Date of Award
5-2017
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Legacy Department
Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design
Committee Member
Dr. Cynthia Haynes, Committee Chair
Committee Member
Dr. G. Jeff Love
Committee Member
Dr. Cameron Bushnell
Committee Member
Dr. Akel Kahera
Abstract
This project studies the fragments of the everyday lives of Filipino Americans, captured and interpreted via vernacular video. Read through three modes of estrangement (translation, nostalgia, and transition), Filipinoness is rendered as unheimlich or “homeless†to open multiple interpretations of this cultural identification. Filipino racial and cultural formation in the United States is often concealed by categories that tend to homogenize Asian American experience and disregard the specificity of the colonial relationship between America and the Philippines, flouting Filipino and Filipino Americans' struggles against a simultaneous ambiguity, invisibility, and strangeness as hybrid persons of color. Through an interpretive reading of Filipino Americans' everyday encounters with Filipinoness, a quotidian rhetorics emerges to provide a framework with which Filipino American videos are read as a way for creatively working through and improvising with multiple identities against persistent stereotypes and a frequent displacement in historical and cultural narratives. Referencing episodes in the colonial history of the Philippines and the United States, this study links the forgotten struggles of Filipinos/Filipino Americans with audio-visual representations of their estrangement from cultural artifacts, language, and images of Filipinoness. Emancipatory discourses are revealed in the strategic use of hybridity, and engagements with fragments of language and memory. As a movement that foregrounds their struggle for homeliness in the elasticity of multiple identities and historical discourses, estrangement as unheimlich provides Filipino American videographers (as well as Filipinos) with opportunities to (re)write narratives of emancipation that emerge from encounters with Filipinoness and Filipino American presence and struggle in everyday life.
Recommended Citation
Tolentino-Canlas, Daphne Tatiana P., "Quotidian Rhetorics: Estrangement, The Everyday, and Transitioning Filipinoness into An/Other Beginning" (2017). All Dissertations. 1884.
https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_dissertations/1884