Emergent Allies: Decolonizing Hawai‘i from a Filipin@ Perspective.
Emergent Allies: Decolonizing Hawai‘i from a Filipin@ Perspective.
Date
2017-05
Authors
Compoc, Kimberly M.
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This dissertation maps a critical terrain of anti-imperialist Filipin@s in Hawaiʻi from
1990-2015. I investigate those Filipin@ writers, community leaders and activists who take
seriously the role of (neo)colonialism in the ongoing fight for self-determination in both Hawaiʻi
and the Philippines. I pay particular attention to the influence of Hawaiian sovereignty
movement(s) on these contributions, while also investigating the way texts resist anti-Indigenous
racism, torture, war, (trans)misogyny, and global capitalism. My intervention marks a shift from
a framework of “Filipino Americans” arriving on “American soil,” to a history from below that
decenters the U.S. and prioritizes decolonial alliances.
This era is marked by several historical milestones including the 100-year anniversary of
the overthrow in 1993; the election of Hawaiʻi’s first Filipin@ American governor in 1994; the
100-year anniversary of the Philippine revolution in 1996; the 100-year anniversary of the
multiple annexations in 1998 (including Philippines and Hawaiʻi); and the 100-year anniversary
of the sakadas’ arrival to Hawaiʻi in 2006. This period also marks the wars on/of terror and the
attendant rise in mass surveillance, racialized torture, and deportation. I approached my archive
with attention to the historical circumstances within which they were produced, the historical
echoes of Filipin@ anti-colonial history, and the decolonial futures these artists, writers, and
community leaders envision.
I conceive of my dissertation as a kind of gathering of speech acts, both literary and
activist. My archive includes English print culture, oral history interviews, and autoethnography.
Plays and poetry serve a primary role in terms of traditional literary texts; I also include one
government report on torture, one documentary film, newspaper articles, fiction, and
commemorative documents. As this is a decolonial project, I also foreground Indigenous
perspectives through my analysis of several interviews I conducted with Hawaiian sovereignty
activist/protectors who have traveled to the Philippines. In terms of autoethnography, I
incorporate self-critique of my family’s relationship to U.S. empire in Hawaiʻi, the Philippines,
and the Middle East. As colonial violence is deeply gendered, I also attend to how agendas of
decolonization intersect with visions of gender and sexual liberation, reflecting on some of my
own work as a theater artist and demilitarization activist.
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