Locating Filipino Americans: Ethnicity and the Cultural Politics of Space - Softcover

Bonus, Rick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566397790 ISBN 13: 9781566397797

Publisher: Temple University Press, 2000

Synopsis

The Filipino American population in the U.S. is expected to reach more than two million by the next century. Yet many Filipino Americans contend that years of formal and covert exclusion from mainstream political, social, and economic institutuions of the basis of their race have perpetuated racist stereotypes about them, ignored their colonial and immigration history, and prevented them from becoming fully recognized citizens of the nation. Locating Filipino Americans shows how Filipino Americans counter exclusion by actively engaging in alternative practices of community building. Locating Filipino Americans, an ethnographic study of Filipino American communities in Los Angeles and San Diego, presents a multi-disciplinary cultural analysis of the relationship between ethnic identiy and social space. Author Rick Bonus argues that alternative community spaces enable Filipino Americans to respond to and resist the ways in which the larger society has historically and institutionally rendered them invisible, silenced, and racialized. centers, and the community newspapers to demonstrate how ethnic identities are publicly constituted and communities are transformed. Delineating the spaces formed by diasporic consciousness, Bonus shows how community members appropriate elements from their former homeland and from their new settlements in ways defined by their critical stances against racism, homogenization, complete assimilation, and exclusionary citizenship. Locating Filipino Americans is one of the few books that offers a grounded approach to theoretical analyses of ethnicity and contemporary culture in the U.S. Author note: Rick Bonus is Assistant Professor of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle.

About this title

From the Publisher:

Defining ethnic identity and social space for Filipino Americans

From the Inside Flap:

"Bonus draws on contemporary insights of cultural studies while grounding its tendency toward idealism in a very material sense of power. His subjects are actors, not victims of narratives. He does an effective and sometimes elegant job of capturing their adjustment and resistance to being neither and both Filipino and American." —John Horton, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, UCLA

About this edition

• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1566397790
• ISBN 13: 9781566397797
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 217