University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Visualizing identity & the Pilipinx diaspora

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Visualizing identity & the Pilipinx diaspora

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Content VISUALIZING IDENTITY
& THE PILIPINX DIASPORA
By Diane Williams
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE ROSKI SCHOOL OF ART AND DESIGN
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF FINE ARTS
(FINE ARTS)
May 2021
Copyright 2021 Diane Williams
ii

As I grew older, I thought … there are so many beautiful things in our culture but why
doesn’t it reflect in the way we behave, or the way we tell stories or the way we frame the
world? There was something wrong in this unbalanced world…
I was so wanting to get out of that and become an artist. I had an inner wave, a tsunami,
to express a story, and I don’t want to do it the way I should’ve done it.
--Kidlat Tahimik, CNN Philippines 2018

iii
Table of Contents

Epigraph ii
List of Figures iv
Abstract v
Introduction 1
1. Constructing Identity 4
2. Humanizing the Pilipinx 9
3. Unwilling Recipients of Subjugation 13
4. Invisibility and Internalized Oppression 17
5. Race Making and the Remaindered Lives 27
Conclusion 31
Bibliography 34

iv
List of Figures

Figure 1: —And Peace Shall Rule by Udo Keppler, 1899.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress. 8
Figure 2: The White Man’s Burden: The United States & The Philippine Islands,
by Rudyard Kipling, 1899. Courtesy of Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1929. 8
Figure 3: The White Man's Burden (Apologies to Rudyard Kipling) by Andrew Gillam,
1899. Courtesy of CGACGA - The Ohio State University, Billy Ireland Cartoon
Library & Museum. 8
Figure 4: Silent Malady by Sara Jimenez, 2017.
Courtesy of www.sarajimenezstudio.com 12
Figure 5: Philippine People Power Revolution, Edsa, Manila, February 1986.
Courtesy of Lakbay ng Lakan. 16
Figure 6: Nailed by Angel Velasco Shaw, 1992. Courtesy of MoMA. 21
Figure 7: Two Young Sailors by Maia Cruz Palileo, 2019.
Courtesy of www.maiacruzpalileo.com. 24
Figure 8: The Seer by Maia Cruz Palileo, 2015.
Courtesy of www.maiacruzpalileo.com. 24
Figure 9: Curtain of Illegibility by Diane Williams, 2020. Courtesy of the artist. 26
Figure 10: The Spam Story by Diane Williams, 2020. Courtesy of the artist. 26

v

Abstract
Colonial legacies remain pervasive in the Philippines and amidst the Pilipinx diaspora. The
shared trauma of colonization and foreign occupation manifests in myriad systems and is passed
through generations. This thesis explores systems of colonialism, imperialism and their legacies
in relation to contemporary art and cultural production. I examine the impact of generational
trauma and the disproportionate absence of Pilipinx identity in contemporary culture by
positioning the works of Pilipinx artistic expression as a mode of imagining, representing and re-
contextualizing these concepts through art. Can processes of postcolonialism and decolonization
help in validating the sense of loss and feelings of inferiority about being Pilipinx? As a visual
artist from a formerly colonized nation, I am not a mere observer, but an active participant in the
artistic discourse around colonialism. Embedded in the structures of imperialism, I am
addressing systems that render Pilipinx people as disposable and devalued within the global
economy. This thesis contextualizes my own practice, along with fellow Pilipinx artists Angel
Velasco Shaw, Sara Jimenez, and Maia Cruz Palileo, exploring how our artworks diversely
represent the precarity of subjectivity and identification under legacies of empire. Drawing from
postcolonial and decolonial scholarship by theorists including Homi Bhabha, Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, Gaiutra Bahadur, and Saidiya Hartman, this thesis aims to illuminate how
Pilipinx artists negotiate ideas of culture and self within oppressive systems. The artists
presented integrate Pilipinx historical and cultural knowledge and produce social mechanisms
that resist essentialized concepts of Orientalism.

1
Introduction
Artists have the ability to reimagine or re-envision alternatives to the static identities
assigned to the non-Western European Other in the familiar colonial narrative. Timothy
Mitchell’s essay, “Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order” defines Orientalist identification,
drawing from Edward Said, as a product of a belief in unchanging racial or cultural essences.
1
In
an Orientalist paradigm, non-Western cultures possess essential characteristics that stand as polar
opposites of the West: passive, not active; static, not mobile; emotional, not rational; chaotic, not
ordered. In this system, the Eastern Other is constructed as distinct in terms of absence of
movement, reason and meaning.
2
This construction of Otherness has played a critical role in
shaping the way non-Western people are depicted and treated: homogenous, fixed, and given.
Cultural identities and racial formations are far from singular and consistent. They are produced,
have distinctive histories and fluidly adapt to the present and the future. Society often views
identity as static, tracing it to an essentialized past, but like everything else, cultural identities
undergo constant transformations.
3
In Orientalism, literary scholar Edward Said argues that both
the Orient and the Occident or respectively, East and West, are artificial constructs that venerate
the edifice of European superiority. By creating a dogmatic view of “the Orient” as an
unchanging abstraction, the West has positioned itself as a canon for hegemony, political and
economic dominance.
4

1
Timothy Mitchell, “Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order,” in Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum, ed.
Claire J Farago; Donald Preziosi. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 442-461.
2
Ibid., 442.
3
Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: on Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 63-
64.
4
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1980).
2
Colonialism is often described in European histories under the guise of valor; yet the
colonizers furthered capital interests from their invasions through the accumulation of goods by
plunder, enforcing cultural and political power over other nations. Historians such as John
Phelan, Jonathan Fast and Jim Richardson along with Pilipino Studies scholars including Nick
Joaquin and Renato Constantino have consistently represented colonial conquest as beneficial to
the colonized.
5
For these scholars, Christianity and the European culture that came with it were
the work of culture heroes disguised as caring missionaries and brave conquistadores who risked
their lives in their voyage to conquer and provide sophistication to the uncivilized. In the 1890s,
there were very few assessments made of colonialism's damaging psychological and cultural
effects. A hundred years after Spain's departure, the Pilipinx
6
people were only just beginning to
question what three centuries of Spanish power and control over their nation and their peoples
has meant to them. The historical legacy of the Spanish incursion victimized Pilipinx people on
several fronts: by the assumptions and presumptions of colonial ideology, the act of cultural
conquest, by forced cultural transformations, and by the complicit collaboration of leaders and
elders who perpetuated the violence of historical distortions. The gross misrepresentation of
Pilipinx peoples in history as the beneficiaries of colonialism is an assault to their agency,
autonomy, and future legacies. It is important to recognize that the natives were not the
beneficiaries but the intended subjects of colonization. The Spanish Conquistadores settled in the

