Dragons becoming shrimps: Toward a Chinese-Philippine poetics

• Main Author: Lua, Shirley O.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2001
• Subjects: Poetics; Literature; Poetry; Chinese literature; Philippine literature; Discourse analysis
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_doctoral/863
• Institution: De La Salle University

This dissertation proposes Chinese-Philippine literature as an overdetermined minority discourse. Specific and interrelated socio-historical, economic, and political factors have conditioned the trans/formation of this literature, resulting in the fragmentations and metamorphoses of Chinese-Filipino identities. The author defines Chinese-Philippine literature as published creative writings in whatever languages/dialects by Chinese-Filipino writers. A Chinese-Filipino writer is a person of Chinese descent, native-born or naturalized, and has stayed for a considerable period in the Philippines. Chinese-Philippine literature, geographically and historically deterritorialized in the Philippines, resides in minority positions in relation to the Confucian traditions and the New Literature of China and at the same time, it is marginalized within the hierarchical paradigm of Philippine literary traditions. In this study, the author devised a reading instrument for the critical analysis of Chinese-Philippine poems to identify a poetics of identity constructions. Specifically, the objectives are: to describe the different versions of Chinese-Filipino identities to examine how poetry makes reformative use of language as a way of re-conceiving identities and to identify alternative modes of experiences. The concepts are primarily drawn from the theoretical insights of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and reinforced by selected ideas and views of cultural theorists, sociologists, and historians like Raymond Williams, Herbert Gans, Joshua Fishman, Benedict Anderson, Ross Poole, Walker Connor, and others. This study broaches the issues of ethnicity, minority, identity, cultures, power, and hybridity.