Improbable Visions: Filipino Bodies, U.S. Empire, and the Visual Archives.

Abstract

The American archives of empire have imaged and imagined “Filipino bodies” to simultaneously justify and abnegate colonial projects in the Philippines. Contemporary Filipino American visual artists, however, defy the very representational and ideological constraints of the archives in their visual work. My interdisciplinary dissertation, “Improbable Visions: Filipino Bodies, U.S. Empire, and the Visual Archives” contends that the American archives are an important point of departure and creative sources for Filipino American visual artists. Filipino American visual production is impelled by what I call an “archival imperative” to critique visual systems of production and distribution channels that have shaped the in/visibility of Filipinos within the period of Philippine-United States colonial and postcolonial relations. The archival imperatives of Filipino American visual artists encompass an array of creative and intellectual strategies that together form the basis for a contemporary Filipino American postcolonial aesthetic.

I examine the visual practices of three Philippine-born, American-based contemporary artists: photographer-filmmaker Marlon Fuentes, photographer Efren Ramirez, and multimedia artist Stephanie Syjuco. The archival imperatives of these artists facilitate the creation of a dynamic Filipino American visual archive that is socially and politically responsive to the artists’ experiences with im/migration and displacements. Their work also speaks to the larger transnational mechanisms that influence Filipino migrancy and diaspora. The visual work of these artists attests to the importance of visual production amid the overwhelming material and psychic constraints of American global hegemony, transnational capitalism, and the legacies of U.S. imperialism in the Philippines. I analyze and theorize the significance of “Filipino bodies” in three important ways. First, “Filipino bodies” denote the Filipino American artists themselves; these artists have transformed their visual productions into alternative maps that chart Filipino modernity into the 21st century. Second, the “Filipino bodies” are also the literal and figurative bodies in the visual work, becoming critical sites of epistemological production. The resulting alternative epistemologies produced by the visual work are the third type of “Filipino bodies.” I argue that Filipino American artists and their respective visual work are American empire’s foil. Together they become embodiments of “improbable visions” that empire could not have imaged, let alone imagined.