5
Nilda Rimonte and Maria P.P. Root, Filipino Americans: Transformation and Identity (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Publications, 1997), 39-61.
6
I’m using "Pilipinx" as a reclaimed version of "Filipinx" in my formal title. The letter "F" does not exist in the
native script of pre-colonial Philippines (Baybayin). However, the use of "Filipinx" and "Pilipinx" is based on
individual preference and can be used interchangeably.
3
Philippines for their gold and spices and saw the Philippine islands as stepping-stones to trade
with China, Japan, and other Asian countries.
7

Seminal postcolonial studies pave the way for alternative and speculative histories as
counter narratives. Pivotal works by, among many others, Paulo Freire, Frantz Fanon, and Albert
Memmi have analyzed the effects of colonization on both the colonized and colonizers, creating
theoretical foundations for decolonial histories. As Freire, Fanon, and Memmi analyze,
dehumanization made colonization possible and has wrought a lasting consequence on the
colonized. Decolonization is a process of revealing the pernicious myths of colonialist histories
that position colonizers as brave benefactors and the colonized as passive beneficiaries.
Decolonization reconnects with the troubled past of colonization to better understand the present
and envision a future unbound to imperialist hegemony. Decolonization is a psychological and
physical process that enables the colonized to understand and overcome the depths of alienation,
marginalization and internalized oppression caused by colonization.
8

In this thesis, I evaluate how artists and cultural workers produce social mechanisms that
resist essentialized concepts of Orientalism and legacies of colonialism. I position my
interdisciplinary work as a way of delving into alternative histories and systems that render the
Pilipinx as disposable and devalued under capitalism. This thesis examines how Pilipinx artists
Angel Velasco Shaw, Sara Jimenez, and Maia Cruz Palileo employ art to re-contextualize
dominant narratives as strategies of resistance.

7
Rimonte and Root, Filipino Americans, 39-61.
8
Lenny Mendoza Strobel and Maria P.P. Root, Filipino Americans: Transformation and Identity (Thousand Oaks,
CA: Sage Publications, 1997), 62-79.
4
Chapter One: Constructing Identity
The construction of race, cultural identities and historical narratives are often written
without the consent of the colonized Other. Marta Savigliano writes in her book, Tango and the
Political Economy of Passion that without historical archives that can be traced back from
indigenous accounts of history, the colonized is caught in an endless loop of tracing and re-
tracing her roots, only to find layers after layers of hybridization. The West’s obsession with
origins and authenticity is a way of delegitimizing the Other.
9
In the United States, this is
evident with the southern states’ insistence to fly the confederate flag years after the civil war
ended, the erection of confederate monuments as southern states began enacting the Jim Crow
10

laws, Christopher Columbus’ monuments and federal observance honoring him as a hero despite
his record of brutality and extreme violence against indigenous people.
11
It is not a mere
coincidence that the archive (from the Greek word arkhē, meaning government) functions in a
similar way wherein origins and authority are privileged and therefore acts as the one true source
of authenticity. The archon (derived from the Greek word arkhōn) preserves and maintains the
authority of the archive. Hence, these guardians of the historical repository have political and
social power as they choose how, where, what and who gets included and excluded in history.
12

These are just a few of the numerous paradigms of Western influence, preoccupation with
lineage and authenticity to delegitimize the Other.

9
Marta E. Savigliano, Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, Inc., 1995), 166.
10
The segregation and disenfranchisement laws known as "Jim Crow" represented a formal, codified system of
racial apartheid that dominated the American South for three quarters of a century beginning in the 1890s.
11
Brian McKenna, “Staging a Christopher Columbus Play in a Culture of Illusion: Public Pedagogy in a Theatre of
Genocide,” Policy futures in education 9, no. 6 (January 2011): 735–746.
12
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
5
Savigliano argues that formerly colonized but now independent nations need sound
origins, national narratives, and strong cultural traits in order to resolve their uniqueness as well
as difference. I diverge with this notion of necessity for a collective national uniqueness,
authenticity and sound origins as it leaves the colonized with an impossible pursuit. The erasure
of indigeneity was a colonial design to delegitimize the Other and resulted in their struggle to
trace their own lineage. On that account, the colonized has the potentiality to reimagine and
reconstruct their positionality, free from imperialism and further destabilizing its control.
I am not contending that only the people from Western nations are culpable of the
pervasive and perpetual Othering of non-Western people. Colonial legacies have created
contradictions in the way the colonized have treated other colonized groups. It is a phenomenon
when the Other embraces or follows the attitude of their oppressors. This perception contradicts
their reality as the oppressed, unable to identify with their own struggles, adopt a stance that
further subjugates them and their own people.
13
The effects of colonization among Pilipinx
people developed into a form of internalized oppression called “colonial mentality,” in which
Pilipinx people adopt the belief that they are inferior to their colonizers, further disparaging
themselves, their culture and discriminating against other Pilipinx people who are less
acculturated to Western values.
14

One can claim that both Western and non-Western cultures perpetuate the imperialist,
historical construction of Otherness, but it is important to develop critical consciousness around

13
Paolo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 50
th
anniversary ed. (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Publishing Inc.,
2020), 45-46.
14
Kevin L. Nadal, Filipino American Psychology a Handbook of Theory, Research, and Clinical Practice
(Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2011).
6
the structures where positionalities are established. The West has possessed the power to
distinguish the hierarchical structures of racial and colonial discourse in which the colonized are
imposed as the exoticised Other.
While I argue that art in any form has the ability to counter essentialism and Orientalism,
artists can also aid in the construction of systems of oppression. In 1898 English writer Rudyard
Kipling sent his poem, “The White Man’s Burden” to then Governor of New York Theodore
Roosevelt. “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands” was later
published in the London Times and McClure’s Magazine in the United States in February 1899.
15

Kipling’s poem justifies the Spanish Empire’s conquest of the Philippines as a mission to civilize
Pilipinx people. Several explicit racist cartoons were published simultaneously with the
publication of Kipling’s poem depicting similar sentiments about the white man’s obligation to
civilize the culturally undeveloped savage. (Fig. 1 and Fig. 2) Artists Udo Keppler and Victor
Gillam illustrated Uncle Sam with the initials US, a national personification of the United States
government (United States’ colonies: Philippines, Cuba, Hawaii, Samoa, Puerto Rico) and John
Bull, personifying England (England’s colonies: India, China, Egypt, Zulu, Sudan) carrying their
“barbaric” colonies to civilization.
16
These overtly racist caricatures aimed to construct a
spectacle of Otherness by illustrating the colonized Other as willing beneficiaries of
colonization, sullen, primitive, incapable of self-government, and mired in poverty and
ignorance. The animal-like images not only dehumanize, but also distort and render the

