American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America.(Book review)

American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America. Allan Punzalan Isaac. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. xxx + 205 pages. $60.00 cloth; $20.00 paper.

American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America is a welcome and incisive addition to the ever-growing scholarship on transnationalist, postcolonial, and Asian American Studies. Refusing to be confined within a strict disciplinary framework, Isaac's study provides a teleology for the unique historical, cultural, and political positioning of the Philippines relative to the United States following the Spanish-American war in 1898. Isaac contextualizes his critical investigation through readings of news events, legal cases, films, and literature, concentrating on writers such as Jessica Hagedorn, Carlos Bulosan, Piri Thomas, and John Dominis Holt. Isaac rests his argumentative foundation on the strange and strained historical relationship between the Philippines and United States that has resulted in a contradictory state of emergence and disappearance. In Isaac's view, a simultaneous avowal and disavowal of the Filipino presence in the United States "tropes" an entire set of postcolonial relationships that tie the Philippines to America's other territorial holdings, such as locations in the Caribbean and the Pacific Islands. Amid what Isaac calls an "imperial grammar," various cultural productions as well as legal cases ultimately distort or engender fantasies of the Philippines, resulting in a spectral legacy where actual Filipino and Filipino American bodies remain a superfluous and often unwelcome excess in the American consciousness. An important intervention that Isaac makes is his conception of the "enfolded border," a location in which the borders of the United States possess an imperial spatial and temporal power to contain and constrain new subjects. Therein lies part of America's strategic mobility in the twentieth century.

Isaac begins his book with a provocative critique of the media frenzy following the murder of Gianni Versace, perpetrated by serial killer Andrew Cunanan, a mixed race Filipino American, and follows this inquiry with the provocative question, "Is the Filipino American but a set of traces, masks, and misrecognitions in American law, borders, and drama?" (xxiv). This eloquently posited uncertainty drives the book forward as Isaac outlines his analytical course for "rearticulating Filipino America."

The book is divided into two major parts. The first section begins with "Imperial Grammar," in which Isaac elaborates on the peculiar status of the Filipino non-citizen national. Because the Philippines was considered a territorial possession, its inhabitants were under the jurisdiction of the United States, but were not considered citizens. A series of legal cases in the early twentieth century clarified the stateless subjectivity of the Filipino American, a figure who did not possess United States citizenship by virtue of legislation, nor Filipino citizenship due to the Philippines' lack of national sovereignty prior to 1934's Tydings-McDuffie Act. These legislative legacies still haunt contemporary political issues in the Philippines, as Isaac shows in the controversy over Fernando Poe, Jr., a candidate in the 2004 Philippine elections, whose citizenship status was called into question due to the alleged non-Filipino status of his parents. Isaac follows this chapter with "Moral Sentences," a study of three "Boy Scout novels" published in 1911 in which boy scouts travel to various US territorial spaces, including Mexico, the Panama Canal Zone, and the Philippines. In each case, Isaac notes ...