Schedule

Nov. 27, 2024 | 4:10–5:40 PM

Room

Rm 2, Center Ballroom

Chair

Lorenzo Perillo
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

Panel Abstract

Since 2007, a growing number of Filipino diaspora studies scholars have researched ways of being and worldmaking in literature, performing arts, music, theatre, visual arts, and popular culture. While many of these studies engage the meaning-making sites of Filipinos impacted by migration, this panel shifts the focus to dance, sports, and travel writing as sites and methods of producing knowledge by and about Filipino diasporic cultures. How does migration and diaspora shape what it means for Filipinos to dance, write, and play sports across the globe? Why do Filipinos choose to express social identities in particular modes of everyday engagement and cultural production?

In J. Lorenzo Perillo’s “Performance and Dance in the Filipino Diaspora,” he examines the experiences of dancers across Hong Kong, Hawaiʻi, Aotearoa, and Sweden to argue that global Filipino diaspora studies are enriched by a deeper engagement with movement.

In “Disentangling U.S. Empire in the Midwest,” Constancio Arnaldo examines how American sports are critical arenas in which to explore the afterlife of US empire and its connection to sports in the Philippines and for the Filipina/o diaspora in the United States. In Ryan Buyco’s “Militarized Encounters: Filipino Travel Writing in Okinawa,” he analyzes the travel writing of Filipino Okinawan photographer, Sunamori Katsumi, and his work in Drifting Islands, Still Water to consider the historical and ongoing connections between the Philippines and Okinawa.

Drawing from a variety of disciplines including Asian settler colonial studies, Critical Dance Studies, and Masculinity Studies, the panel takes a wide perspective across disparate sites including Hong Kong, Hawaiʻi, Aotearoa, Sweden, Okinawa, and the United States to advance a deeper understanding of how dance, travel writing, and sports shape our knowledge of Filipino diaspora identity development and decolonization.

C2.1

Performance and Dance in the Filipino Diaspora

Lorenzo Perillo

University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

This paper builds upon scholarly conversations on dance and migration to shed light on  Filipinos’ everyday engagements with performance and dance and demonstrate how mobility  and bodily movements are mutually related. Although Filipino performance studies usually  center subjects in the Philippines or U.S., I look across the global Filipino diaspora to migrant  dance experiences in East Asia, Oceania, Northern Europe, and the Middle East. What is the role  of performance and dance as theory, method, and practice in the Filipino diaspora? How does a  better understanding of mobility and bodily movements shape our understanding of Filipino  diaspora identity development and decolonization? This paper responds to these research  questions in order to reveal negotiations of identity and cultural production in often overlooked  sites of Filipino diaspora. 

First, I provide a review of the major contemporary concepts and debates at the intersection of  Filipino performance, decolonial, and migration studies. Then, drawing from Filipino Indigenous  Research methods of pagtatanong-tanong, I examine the experiences of three Filipina diasporic  practitioners across Hong Kong, Hawaiʻi, Aotearoa, and Sweden. Finally, I offer insights based  on their everyday lived experiences of culture, performance, and dance in order to argue that  knowledge production about global Filipino diasporas is enriched by a deeper engagement with  movement. This paper serves as a resource for Filipino migrants to increase understanding of  how performance and dance not only reflect but also generate valuable Filipino diasporic relations since the 1970s.

C2.2

Militarized Encounters: Filipino Travel Writing in Okinawa

Ryan Buyco

Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo

This paper offers a reflection on travel writing and the Filipino diaspora in the colonial context of Okinawa–known widely as the “Hawai‘i of Japan.” In the aftermath of the Pacific  War and Battle of Okinawa, the United States transformed the Ryukyu archipelago into a military colony until 1972 when it was “returned” to Japanese sovereignty. In the years since, the islands continue to be burdened with a disproportionate number of US military bases in Japan and has also become a major tourist destination in the region. For example, in 2017, the tourism numbers in Okinawa surpassed Hawai‘i for the very first time. This paper considers the Filipino diaspora within this context, which began in the immediate postwar period when Filipinos were brought to Okinawa to help construct and maintain the US bases. This paper examines the travel writing of Filipino Okinawan photographer, Sunamori Katsumi, and his work in Drifting Islands, Still Water—which depicts his travels to the Philippines and Okinawa in the 1990s. Drawing from Oceanic Filipinx studies, Asian settler colonialism, the Detours project, as well as own travel writing in Okinawa, I consider the historical and ongoing connections between these two archipelagoes in order to disrupt the touristic images that have come to define Okinawa in recent  years.

C2.3

Disentangling U.S. Empire in the Midwest: Filipino Labor, Masculinity and Sports in America’s Heartland

Constancio Arnaldo

University of Nevada

The Midwest region of the United States of America represents a cultural mythology that often characterizes itself as the “heartland” of America. In the popular culture imagination, the Midwest is replete with pastoral settings at the intersection of white masculinity, sports, and  nation. However, I argue that the Midwest is analogous to a knot, a series of social and cultural processes that become entangled through projects linking race, nation, and empire. In this paper, I first discuss how Filipino/Americans’ relationship to the Midwest region and sports dates back to St. Louis, Missouri (1904) where indigenous Filipino tribes were brought by U.S. colonial  administrators to an event called the “Special Olympics.” At the event, indigenous Filipinos were measured in conjunction with testing race and athletic ability and their bodies were used to support eugenic research by relying on sporting abilities to justify the supposed athletic  superiority of white men. I assert that this context is an echo of colonial gendering and racial  hierarchy that continues to this day. I then pivot to the contemporary moment by discussing how  Filipino immigrant men (with limited labor opportunities under global capitalism) express their masculinity in a Filipino American only basketball league. I argue that the league enables these  men to express a sense of masculine self-style not afforded to them in other realms of their  everyday lives. As part of an ongoing post-colonial labor force brought on by legacies of empire,  many of these men work in “feminized” labor occupations as cooks, factory workers, and caregivers for the local community. This moment in the heartland of the American empire reveals a much more complicated understanding of Filipina/o “migration” beyond West coast geographies, metropolitan spaces, and global sporting spectacles.

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