15
Patrick Brantlinger, “Kipling’s ‘The White Man’s Burden’ and Its Afterlives,” English literature in transition,
1880-1920 50, no. 2 (2007): 172–191.
16
Ellen Sebring, “Civilization and Barbarism,” accessed March 11, 2020,
https://visualizingcultures.mit.edu/civilization_and_barbarism/cb_essay02.html.
7
colonized vulnerable, while they reinforce the European construction of dominance and control.
This negative visibility is still prevalent and upheld in the arts. In museums, Western culture is
assigned multiple sections and large architectural wings from classical antiquity to modernity
while Eastern culture is typically condensed into a small section of anthropological finds.

8
Figure 3: “The White Man’s Burden”:
Kipling’s Hymn to U.S. Imperialism

Take up the White Man’s burden—
Send forth the best ye breed—
Go send your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child
Take up the White Man’s burden
In patience to abide
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple
An hundred times made plain
To seek another’s profit
And work another’s gain
Take up the White Man’s burden—
And reap his old reward:
The blame of those ye better
The hate of those ye guard—
The cry of hosts ye humour
(Ah slowly) to the light:
"Why brought ye us from bondage,
“Our loved Egyptian night?”
Take up the White Man’s burden-
Have done with childish days-
The lightly proffered laurel,
The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
Through all the thankless years,
Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,
The judgment of your peers!

Figure 1: John Bull and Uncle Sam lift the globe, turned
toward Asia and the Pacific, to the heavens. The angel of
peace and caption suggest that their joint strength will bring
about world peace.
Udo Keppler, —And Peace Shall Rule. Puck, May 3, 1899,
Library of Congress

Figure 2: John Bull (Great Britain) and Uncle Sam (U.S.) bear
The White Man's Burden by delivering the colored peoples of
the world to civilization.
Victor Gillam, The White Man's Burden (Apologies to Rudyard
Kipling), Judge, April 1, 1899, CGACGA - The Ohio State
University, Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum

9
Chapter Two: Humanizing the Pilipinx
It is not sufficient to question the recognizably dehumanizing aspects of colonization and
imperialism; we must similarly cross-examine the “humanizing” apparatuses of control. At the
turn of the twentieth century, the Philippines was already engaged in a revolution against
Spanish colonizers, only to discover that they had to battle yet another imperialist power: the
United States. The Philippine-American war lasted from 1899-1902. During the American
occupation in the Philippines, President William McKinley who confessed didn’t even know
where the Philippines was located on a map before the Spanish-American war, fostered the
concept of “Benevolent Assimilation” to “civilize” the Pilipinx peoples. This was part of an
agenda to “improve” the lives and “humanize” the newly colonized subjects of the American
empire through forced assimilation. Americans implemented Western medical practices and
education in the Philippines and made English an official language in 1935.
17
According to urban
ecologists Robert Park and Ernest Burgess, assimilation is a “process of interpenetration and
fusion in which persons and groups acquire the memories, sentiments and attitudes of other
persons or groups, and by sharing their experience and history are incorporated with them in a
common cultural life."
18
Many Pilipinx people were more than willing to be acculturated into the
American way of life and were quite convinced that adhering to these mandates would
modernize their country. While assimilating into another culture avoids the spectacle of

17
James Zarsadiaz, “Playing the Assimilation Game,” Positively Filipino Magazine, October 11, 2017,
http://www.positivelyfilipino.com/magazine/playing-the-assimilation-game, accessed November 2020.
18
Zhenchao Qian and Priyank Shah, “Assimilation Paths of Immigrant Children: Asian Indians and Filipinos
Compared,” Chinese Journal of Sociology 1, no. 3 (September 2015): 356-379.
10
Otherness, it risks erasure altogether through the loss of shared memories, sentiments and
histories.
I grew up just a few miles away from Clark Air Base, a United States Military facility in
the Philippines from 1903 through 1991, now an International Airport, Freeport and Special
Economic Zone.
19
Unaware of the histories and politics of the American presence in the country,
I was captivated by American culture, the United States military officers and their families added
to our ways of life. Most people from my province welcomed the “Kano,” slang for Amerikano.
The community invited them to fiestas as an introduction to Pilipinx culture through food and to
practice their English. The “Kanos” seemed flashy, loud and exceedingly cool, right out of a
scene from the 1986 film, Top Gun. They reveled in the attention and our fascination with
everything American. As an adult now living in the United States, I frequently contemplate and
dissect the memories of my past, connecting them to my current experiences. When I travel to
other countries, especially in non-Western nations, I observe American tourists’ ambivalence in
engaging in the local culture through food and language, as they often request to be spoken to in
English. Like other tourists in foreign locations, Americans represent their country wherever they
travel. Undoubtedly, America’s hegemony over other nation-states and their meddling in other
countries’ affairs has drastically impacted the perception of America and its people. But
Americans have a reputation in their unwillingness to adapt to an unfamiliar way of life, learn
native customs of other countries, and develop a critical lens in determining the
interconnectedness of human beings.

19
A special economic zone (SEZ) is an area in which the business and trade laws are less regulated and distinct from
the rest of the country. SEZs are located within a country's national borders, and aim to increase trade and
development.
11
In the United States, Western European immigrants are characterized as having charming
accents, while non-Western European accents are frequently made fun of, viewed as unpleasant
to listen to, primitive, and Othered. After immigrating to the United States in 1989, I developed
a keen sense of how difference plays a part in the way people who look and sound “foreign”
were treated. I went to a public school in Los Angeles County where my friends and I were
repeatedly bullied for speaking in Tagalog, the central language of the Philippines. I
subsequently decided to only speak English in public spaces to avoid ridicule. Today, I re-
examine how the colonized often negotiate their selfhood as a method for survival. As a Masters
of Fine Arts (MFA) candidate in academia, I find myself having to code switch, meaning
adjusting one’s style of speech, presence, behavior, and expression in ways that will adjust the
comfort of other people in exchange for fair treatment, better service and employment
opportunities. To this day, my mother advises my sister and I to act “American” in school, at
work, and on social media to escape stereotypes and contempt from hate groups who are
emboldened by the xenophobic rhetoric of the Trump administration. I question if assimilation
only applies to people who come from non-Western nations that are treated as inferior to their
Western counterparts.
Pilipinx visual artist, Sara Jimenez responds to the legacies of the 1935 “Benevolent
Assimilation” enforced by President William McKinley during the American colonial period.
She underlines that this forced assimilation was introduced in the Philippines to promote
essentialism and ideals of American empire. In her vertical sculpture series Maladies, Jimenez
uses strips of materials made from inkjet prints, which are sourced from scanned and printed
12
images from 19
th
and 20
th
century American colonial texts written about the Philippines.
20
Her
work challenges the systematic constructions imposed by the United States to establish authority
and control, consistent with colonial projects. Her large installations are devoid of the
institutional order of government and sovereignty as structures of imperial power.

