Antipasismo: Filipino American Writers on Empire and the Rule of War

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

In Filipino and Filipino American writing, the term “empire” refers to the U.S. empire or the violent American colonization of the Philippines after the Philippine-American War (1899-1902). While the Philippine-American War is a forgotten war, it was also a historical moment of “white civilization-making and native social liquidation across the Pacific” (Rodriguez). As cultural studies Sarita Echavez See wrote, “Filipino America owes its existence to the monumentally violent and monumentally forgotten inclusion of the Philippines into the United States more than a century ago when the Philippine-American War broke out in 1899.” In the 21st century, cultural studies scholar Neferti Tadiar updates empire with the phrase “the rule of global war,” and describes the rise of fascism as the current form of the American empire. The writers featured on this panel will read from published or new work on the meanings of living in the U.S. empire, on the Philippines as a former colony or as a present-day neocolony, on empire’s afterimages and hauntings, and its intimate and affective forms of violence and mythmaking.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Josen M Diaz

Panelists

• Lara Stapleton, BMCC of CUNY

• Fidelito C Cortes, Hunter College-CUNY

• Gina L Apostol, Gina Apostol

• alejandro t acierto, Wayne State University

Comment

• Nerissa Balce, SUNY Stony Brook

Biographical Information

Gina Apostol won the 2022 Rome Prize in Literature to write her next novel, on womanhood and radicalism in fin-de-siécle Europe. She was the 2024 Inouye Chair for Democratic Ideals at the University of Hawaii-Manoa. Her body of work has been shortlisted for the John Dos Passos Prize, longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and in the Philippines has been honored with the Alagad ni Balagtas award, among others. Her last book, La Tercera, was selected an Editors’ Choice of the NYT. Insurrecto was named by Publishers' Weekly one of the Ten Best Books of 2018, selected as an Editor's Choice of the NYT, and shortlisted for the Dayton Prize. Gun Dealers' Daughter won the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan Prize. Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, out in the US from Soho Press, both won the Juan Laya Prize for the Novel (Philippine National Book Award). Bibliolepsy was one of the New Yorker’s Best Books of 2022, and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata was an Editor’s Choice of the NYT. She has received fellowships from Civitella Ranieri and Emily Harvey Foundation, among other residencies, and has served as writer-in-residence at Vassar College and Phillips Exeter Academy, among other institutions. Her essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Gettysburg Review, Massachusetts Review, and others. She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts and grew up in Tacloban, Leyte, in the Philippines. She teaches at the Fieldston School in New York City.

Sabina Murray is the author of eight books of fiction including the novel Valiant Gentlemen, a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book, The Caprices, a PEN/Faulkner Award winner, The Human Zoo and the recent Muckross Abbey, a collection of stories. Also a screenwriter, she wrote the script for Beautiful Country, an Independent Spirit Award finalist, developing the story with Terrence Malick. Sabina's awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, an N.E.A. Grant, a Bunting Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, and a Magdalen College Research Fellowship at the University of Oxford. She is Professor of English in the MFA Program of Poets and Writers at University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

John Labella is an award-winning poet from Manila, Philippines. He is the former head of Filipinas Heritage Library, a cultural advocacy unit of Ayala Foundation, and a former faculty member of the English Department of Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines. He writes on Philippine and world literature, critical theory, food studies, music, visual art, postcolonial studies, Philippine studies and Asian American studies. He is currently a Lecturer at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign’s Department of English.

Lara Stapleton is the author of the short story collections The Ruin of Everything (Paloma Press) and The Lowest Blue Flame Before Nothing (Aunt Lute), an Independent Booksellers’ Selection, and a Pen Open Book Committee Selection. She edited The Thirdest World (Factory School) and co-edited Juncture (Soft Skull). Her work has appeared in dozens of periodicals, including The LA Review of Books, Poets and Writers, The Brooklyn Rail, Ms., Glimmer Train, and The Indiana Review. A writer of prose, poetry, and teleplays, she is developing 1850. Co-created with Rachel Watanabe-Batton, the television series is set in antebellum New Orleans and is about mixed-race families, taboo and the color line. The series was selected for the IFP No Borders International Co-Production Market. She is also at work on a show about a self-destructive multi-cultural community in Brooklyn and another about a Filipino American restaurateur with Nicole Ponseca. Lara was the recipient of a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation Grant for writers and aWafiction prize. A graduate of NYU’s creative writing program, her greatest pride is for her students at Borough of Manhattan Community College of the City University of New York.

Fidelito C. Cortes is a an award winning Filipino immigrant poet from Manila. He teaches Filipino American literature and Asian American literature at Hunter College NY. He is at work preparing a course on Asian American dystopian writing and Anthropocene upheavals. He is the author of two Filipino English poetry collections published in Manila, Waiting for the Exterminator (Kalikasan Press) and Everyday Things (University of Santo Tomas Press).

Nita Noveno is the recipient of the 2024 Women’s Prose Prize from Red Hen Press, the publisher of her forthcoming hybrid memoir Mud on the Moon (Fall 2026). Noveno teaches composition and literature at the Borough of Manhattan Community College/CUNY, and is the founder and former host of the Sunday Salon reading series in New York City. Her work has appeared in Mānoa, Identity Theory, Brink, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop's Open City and The Margins, among others. Born in Southeast Alaska to immigrant parents from the Philippines, Nita writes about memory, culture, identity, and immigrant lives.

Nerissa Balce (Commenter) is a cultural studies scholar. She is an Associate professor of Asian American studies at SUNY Stony Brook. Her research focuses on race, gender, state violence and popular culture in the U.S. and the Philippines. With Sarita Echavez See (UC Riverside), Pia Arboleda (UH Manoa) and Francine Marquez (Manila), she was co-curator of the 2019-2021 online art project, Dark Lens / Lente ng Karimlan: The Filipino Camera in Duterte’s Republic, an online exhibition of Filipino atrocity photographs of the Duterte “drug war” by Manila photographers Ezra Acayan, Raffy Lerma, Eloisa Lopez, and Bro. Ciriaco Santiago III. The exhibition featured commissioned poems and captions by 40 scholars and artists from the Philippines and North America. Dark Lens was sponsored by what was then called the Stony Brook University’s Center for the Study of Inequalities, Social Justice and Policy. Balce is the author of the book, Body Parts of Empire: Visual Abjection, Filipino Images and the American Archive, winner of the 2018 Best Book award in Cultural Studies from the Filipino Section of the Association for Asian American Studies. The book was also a finalist for the best book in the social sciences for the 2018 Philippine National Book Awards. At Stony Brook, she teaches graduate and undergraduate courses on Asian American literature and popular culture. Her essays have appeared in the Asian American Writers' Workshop blog, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Journal of Asian American Studies, Social Text, Peace Review, Hitting Critical Mass and in anthologies such as Filipinx American Studies: Reckoning, Reclamation, Transformation, "Positively No Filipinos Allowed": Building Communities and Discourse, and Resource Guide to Asian American Literature.

Josen Masangkay Diaz (she/they). (Chair of the roundtable.) Diaz is Associate Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her book, Postcolonial Configurations: Dictatorship, the Racial Cold War, and Filipino America (Duke University Press, 2023), analyzes the formation of Filipino American subjectivity at the intersections of colonialism, liberalism, and authoritarianism.