“What’s Filipino? What’s authentic? What’s in the blood?”: Alterity and Ethics in the Novels of Jessica Hagedorn

Abstract

Migration—the desire to explore, to reposition, to overcome—is a fundamental human impulse. It is an urge characterized by movement, adaptation, and progression, yet it is also fraught with dislocation and uncertainty. In such visionary novels as Dogeaters (1990) and The Gangster of Love (1996), Jessica Hagedorn explores the impact of Americanization and cultural bifurcation upon the Filipino pre- and post-immigrant experience. In Dogeaters Hagedorn examines the turbulent world of Manila during the Marcos era, a morally convoluted environment in which the importation of American movies seems to provide her high and low characters with a means of escape from their politically corrosive world. Yet at the same time, their vast consumption of American popular culture continues to obliterate their sense of national identity. In The Gangster of Love Hagedorn traces the story of the Rivera family after they make their immigrant journey from the Philippines to the United States. Haunted by the lingering memory of their homeland, the Riveras find themselves confronted with ubiquitous sexual promiscuity, the artificiality of the American success myth, and the moral vacuousness of Western materialism.

What is literature for? You don’t go to literature and say, “I need to feel good about my race, so let me read a novel.”

Jessica Hagedorn