Figure 4: Sara Jimenez, Silent Malady, 2017, Scanned and printed colonial images of the Philippines, inkjet
prints of online news images, paint 9 x 24 x 1 feet, http://www.sarajimenezstudio.com/maladies/silent-malady-1.

20
Sara Jimenez, “Maladies (2017-current),” accessed December 9, 2019,
http://www.sarajimenezstudio.com/maladies.
13
Chapter Three: Unwilling Recipients of Subjugation
It is important to understand that colonized subjects were not merely passive recipients of
epistemic violence. While assimilation, defined as a socio-political system, relies on a set of
rules and practices, both legal and cultural, to enforce subjugation, mimicry describes the
unconscious process that supports it. The internalization of subjugation relies on a set of
imaginary relations to our lived conditions of existence brought on by generational trauma.
In Homi Bhabha’s essay, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial
Discourse,” he argues that colonial mimicry is “the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other, as
a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite.”
21
The mimicry that the native
performed was neither this nor that since one does not merely become his or her colonizer. The
colonizer tried to evolve the indigenous Other by the process of mimicry and integration, yet
recognizing that the Other would never be quite like them by maintaining a clear sense of
difference. Homi Bhabha sees the premise of mimicry as a destabilizing factor in the colonial
imperative as the native can execute or imitate their colonizer’s sentiments, positions, language
and ideas, thus threatening the colonized/colonizer relationship. The process of mimicry, along
with the colonizer’s incessant demand for cultural assimilation and integration, has had a
subversive effect on the minds of their colonized. Simultaneously, the colonized absorbed and
sought to adapt Western ideals of enlightenment, democracy, justice, rule of law and pursuit of
happiness. These values, along with the quest for freedom, have mobilized the Other to demand
equal treatment from their colonial oppressors and become agents of their own destiny.

21
Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October 28 (Spring 1984): 125-
133.
14
Pilipinx people have a long history of involvement in many revolutions against their
colonial oppressors and their own tyrannical leaders. The Philippine People Power Revolution, a
series of demonstrations that lasted for four days in February of 1986, toppled the dictatorship of
President Ferdinand Marcos. This movement stimulated a tactile emotional response as well as
an intellectual consciousness among Pilipinx peoples. They were roused by the implications of
living under a corrupt government in a country that had been ravaged by centuries of colonial
persecution. In my youth, I could not fully grasp the historical and socio-political repercussions
of this important mass protest, but I was inspired by the tenacity of the subjugated poor who
protested to overthrow years of tyranny and reclaim liberties that they have been denied for
many years. Marcos retaliated by sending heavily armed military and armored tanks to
discourage a mass rebellion. Unafraid to face the heavily armed battalions, I remember begging
my mother to let me join the peaceful demonstrations on the streets, eager to be a part of this
great uprising. The Pilipinx people triumphed in their fight and disintegrated the power of their
dictator. Soon after, political pundits from the United States tried to prove that this event had
never happened, perhaps to dissuade uprising amongst their citizens. There were many
speculations: the head of the Philippine military had planned the uprising as a coup; Ronald
Reagan was behind the whole insurrection; the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) engineered the
mass revolt.
22
These insinuations further belittle Pilipinx dissidents, assaulting their agency and
dignity. Since the People Power Revolution, the Philippines has continued to undergo the
depredations of despot leaders who are complicit in the suppression of their own people. It is
impossible to erase four hundred years of colonial legacies as well as the material and

22
Douglas C. Lummis, Radical Democracy (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1996), 113.
15
psychological impact of colonization in a single event. The traces of caste systems preserved by
the wealthy and deeply religious sectors actively maintain the status quo. But it is undeniable that
the People Power Revolution gave the Pilipinx people hope to realize their agency and power as
a collective nation.
It is a testament that when people are awakened by mental and somatic responses from
subjugation, real power can be achieved. Neetu Khanna’s The Visceral Logics of Decolonization
explores a new area of critical inquiry on decolonization by studying the relationship between
embodied experience and political feeling, which she anatomizes as visceral. Khanna suggests
that the complicity of the colonized with the colonial regime of thought has become naturalized
in the automatized reflexes of the body. Through somatic awakening, the colonized Other can
turn the gaze inward. The stimulation of the visceral can bring on a critical stream of self-
questioning wherein an inward change can become a revolutionary act.
23
By examining visceral
archives, Neetu Khanna reimagines decolonial transformations through somatic experiences
rather than the monolithic approaches to decolonial analysis through mental awakenings.

23
Neetu Khanna, The Visceral Logics of Decolonization Durham (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021).
16

Figure 5: Edsa, Manila. Philippine People Power Revolution, February 1986,
https://lakansining.wordpress.com/2019/09/22/the-long-road-to-the-people-power-revolution/comment-page-1/

17
Chapter Four: Invisibility and Internalized Oppression
Oppression functions in connection between materiality and psychology, and is
sometimes revealed as ghosts or phantoms, representing internalized mental effects. Under
American colonialism, there was a focus on indoctrinating Pilipinx students through the school
system, which significantly shifted the cultural values and motivated many Pilipinx people to
immigrate to the United States. During Spanish colonization, education was used as a means of
control and access to communications in Spanish, which was the language of those in power.
The natives who received education became members of the elite.
24
As an outcome, indigenous
culture was hybridized and the Philippines developed syncretic cultures, rituals, language, and
physical appearance under foreign rule. As a young child, I was aware of the hybrid nature of my
culture. With bewilderment, I watched the Philippine newscasters on the television read
broadcast news conveyed with an amalgamation of Tagalog (the national language of the
Philippines), Spanish, and English languages. This hybridity has contributed to the invisibility of
the Pilipinx. For Anthony Christian Ocampo, author of The Latinos of Asia, identity is a two-way
street. This hybridity contributed to the way the Pilipinx is racially perceived and how Pilipinx
people see themselves as racially ambiguous. In his interview with his Pilipinx subjects, Ocampo
affirms that many of them did not feel they were “fully Asian.” Undoubtedly, Pilipinx people
know that the Philippines is a part of Asia, but they are constantly reminded of the cultural

