process dependent on social and historical circumstances (see Omi and Winant, “On the Theoretical Status of the Concept of Race,” 203). More recently, scholars who work on disability have contended that “disability is an unstable category” similarly dependent on material circumstances, social perception, and representation (Davis,Bending Over Backwards,9). Lennard...

Nina Aquino and Nadine Villasin’s playMiss Orient(ed)and Deepa Mehta’s filmBollywood/Hollywood(2002), both set in Toronto, use humor, irony, and parody to question and challenge the insidious effects of global American culture on Asians, particularly those in the North American diaspora. First performed in Toronto in December 2001 and then again in the spring of 2003,Miss Orient(ed)is a raucous and entertaining theatrical production featuring an all - female cast of Filipina Canadians.¹ Set in the world of the “Miss Pearl of the Orient” beauty pageant, the play reveals the ways in which contemporary Filipinas have been stereotyped,...

As I have argued, novels by writers of the first generation of Asian North Americans, such as those by Maxine Hong Kingston, Carlos Bulosan, and Joy Kogawa, though frequently infused with legends and myths, have tended to be mainly autobiographical and based on the realities of social history.¹ Writers of the late 1980s and 1990s, such as Amy Tan, Jessica Hagedorn, Gish Jen, Wayson Choy, Chang - rae Lee, and others, have continued this tradition but have incorporated postmodern techniques of intertextuality—the use of parallel and disjunctive narratives, dreams, and postcolonial history—in their novels. However, most of these...

A number of Japanese North American novels have explored the traumatic experience of dislocation, internment, confiscation of property, and dispersals of the Japanese Canadian and Japanese American communities during and after the Second World War and the consequences of these events. The best - known example is Joy Kogawa’sObasan,which delineates the mostly silent suffering of Japanese Canadians during that period. Other works about Japanese Americans during the war include Monica Itoi Sone’sNisei Daughterand John Okada’sNo-No Boy.Recently Japanese Canadian and Japanese American novels have been moving away from focusing on that subject and have attempted...