24
Erin P Hardacker, “The Impact of Spain’s 1863 Educational Decree on the Spread of Philippine Public Schools
and Language Acquisition,” European Education Outside Europe: Historical Perspectives on Perceptions and
Practices 44, no. 4 (December 1, 2012): 8-30.
18
remnants of their Spanish colonial past. This is evident in their national language, surnames,
food and religion.
25

Despite the status of the Pilipinx people as the second largest Asian-American group,
26

they are underrepresented and under-recognized in multi-cultural, post-civil rights American
culture. Furthermore, as the fastest growing population in the United States, the Pilipinx
community is considerably understudied, with minimal efforts to introduce Philippine Studies
programs in academia. In her book, The Decolonized Eye: Filipino American Art and
Performance, professor of media and studies scholar, Sarita Echavez See suggests that, “…there
is a special pattern to the blind spots in dominant American culture that produces the structural
invisibility of Filipinos in America, contemporary Filipino American art and expressive culture.
Consequently, this invisibility has generated wily strategies of misdirection and indirection that
demand an especially heightened awareness of acts of coding, masking, and mimicry.”
27

The lack of Pilipinx representation and continuing misrecognition in the arts and
historical archives is undeniable. The absence of Pilipinx-American discourse has contributed to
an invisibility and exclusion that defines Pilipinx people’s ability to produce institutional
knowledge and culture. As scholar Elizabeth Pisares has argued, the exclusion of Pilipinx-

25
Anthony Christian Ocampo, The Latinos of Asia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), 11-12.
26
The large-scale immigration of Pilipinx to the United States began in the early twentieth century. The United
States conducted a massive recruitment of Philippine farm labor and although the Philippines was an American
colony at the time, the Pilipinx migrant workers were not allowed permanent settlement.
After World War II, there were shifting sentiments in the political and social climate in America and the Pilipinx
workers were permitted to become naturalized citizens. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 precipitated
massive immigration of Pilipinx with college education and those with high occupational skills to the United States.
In 1990, the Pilipinx-American community became the largest segment of Asian Americans, 21.5%, followed by the
Chinese and the Vietnamese. In 2000, there were over two million Pilipinx in the United States. According to the
2017 census, there are now over four million Pilipinx in America and currently the third largest immigrant group
behind Mexicans being the largest followed by the Chinese.
27
Sarita Echavez See, Introduction to The Decolonized Eye: Filipino American Art and Performance (Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), xxxiv.
19
Americans from racial discourse and mainstream culture has resulted in the construction of their
own racial identity by negotiating those of others.
28
The violent implications of colonization live
on in the Pilipinx psyche in forms of self-hatred, a sense of inferiority, and an inability to grasp
their position within the relationships of power in society.
The Pilipinx-American often does not challenge master narratives and accepts the
dominating aspects of European culture. Their silence in the United States emphasizes their
feelings of marginalization and their unwillingness to identify with their people. The legacies of
Spanish and American colonialism in the Philippines affected the psyche of its people through
internalized oppression. Internalized oppression is learned self-hatred when the colonized believe
they are not as good or equal to their colonizers, devastating their social, racial, and class status.
29

See posits Sigmund Freud’s notion of Melancholia with the self-reproach (pagsisisi sa
sarili) of the Pilipinx as an “attitude of revolt.” The abasing flagellation is redirected on the self
and instead of addressing the indignation and denunciation onto the aggressor (colonizer) and the
external world; Pilipinx people punish and torture themselves. This concept is evident in artist,
educator and cultural activist Angel Velasco Shaw’s video performance, Nailed (1992). Shaw
documents faith healer, Lucy Reyes who recreated the crucifixion (pasyon) of Jesus Christ,
donning a blond wig, crown of thorns and carrying a large wooden cross that she was nailed to.
30

I had the pleasure of speaking with Velasco Shaw about this video, her current projects and
future endeavors that involve trans-disciplinary Pilipinx artists. In our conversation, she talked

28
Elizabeth H. Pisares, “The Social-Invisibility Narrative in Filipino-American Feature Films,” positions: east asia
cultures critique 19, no. 2 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, May 2011): 421-437.
29
Strobel and Root, Filipino Americans, 62-79.
30
See, The Decolonized Eye, 3-39.
20
about the complex effects of colonial legacies and imperialism. Like many Pilipinx artists who
were raised in other countries, Velasco Shaw went to the Philippines in 1988 to further
understand the Philippine struggle. In her travel to the Philippines, she was told about the 33
women who claimed to be possessed by the infant Jesus (Santo Niño). The subject of her video,
Lucy Reyes was one of the 33 women who re-enact the crucifixion in a yearly ritual. Velasco
Shaw asserts that Reyes’ embodiment of the virgin mother and the savior goes beyond symbolic
representations of Catholicism and imperialism.
31

Having been raised in the Philippines, these religious rituals were very familiar and
memorable. I ruminate on the distinctive sensations of Pasyón
32
during Holy Week, about the
epic narrative of the life of Jesus Christ. This tradition is observed by almost everyone in
different communities with haunting smells of fresh flowers as offerings, visual and oral
elaborate retelling and enactment of Christ’s life from his birth to his violent death. Without fully
comprehending these physically intense spectacles I grew up observing as a child, I began asking
my elders about these bizarre traditions and processions. Their answers unanimously pointed to
the religious aspects, without suggesting the implications of colonialism. Nailed raises questions
about the continuing struggles of the Pilipinx with cultural and identity in relation to the complex
consequences of colonialism.

31
Angel Velasco Shaw, “Nailed,” filmed 1992, Vimeo, 49:30.
32
The Pasyón (Spanish: Pasión) is a Philippine epic narrative of the life of Jesus Christ, focused on his Passion,
Death, and Resurrection. In stanzas of five lines of eight syllables each, the standard elements of epic poetry are
interwoven with a colourful, dramatic theme. The uninterrupted recitation or Pabasa of the whole epic is a popular
Filipino Catholic devotion during the Lenten season, and particularly during Holy Week.
21

Figure 6: Angel Velasco Shaw, Nailed, 1992, © Angel Velasco Shaw. Courtesy of MoMA.
https://www.moma.org/collection/works/118635

In “Who Claims Alterity?” postcolonial theorist, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
deconstructs how historical narratives are produced, which writings are sanctioned, how they
emerge and how they gain political implications.
33
History for the colonies was created under
false claims through biased and perfunctory information, unsanctioned by the colonized. The role
of postcolonial critique is to offer analysis in a non-Western literary and linguistic tradition
wherein the colonized Other can rewrite alternative cultural stories. As a postcolonial theorist,
Spivak uses the methodology of deconstruction to examine how evidence and narratives are
constructed. Eurocentric frameworks have paved the way to support Western economic interests.
Responding to French scholars Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze in her essay, “Can the
Subaltern Speak,” Spivak suggests that the subaltern or the oppressed subject does not have the

33
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Who Claims Alterity?,” in Art in Theory 1900 - 2000: An Anthology of Changing
Ideas, 2
nd
Edition. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 1119-1124.
22
power to transform society without changing the systems in which society is constructed.
34
White
European scholars impose Western ideologies on the Global South as a universal approach to
epistemology.
35
The notion that populations are treated homogenously and stand in the same
relation to global neoliberal capitalism is a form of essentialism. Spivak implies that Western
intellectuals replicate the colonialist discourse they claim to critique when they customarily use
this homogenized language. These frameworks do not give agency to the subaltern.
36
In an
academic setting, pedagogy can be deconstructed to produce alternative ways of looking at other
cultures and consequently shifting universal perceptions.
In Archive Fever: a Freudian Impression, Jacques Derrida considers the psychology
between the human mind and the physical archive. Psychoanalysis helps recover the lost and
forgotten memories of the past. Some vivid and some repressed, as the mind constantly organizes
and reorganizes memories. The physical archive operates analogous to the human mind. We
remember what is useful and stow away what is not, yet we seek psychoanalysis to uncover these
lost and painful recollections in order to connect, give clarity and heal from the hidden painful
aspects of our memories. In order to make sense of the past, artists and cultural workers
“psychoanalyze” the physical archive, sorting through and reclaiming what and why their lineage
has been refused entry to the arkheion, the house, domicile, address, or residence of the superior

34
In Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s essay “Can the Subaltern Speak,” the subaltern is a silenced, voiceless and
gendered other. When Spivak refers to subalterity, she is specific about the complexity with text of and by Indian
women.
35
The phrase “Global South” refers broadly to the regions of Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. It is a term
that includes “Third World” and “Periphery,” denoting regions outside Europe and North America that are mainly
low-income and often politically or culturally marginalized.
36
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Can the Subaltern Speak: Reflections on the History
of an Idea, ed. Rosalind C. Morris (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 21-78.
23
magistrates.
37
In the face of the archive as a place of power, Pilipinx artists navigate through
archival spaces of absence and that to which they have been historically denied access. In doing
so, artists subvert the power and control of the archive, conjuring instead forgotten memories of
the dead and trying to retrieve (however futilely) what has been repressed.
How can artists contend with the impossibility of retrieving the stories of the lives of
people who have been forgotten and omitted in history? Pilipinx visual artist, Maia Cruz Palileo
re-contextualizes stories, portraits, and images in her work. The images are based on her research
at Chicago’s Newberry Library where she unearthed dehumanizing ethnographic, colonial
photographs of indigenous Pilipinx in their archive. This research became the point of creative
departure where the artist combined images based from the ethnographic photos, familial and
imagined imagery. Together, they present an image of Pilipinx culture, constructed through
native eyes and through the eyes of the Other. This phenomenon mirrors the fractured feeling of
multiplicity and shallowness many of her generation describe when asked about the Pilipinx-
American identity and historical knowledge.
38
Palileo infuses both imagined and familial
narratives derived from memories of the United States; her current residence and the Philippines;
her family’s native land. “You have to make what you see,” says Palileo in her 2020 Public
Broadcasting Service, PBS video feature.
39
Her subjects have self-possessions in their facial
expressions with magic realist landscapes, bold colors found in the Philippine sceneries and
gestural brush strokes. Her Pilipinx subjects possess an evocative gaze confronting the viewer in
a dream-like, imagined environment and motifs of folklore. This visual strategy employs

37
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, 9.
38
Maia Cruz Palileo, “Paintings,” accessed December 9, 2019, http://www.maiacruzpalileo.com.
39
Ligaiya Romero, “Maia Cruz Palileo: Becoming the Moon,” Public Broadcasting Service, PBS, 11:54, October
13, 2020, https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/maia-cruz-palileo-becoming-the-moon/15825/.
24
alternative and speculative counter narratives to the dominant voices in historical archives.
Devoid of the racialized and debased caricatures of the indigenous Pilipinx, these paintings resist
the familiar dehumanizing images of Orientalism.

Figure 7: Maia Cruz Palileo, Two Young
Sailors, 2019, Oil on canvas, 48” x 36",
https://www.maiacruzpalileo.com/painting/v
iew/1582715/1/1709810

Figure 8: Maia Cruz Palileo, The Seer, 2015, Oil on canvas, 62” x
96" Diptych,
https://www.maiacruzpalileo.com/painting/view/1582715/1/1582788

In my own practice, I create a visual language around the idea and representation of the
Parol in Pilipinx culture, relating it to the discrepancies in the archive. The Parol, an ornamental,
star-shaped Christmas lantern, traditionally made of bamboo and paper, is believed to originate
from the Spanish colonial era. The word Parol is derived from the Spanish word farol, meaning
lantern. In the Philippines, the Parol is an iconic symbol of joy. Although this festive object is
seemingly harmless, the lineage of the ornamental lantern is an embodiment of colonial power
and authority, physically evident and internalized by Pilipinx people, wherever they reside. The
25
goal is to remind my Pilipinx audience to question master narratives and challenge the
dominating aspects of our European and American history of subjugation. After tracing the
history of the Parol, the futile search for authenticity and roots, conditioned by colonialism,
became apparent. I could not find the lineage of the Parol in the archives (beyond travel
websites); I was left with only fragments of historical accounts. This brings me back to Marta
Savigliano’s notion of the colonized’s endless search for an identity of their own, only to be
reminded of the painful and disjointed sequences of the past. This process of re-
contextualization can reveal how oppression functions in connection between material
oppression and its psychological effects.
My futile inquiry of the Parol prompted multiple strategies to reimagine and speculate in
a non-centered, non-hierarchical construction. The archives are designed to alienate and abstract
meanings therefore I suture vast tapestries that weave together familiar histories of colonial
traumas. As the archived historical lineage of the Parol is unclear and vague, I engage the
repetitive, layered and obscured approach when the context is complex and nuanced. I provide
visual cues with heuristic, fragmented and immersed with temporal but stable concepts. Each
artwork embodies a shared, non-linear collective story of the underrepresented Other, illegible
under legacies of empire.
26

Figure 9: Diane Williams, Curtain of Illegibility,
2020, Fabric, yarn, plastic netting, plastic bags,
ribbon, jute, acrylic, silkscreen ink on wooden dowel,
204” x 84”

Figure 10: Diane Williams, The Spam Story, 2020,
Wood, acrylic, plastic bag, wire, Spam cans, 72” x 60”

27
Chapter Five: Race Making and the Remaindered Lives
Art can create counter narratives and reconstruct race and identity. In her book,
Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity, anthropologist and dramaturge,
Dorinne Kondo employs the notion of reparative creativity in playwriting to engage the social
world in a dramatic register and as a way to remake worlds. In their creative processes, artists
can integrate and repair systems to make, unmake and remake race.
40

As Said argues in Orientalism, the designation of the term “Orient” reflects a Western
European view of the East to create a distinction between the West; the “Occident.” Race-
making and racial formation function similarly to the designation of the “Orient” as projects of
difference and imperial apparatuses of authority and control. The United States’ 1935
“Benevolent Assimilation” as a project to humanize the Pilipinx was a process of racialization.
This social and identity formation is an exemplary paradigm to discipline a population as a
mechanism of subjugation.
41

I return to Lisa Lowe’s notion of Identity as a constant formation. Identity and diaspora
are fluid, sutured and assembled from collective memories. As an interdisciplinary Pilipinx artist,
I examine and create a non-assigned and a non-static identity by weaving personal and shared
experiences. I combine cultural detritus as collected materials pulled from amalgamated sources:
friends, family (in US, Philippines and abroad) and immigrant communities in Los Angeles. My

40
Dorinne Kondo, Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity (Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2018), 211.
41
Neferti X. M. Tadiar, “Decolonization, ‘Race,’ And Remaindered Life Under Empire,” Qui Parle 23, no. 2
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, Spring/Summer 2015), 135-160.

28
fascination with the collection of detritus started the first time I saw a roadside memorial with
offerings of flowers, stuffed toys, crosses, handwritten notes, photographs and other items left
behind to honor the collective memories of the departed. They represent a claim of visibility,
grief and our detachment to death. Dedicated to automobile-related deaths, victims of murder
and violence, these shrines are frequently seen in less affluent immigrant and working-class
neighborhoods. While these deaths signify a collective sadness and loss for beloved and
significant members of the community, their value under capitalism is obscured. I became more
and more engrossed with these sights as they decay and left to be forgotten and erased through
time.
How do we find agency within the structures where some are devalued, erased, forgotten
and made illegible under the social and political economy of life? What does it mean to live a
remaindered life? Scholar, Neferti Tadiar theorizes the remaindered life as an analytical category
of thinking about life-sustaining forms and practices of personhood and sociality. It means
questioning the way we think about difference and marginality and abandoning our unchallenged
attachments to the ideals of abstract, free subjects that uphold racial liberalism and its critique of
empire. Tadiar points to the gendered subjects and their mutability throughout the
“standardization” of life and production of the “average” human under capitalism. She makes a
distinction between lives worth living for their ability to accumulate value transmissible across
generations, can solidify with the facility for mobility and lives that are expendable, that can
never accumulate, liquid and always sinking in value.
42
Parallel to Kondo’s concept of

42
Ibid.
29
worldmaking, the focus is on finding possibilities to transform and remake human social
relations.
I am aware of the stark differences between a country like the Philippines (my
motherland), struggling to lift itself from legacies of empire and the United States (my adopted
country) with so much excess and accumulated wealth. I have several members in my family
who work overseas as migrant workers or commoditized national and natural resources. With the
rate of unemployment in the Philippines, they’re faced without recourse but to work overseas for
income to support their families. According to the Philippine Statistics Authority, in 2019 there
were 2.2 million Overseas Filipino Workers, OFW who worked abroad at any time during the
period of April to September.
43
56% of these OFWs are young female domestic workers under
servitude. The OFWs, particularly the female migrant workers are living under the harshness of
exploitation and as devalued lives under capitalism. They are racialized and gendered figures,
disposable and expendable consequences of the political order of power.
How does the Pilipinx thrive beyond the conditions of disposable existence to which they
are constantly reduced? Decolonization and the remaking of social life can generate new modes
of thinking that can build new institutional knowledge. To connect these ideas in my work, I
employ visual strategies that intend to make the viewer consider positions in diverse perspectives
when the subject is complex or “illegible.” Performativity in language is a poststructuralist
approach that fosters an active, versus passive, mode of viewing, enabling viewers to shift to the
performative mode and therefore viewing (consuming) becomes a performance.
44
I use

43
“Total Number of OFWs Estimated at 2.2 Million,” Philippine Statistics Authority, accessed March 2, 2021,
https://psa.gov.ph/content/total-number-ofws-estimated-22-million.
44
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1975), 41-43.
30
fragmentation, collaging remnants of fabric and textiles with cultural significance as substrates,
combining transparent or translucent materials and mixing disparate elements that further
muddle the subject in question. I weave physical cultural detritus as metaphors for how the
marginalized is often viewed as “detritus of society.” Repeatedly integrating Spam
45
cans, Santo
Niño
46
figures and other religious iconography, crocheted flowers, grocery bags from immigrant
markets, my mother’s old dresses, and wrappers of my favorite childhood snacks in the
Philippines combined with highly chromatic paint and fabrics that remind me of the Philippine
landscapes. These items not only represent colonial histories but also carry collective memories
of kinship. The collected materials/detritus cultivate cultural literacies wherein the audience is
activated through a heuristic method by learning the plurality behind the codes, which contain
multiple meanings. My practice is not a prescription for repair nor it is cathartic in nature, but a
pathway to integrate Pilipinx identity and culture into contemporary art and historical practice.

45
U.S. soldiers were the first to introduce Spam to the Filipinos during World War II and was given to the locals as
some sort of reward. Spam became a very popular breakfast item after the war ended as well as a cultural symbol
between the U.S. and the Philippines.
46
Santo Niño was originally a gift from explorer Ferdinand Magellan to the Philippine chief, Rajah Humabon of his
baptism in 1521 converting Rajah Humabon to Christianity. Magellan gave Rajah his Christian name, Carlos and his
wife Humaway, Juana.

31
Conclusion
Does art have the power to alter the traumatic legacies of colonial history? To address the
material and psychological violence of assimilation and erasure, it is not enough to substitute
positive images for the familiar stereotypes of Orientalism, but also to develop alternative
histories through a self-reflexive practice of decolonization and postcolonialism. It is impossible
to recover the voice of the subaltern, the oppressed subject, the forgotten and the “remaindered
life.”
To return to Spivak’s theorization, it is impossible to recover the voice of the subaltern,
or the oppressed subject. Inclusion in the archive is dependent upon whether or not it produces
value to colonial knowledge production. An archive needs origin and authority. But what does it
mean to recover lost memories? Gaiutra Bahadur, known for her artful political writing in her
book, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture, recounts the hidden history of the exploitation
of indentured coolie
47
women in the early 1900s. Among them was her great-grandmother
Sujaria. Consistent with the lives of indentured women whose accounts were not recorded in
history, Sujaria was not afforded a testimony, or a story in her own words. Bahadur tells a
broader history of over a million indentured Indians transported to the colonies. The book
focuses on several painful accounts of coolie women who were born into the wrong caste, class,
race and gender.
48
These voiceless gendered subjects are the same women Spivak refers to as the

48
Author Gaiutra Bahadur states: "[Coolie] was the bureaucratic term the British used to describe indentured
laborers. But it became a highly charged slur. So naming the book Coolie Woman was controversial. I did it because
to me, the women who migrated as indentured laborers carried enormous burdens," Gaiutra Bahadur, “‘Coolie
Woman’ Rescues Indentured Women from Anonymity” (November 19, 2013), National Public Radio,
https://www.npr.org/2013/11/19/246154506/coolie-woman-rescues-indentured-women-from-anonymity, accessed
March 2, 2021.
48
Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture (London: Hurst & Company, 2013).
32
subaltern. How can art reconstruct, weave and invoke the voices of the intended victims of
colonization? To enter the unrecorded history of the subaltern, Bahadur turned to alternative and
unofficial sources, weaving together her familial history of trauma and speculative narratives of
her connections to indentured servitude.
49
These stories were written with explicit retelling of
trauma and violence, insistently addressing uncomfortable colonial legacies.
Parallel to Bahadur, writer and researcher Saidiya Hartman uses speculative narrative to
reconstruct the experiences of unknown subjects. To strain against the limits of the archive, she
enacts the impossibility of representing the lives of marginalized people (especially young Black
women) through the process of narration. Hartman suggests in her essay, “Venus in Two Acts”
that the history of Black counter historical projects is one of failure. Hartman dissects the
improbability of producing Black historical accounts as counter history since they were denied
access and substance to be accounted for in the archives. The irrevocable violence of the Atlantic
slave trade cannot be retrieved.
50
How can artists recover the stories of the lives of the subaltern,
the dispossessed, and the enslaved? The intent is to imagine what cannot be verified since the
dead cannot speak. The artist does not represent nor give voice to these forgotten and emblematic
figures, but to create imagined narratives in the discrepant archives. As Neferti Tadiar suggests,
these commodified corporeal subjects under the accumulation of capital and power are the
remainders, illegible and expendable. But how do we address the disposable existence of the
remaindered life when it is constantly reduced under the political economy of life? Rather than

49
Speculative narrative/nonfiction is writing in which actual or verifiable material is not at war with material
invented/extrapolated/speculated/fantasized.
50
Saidiya V. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small axe: a journal of criticism 26, no. 26 (June 2008): 1-14.
33
rehabilitating the old systems, it is necessary to build new institutions, cultivating imagined and
existing cultural literacies.
Many Pilipinx artists work to confront their own physical and internalized boundaries. As
Said argues, it is not sufficient (nor plausible), to present positive images of a true “Oriental”
culture to challenge the static identities given to non-Western subjects, including Pilipinx people.
The visual artists and cultural workers I have included in this thesis each present their subjective
and vulnerable processes of moving within, between, beyond, and through subconscious
phantasms of their colonial repressions. Knowing that the oppressed subject does not have the
power to transform society without changing the systems in which society is constructed, these
artists confront and resist hierarchical systems that uphold inequalities. The artists’ works are not
prescriptive, but rather navigate and negotiate around systems of colonization. The goal of this
thesis is to reorient and integrate the Pilipinx in history and produce cultural knowledge for the
historically underrepresented, devalued, expendable and illegible under capitalism. It is not
possible to retrieve the testimonies of our colonized ancestors as they have been denied inclusion
in history, but artists can reimagine and reevaluate evidence, agency and authorship by
challenging the absent, inaccurate and discriminatory representations in historical archives. By
confronting conventional frameworks of history and engaging communities in subversive,
speculative and generative forms of reflections, we can begin to engage in non-essentialist and
anti-colonial discourse and artmaking as forms of resistance.

34
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Asset Metadata

Creator Williams, Diane (author)

Core Title Visualizing identity & the Pilipinx diaspora

School Roski School of Art and Design

Degree Master of Fine Arts

Degree Program Fine Arts

Publication Date 03/30/2021

Defense Date 03/27/2021

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag alternative histories,Angel Velasco Shaw,API,Archive Fever,benevolent assimilation,colonial,colonial legacies,Colonialism,contemporary art,counter narrative,decolonization,devalued,Diane Williams,diaspora,Dorinne Kondo,expendable lives,Filipino,Gaiutra Bahadur,Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,Homi Bhabha,illegible,imperialist,internalized oppression,Jacques Derrida,legacies of empire,Maia Cruz Palileo,Marta Savigliano,mimicry,Neetu Khanna,Neferti Tadiar,OAI-PMH Harvest,Orientalism,Parol,Philippines,Pilipinx,Pilipinx artist,postcolonial,postcolonialism,post-structuralism,precarious lives,racist,Roland Barthes,Rudyard Kipling,Saidiya Hartman,Sara Jimenez,Sarita Echavez See,spam,speculative narrative,subaltern,syncretic culture,umbilical cord,underrepresented Filipino,White Man's Burden

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Lin, Jenny (committee chair)

Creator Email dianewil@usc.edu,info@dianewilart.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c89-433780

Unique identifier UC11668929

Identifier etd-WilliamsDi-9372.pdf (filename),usctheses-c89-433780 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-WilliamsDi-9372.pdf

Dmrecord 433780

Document Type Thesis

Rights Williams, Diane

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA