UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

Los Angeles

Toward a Political Economy of Desire:

Disco(rdant) Fantasies in R. Zamora Linmark’s Rolling the R’s

A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction

of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts

in Asian American Studies

by

Paul Nadal

JUNE 2007

***

I.

Toward a Political Economy of Desire

History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its "ruses" turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention. But this History can be apprehended only through its effects, and never directly as some reified force. This is indeed the ultimate sense in which History as ground and untranscendable horizon needs no particular theoretical justification: we may be sure that its alienating necessities will not forget us, however much we might prefer to ignore them.

—Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious[1]

IT HAS BECOME COMMONPLACE, even axiomatic, to say that everything is socially constructed. For those of us working in Asian American Studies, social constructionism, in a certain sense, has indeed become the methodological de rigeur. But what is left of identities, cultures, and social practices after ideological investments are exposed? What of desires after discursive effects? The thrust behind these questions is of course not to dismiss the powerful claims that have been made about the nature of social and cultural phenomena: we can no longer, for instance, assume the essentialisms of race, gender, and sexuality, as they have been effectively “deconstructed” to reveal their various Eurocentric, patriarchal, and heteronormative underpinnings. These questions are posed rather to reflect on the current state of affairs of what is undeniably the present condition of global war and terror, and to ask: What forms of counter-hegemonic politics does the idea of difference still allow? At a historical moment in which the political is scarcely immune to the unremitting codification of global culture, how do we deploy a politics of difference around race, gender, and sexuality beyond what readily comes to us as a seemingly boundless identitarian pluralism and cultural relativism?

An invocation of race, gender, and sexuality, to be sure, belies the unequal and jagged emergence of each. In Asian American Studies, perhaps indicative of a certain logic of disciplinary formation that gives rise to the uneven institutionalization of ethnic and women’s studies, issues of race and ethnicity have preoccupied what can generally be described as the primary critical project of Asian American Studies, namely, the production of scholarship which exposes how power operates along racial lines that have historically marginalized particular groups in the U.S. in cultural and political terms. As a consequence, Asian American Studies in general and Asian American literary studies in particular have consciously advocated for the reclaiming of histories, communities, and voices out of the margins of the American imaginary and into the national arena of political representation. Difference, in this sense, becomes a representational problem with a specific historical content of disenfranchisement, resistance, and struggle for visibility. [2]

The turn to gender and sexuality, on the other hand, effectively decentered the emphasis on race in Asian American Studies.[3] Difference, in this instance, had to be reconceptualized to incorporate other multiplicities into the struggle that were occluded by previous race-based analyses and political projects.[4] As has been noted, this turn to gender and sexuality coincided with and contributed to the turn from cultural nationalism to transnationalism, informing a postcolonial, postmodern, and queer politics of difference keen on interrogating the racial, patriarchal, and heteronormative underpinnings of the nation. [5] Taken together, such “turns” to go beyond race and beyond the conceptual territorial boundaries of the nation-state give legibility to concepts as diverse as queerness, diaspora, globalization, and empire.[6]

It is the task of this thesis not only to reflect on the consequences of these various “turns,” turns which are in part disciplinary efforts to think through the overdetermined intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. This thesis, as importantly, makes an effort to examine how and why this proliferation of difference (through the interfacing of race, gender, and sexuality) came to be not only the subject of Asian American cultural politics but indeed, as we shall see, the desire that drives it. Through a close reading of Linmark’s 1995 novel, Rolling the R’s, I take to task the political claims made on, and in the name of, difference as such. As I hope to show, what needs to be interrogated further are the desires that inform and are expressed by the political claims made on behalf of difference and to account for the historical conditions that make for such critical and representational practices. This thesis thereby attempts to read and theorize difference through and against its conditions of possibility in order to essay at the same time their attendant ideological and material consequences, or what I want to call the political economy of desire.

Desire here would include desires to belong, to become, to imagine, to move, to represent, to love, to act. As these verbs suggest, desire is to be understood as having a productive, dialectical value and transformative effect of and for agential change. As such, desire is to be read not as a private, epiphenomenal activity, but rather as a social process of production in the specific sense that it produces states of being, social relations, and connections within and between bodies. From this perspective, to activate desire as an expression of a politically enabling difference henceforth would involve the production of forces, collectivities, and relations. What becomes important is to question more adequately the foundations that enable desires to become social formations and to grasp the relations that mediate the difference expressed by such formations within and through various levels of society. We will continue our discussion of desire and its relation to society with Deleuze and Guattari’s insight that “desire produces reality, or stated another way, desiring-production is one and the same thing as social production.”[7]

The conjunction of “desire” and “production” in Deleuze and Guattari’s framework is useful for us here because it affords us to name with some specificity the determinate forces that set in motion and give shape to the “semi-autonomous” levels of the socius: namely, capital and its social, cultural, and economic dimensions. Furthermore, the significance of Deleuze and Guattari’s conjunction lies in the presupposition that capital itself has evolved into a stage of development, in which these two terms—“desire” and “production”—become inseparable.[8] Indeed, the historical stage that is “late capitalism”[9] is such that even the most disparate cultural and subjective forms are now progressively becoming integrated into late capitalism’s regimes of accumulation. Hence, what we witness as the “global” growth and expansion of capital is nothing less than the absorption of territories into the world market, and by extension, the cultural and social practices of populations into its formal structures of production and the forms of governmentality which organize them. On this view, even if we are to consider difference as politically desirable, any invocation of the concept must first take into account the degree to which the production of difference may in fact be already in the order of capital itself.

While admittedly this coextensity between difference and capital may seem too bleak of a scenario (is there an outside from which one can speak?), the point is to attend to potential sites of complicity, and to interrogate and work through them, if we are to render effective social and political critiques. To this end, it is important to remind ourselves that while the process by which difference becomes integrated into late capitalism’s “new regime of accumulation” [10] is one that is totalizing, it is not totalized: that is to say, it is neither complete nor without contestation. For where desire is associated with the local (e.g., as a local practice or local production of social and cultural difference), the relation between the local and the global is always one of struggle, what Alberto Moreiras describes as the struggle “against the planetary imposition of a system of control based upon hierarchically organized homogenization and administered difference.”[11] As I hope to show, what I am calling the political economy of desire attempts to theorize and read difference precisely against this integrative and regulatory logic of late capitalism, a logic that seeks to administer and manage difference in order to abstract its value into late capitalism’s transnational modes of production.

Transnationalism as an object of inquiry in Asian American Studies is, in part, an effect of the proliferation of different representations, or in Deleuze’s vocabulary, “assemblages of desire” that one witnesses alongside the aforementioned trends in Asian American literary studies. As we turn to include gender and sexuality with race in reading Asian American literature, we now observe desire in its multiple, interstitial forms as they travel, as it were, in and through the fraught boundaries of the nation-state, subjectivity, and the body. From this perspective, the American ethnic minority’s desire for an ethno-national identity becomes foiled by the transnational’s desire for the hybrid, multi-sited, performative subject. Sau-ling C. Wong has described this shift in Asian American Studies in terms of “denationalization,” a term which marks for her the shift from cultural nationalist concerns to properly diasporic or transnational ones. As Wong writes, “this repositioning arises from a larger global movement of transnational capital, whose cultural consequences include a normalization of multiple subjectivities, migrations, border-crossings.”[12] Critical of what she sees as the ahistoricity and depoliticizing effects of denationalization, Wong insists on “claiming America” so to establish “the Asian American presence in the context of the United States’ national cultural legacy and contemporary cultural production.”[13] Susan Koshy takes issue with Wong’s polemic by pointing to what she sees as the “conservative tendency of its conclusion,” or more specifically, to what Koshy interprets as the equivalence Wong unwittingly sets up between “claiming America” and the assimilationist desire to be loyal to the nation-state.[14] Koshy, contra Wong, writes:

I would contend that “Asian American” offers us a rubric that we cannot use. But our usage of the term should rehearse the catachrestic status of the formation. I use the term “catachresis” to indicate that there is no literal referent for the rubric “Asian American,” and, as such, the name is marked by the limits of its signifying power. It then becomes our responsibility to articulate the inner contradictions of the term and to enunciate its representational inconsistencies and dilemmas.[15]

If “Asian America” has no literal referent to which it can use as a basis for its formation, it would seem then that Koshy’s poststructuralist gesture to highlight the “catachrestic status” of the sign that is “Asian America” undermines her own argument. For exactly who, then, would constitute the “our” that would claim the burden of such a (representational) “responsibility”? How does one go beyond this impasse?

It seems to me that in spite of the rhetorical ambiguities around Wong’s “reclaiming [of] America,” what remains important for us in her essay is the caution she makes against the thorough rescinding of “America” as a referent. Significant projects around race, gender, and sexuality continue to do the important work of interrogating the nation-state, showing its contingency, porousness, and the new forms of being and citizenship promised by the purported demise of the nation under the transnationalization of capital. At the same time, however, it remains important to bear in mind that the rise of capital’s influence as “multinational” does not necessitate the complete dissolution of the nation-state as such.[16] As Neferti Tadiar argues, “[t]he decline in importance of the nation-state and the category of the nation is only relative to the supremacy of multinational corporate capital.”[17] What must be analyzed in a systematic way are the extent to which nation-states are thrown into and participate in “a relation of reciprocity with capital”[18] and the consequences this relation may have on minority subjects in general and Asian Americans in particular. In such a scenario, Asian American subjectivity begins to assume different orientations: no longer simply the immigrant, but also the refugee, the diasporic, the cosmopolitan, hailing from and inhabiting different locations, Southeast Asia, Pacific Islands, South America, and elsewhere. [19]

If the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality generate new ways of conceptualizing subjectivities that can become potentially tangential and oppositional to the nation-state, then what becomes necessary is a particular kind of critical self-reflexivity through which we can begin to examine their specific historical and material conditions of possibility. With this in mind, we ask, is difference, that is, radical alterity, “always already” political? This question involves both a rethinking of race, gender, and sexuality in their discursive and subjective dimensions, as well as a questioning of what made subjectivity as such an integral, if not the predominant problem, in Asian American cultural politics. In articulating a political economy of desire, I suggest that the full potentiality for the political must not be confined to the subjective domain, which is to say, must not be determined solely on the exigencies of identity politics. This potentiality, I suggest, lies elsewhere. As the name implies, the political economy of desire is an attempt to bring together the subjective and the material in order to work through what is often slighted in Asian American critical practice, and which this thesis takes up as its polemical purpose: namely, the workings of capital that underpin the Asian American subject in all its racial, gender, sexual, and transnational forms.

It will be illustrative at this point to examine a particular moment in Linmark’s novel which illuminates some of the concerns I have raised about the political economy of desire. In Rolling the R’s, we are introduced to a cohort of young children living in the “local” immigrant community of Kalihi, whose dreams and fantasies hold a particular racial and sexual import as they come to grips with their sexuality in late 1970s Hawai`i. Among them is Orlando Domingo, a Filipino senior high school student at Farrington High who participates in the Farrah Fawcett craze sweeping Kalihi’s cultural landscape. What many critics find enabling about Orlando is nothing less than his flagrant racial and gender cross-identifications, that is, his queer difference in becoming “Farrah…Far-Out Farrah, or Faraway Farrah.” Orlando’s self-refashioning thus would seem to mark his radical difference and, in effect, would ostensibly disrupt the school’s social order.[20] As David Eng argues, Orlando embodies “a queer childhood marked by psychic strength and material resistance to the demands of the law and the demands of others—a flipping of traditional representations and expectations.”[21]

…Orlando struts into class wearing a fire-engine red polyester long-sleeved shirt tied around his 24” waist, yellow bell-bottoms, and Famolare platforms. His face is painted, courtesy of Helena Rubinstein’s The Paris Boutique Kit, which includes lipstick and nail lacquer and Aziza’s Shadow Boutique. Twelve shimmering eye colors for every occasion.

“What’s next?” the teachers ask during their lunch break. “Principal Shim must do something about this. Ahora mismo!” The following week, after Orlando views the episode called “The Death of a Roller-Derby Queen,” he wheels onto campus on black leather Cobra skates, wearing see-through Dove shorts, red Danskins, and red-and-white knee and elbow pads. And, as always, fully made-up with Farrah’s hairdo that withstands the Kalihi breeze with the aid of an entire can of unscented Aqua Net hair spray. (24)

Construed as a deviance to be contained, Orlando’s desire for transvestism prompts the school authorities of Farrington High to expel him before “our boys catch this madness” (24), but the queerness of which ultimately cannot be disciplined because of his stellar academic record: “Top of the Dean’s List; Current GPA: 4.0; This year’s Valedictorian” (25). Orlando’s scandalous style and presence here as “Farrah Flip” enact what could be interpreted as a renunciation and an undoing of U.S. racial and gender norms by an audacious Filipino queer immigrant from Cebu.

But what is needed here, too, I hasten to add, is a specific reinscription of a process, that is, of a certain labor act through which Orlando’s queer cross-identifications and transformations are effectuated. What Orlando’s self-fashioning marks, and which, as the passage above suggest, Linmark readily details in his sentences, is that Orlando’s affirmation of difference seems predicated upon a certain labor: namely, his sheer consumption of commodities. An inventory will suffice here: Famolare platforms; Helena Rubinstein’s The Paris Boutique Kit; Aziza’s Shadow Boutique; Dove shorts; Danskins; and, of course, Aqua Net hair spray to achieve that “million-dollar mane coveted by Farrah wanna-be’s and Flip queens” (24). On the very surface of the text itself, Orlando’s performance as Farrah Flip and the difference it represents find their value in the significations of these objects. In this light, it is as though the very description we have of Orlando’s dazzling entrance to the school grounds as Farrah Flip announces yet another event, the eventuality of which is brought to our attention through a kind of political allegory that Linmark’s text enacts: the importation of object-goods into Hawai`i and the new kinds of consuming practices it creates. Indeed, does not the very name “Farrah Flip” itself mark the commodification of difference as much as it names a potential mode of resistance? What we can begin to realize, then, is the degree to which difference, in its most basic and fundamental sense, is materially made possible, and as such, circumscribed by the operations of capital and its relations of consumption and production.

This is the very occasion behind which we can begin to sense the political economy of desire active in Linmark’s literary production of a queer diasporic narrative. Re-examined from this perspective, this particular representation of desire—constitutive of a process of becoming—expresses itself in certain form of difference, the conditions of which signal for us an unsettling fact: the historical moment in which the world-market begins to penetrate colonized and ex-colonized territories, absorbing them and the difference they represent into its relations of production. This specific historical juncture, this event, I argue, is precisely the “absent cause” informing the queer diasporic narrative I consider in Linmark’s novel.[22] Part of my effort in reading Rolling the R’s, as I hope the second section of my thesis will demonstrate, is to reconstruct this history, this determining “absent cause,” and the experience of and struggle with this history I see as being expressed in Linmark’s text.

For critics are quick to hail Orlando the Farrah Flip as an exemplary articulation of a queer diasporic politics and even, as Victor Bascara writes, as an “example of the legal apparatus’s inability to contain transgressive formations that exceed direct regulation by the state under liberalism.”[23] We can begin to see, however, that such a politics of difference cannot be stipulated in advance without first finding the means of coming to terms with the political economy of desire itself. As our re-reading of Orlando suggests, it becomes necessary to change the very terms of the problem, from a representational kind to one in which we account for the specific objective precondition of Linmark’s representation of a subjective mode of being and becoming: simply put, to articulate the link between capital and desire.

Hence there is a double-bind, a certain ambivalence at work here, which Bascara to be sure, does not fail to point out: “[Orlando] would be able to invoke his status as a proper subject before the law, even though he is an improper subject to nonstate institutions that the state cannot touch in the name of the maintenance of the public/private split. The idea that a disruptive formation such as Orling would fit and indeed claim status as the Enlightenment juridical subject is the liberal turn that queerness may be tempted to take.”[24] What needs to be interrogated further is precisely this ambivalence in order to effectively undercut this “liberal turn” to which difference is susceptible. This “liberal turn” is the trap of a particular logic of representation, a logic which seeks to nominalize and recognize difference in order to accommodate it into the liberal state apparatus. It is only when we undermine and do away with such a trap can we begin to realize the potentiality for the political we continue to hope for in Orlando’s bold subjective practice as Farrah Flip.

Thus through a detour of Rolling the R’s we find ourselves back to the fundamental problem we had started with about articulating race, gender, and sexuality toward a counter-hegemonic critical practice. This problem in light of the political economy of desire involves an examination of the political claims of difference and the desire for visibility, recognition, and representation we make through such claims. It is at the same time to read difference in a way that takes into account the dialectical relationship between the subjective and the material, or more specifically, the relations that inform subjectivities and the modes of production that give value to their very becoming. The political economy of desire, then, is about the changing conditions of our times and about the ways in which we come to produce knowledges, identities, and the kinds of politics we hope to enact. This thesis is therefore conceived as an elaboration and working through of these various problems by thinking about the role of capital in shaping our desires. My aim is therefore to work toward a place of enunciation in which a politics keen on grappling with the complexities of our global situation can be actualized and practiced.

—Here I wish to add that my title is borrowed from E. San Juan, Jr.’s essay, “Overseas Writing: Toward a Political Economy of the Diasporic Imagination,” an homage which functions both as a point of reference and a point of departure. [25] In keeping with San Juan’s historical questioning, “Toward a Political Economy of Desire” makes a similar inquiry about method with respect to the kinds of reading practices we bear on Filipino American literature. To ask about method is of course to pause and delineate the particular stakes that inform our investments in reading Filipino American literature. San Juan takes up these questions in his essay, in which he concludes that Philippine-U.S. literary production must be “theorized within the process of comprehending the concrete historical particularity of their incorporation in the U.S. empire and the ecology of this unequal exchange.”[26] San Juan’s injunction to ground Filipino “diasporic imagination” into histories of empire must also be placed properly in its political situation. Writing at a time when the project to revise the national literary canon gave way to various “politically correct” multiculturalisms, San Juan hazards against the desire to take (literary) recognition as an index of full political redress. San Juan calls instead for a critical account of how the very unevenness of canonization signals the resistance to “cooptation and incorporation” and how unevenness as such attests to Filipinos’ long struggle toward emancipation and self-determination.[27]

My approach to contemporary Filipino American literature engages with this trope of unevenness and takes up San Juan’s insistence to articulate Filipino culture with the material relations underwriting Philippine-U.S. history, not the least of which include the international division of labor and the dispersal of Filipinos in the diasporas under global finance capital. Inasmuch as contemporary Filipino American literature is born out of this general socio-cultural processes, recent writings by Filipinos in the diaspora are invested with the desire (unconscious or not) to come to grips with this emergent world-system.[28] I want to submit that contemporary Filipino American literature, whatever else it is, is a mediation of desires and aspirations toward a collective history that takes into account the cultural and geopolitical effects of these various globalizing forces. This conceptualization of Filipino diasporic cultural production as a process of mediation[29] calls for an understanding of just how the multiplicity that is “Filipino America” is a complex of relations between the individual and the social, the local and the global, and above all, between subjects and historical experience itself. It seems to me that at a historical moment in which social antagonisms paradoxically exist in an ethos of cultural relativism, what needs to be effectively rendered are other possibilities of desire afforded in our acts of remembering, belonging, and living—experiential activities which intimately deal with but cannot, must not, be subsumed by the totalizing operations of modernization.

In working toward a political economy of desire, I also hope to demonstrate that these mediations can be best appraised on the level of form, or more specifically, the various experimentations of form that the text I consider enact. I emphasize the role of narrative form in my reading of Rolling the R’s to counter the tendency to see innovation (or, even, I want to say, literature in the broadest sense) as inconsequential or, at best, supplementary to the political claims we make about race, gender, and sexuality. I want to affirm instead that narrative form in contemporary Filipino American literature is one of the sites in which cultural practices of memory, nostalgia, imagination, and other structures of feelings on the part of Filipina/os are purposively reworked in order to effect other kinds of intimations of the past and present. On this view, form becomes the medium through which we as readers engage with and recreate the desiring practices of subjects; put another way, form becomes for us both the generative site of ideological struggles and the phenomenological vehicle of historical experience itself.

As I shall show in my reading of Rolling the R’s, to articulate the political economy of desire in Linmark’s novel is to work through the problematic of reading I have outlined above. How might we think of Linmark’s novel as an effort through language to apprehend the various cultural and political changes brought about by emergent formations of global capitalism? This question, which implicates the so-called more material problems of capital, need not be taken as a heady reduction of a literary work to economic matters. In theorizing experimentation as a kind of desire itself, a form of imaginative and creative labor which involves the negotiation of various symbolic options toward the transformation of one’s historical situation, we can begin to sense how Linmark’s literary production is an effort to come to grips with changing global relations, a process of mediation worked through in the figuration of this phenomenon in narrative form. This is precisely how we were able to read, for instance, Orlando’s self-fashioning as Farrah Flip as also a kind of political allegory for the integration of Hawai`i into the world-market. As I hope my readings will make clear, the political economy of desire attempts to understand both the affective dimensions of our ways of being and belonging and the histories and transnational structures that are the conditions of their possibility.

II.

Disco(rdant) Fantasies: R. Zamora Linmark’s Rolling the R’s

R. ZAMORA LINMARK’S ROLLING THE R’S IS, above all, about queer desires. While this may not come as a surprise, what is striking is the range of responses that Linmark’s queer diasporic narrative seems to evoke. This range is evidenced by what critics have analyzed as laughter and grief, two emotional responses constitutive of Linmark’s queering of late-1970s Hawai`i. In Model Minority Imperialism, for example, Victor Bascara writes that “we can link Linmark’s humorous look at queer, neocolonized immigrants under globalization to a history they inherited through that sense of humor.” [30] On the other hand, Crystal Parikh suggests that Linmark’s novel produces in us a sense of grief through what she calls the “racial melancholia” that infuses our reading of episodes of loss, betrayal, and trauma in Rolling the R’s. [31] Rolling the R’s, in this way, is about the humorous adventures of a group of immigrant children living and acting out their ambitions in Hawai`i and the unhappy consequences that arise when such dreams fail to realize.

How do we make sense, however, of this range of affects between humor and melancholia? As Bascara and Parikh demonstrate, the significance of these two affective states lies in the way they make perceptible intimations of the political. When Bascara says that we find ourselves in the world of Rolling the R’s “laughing,” he means the pleasure we get from Linmark’s style of play. It is through Linmark’s play with narrative form, after all, in which we come to view the contradictions that ensue when a local, peripheral place like Kalihi, Hawai`i and its people converge with the globalizing force that is American culture. Parikh’s psychoanalytic reading of racial melancholia, on the other hand, suggests that grief comes to us precisely in the remainder of just such a play with form: when social inequalities such as poverty and segregation become the content of the story itself. In short, where we may laugh in seeing the irony and absurdity of reality, grief strikes us when things fall apart, become fragmented.[32] Yet, it would seem, too, that another feeling is operative, a mediating third term, as it were, mobilized to set these two seemingly contradictory affects toward political critique. If the critical possibility of humor and melancholia lies in the way they convert themselves into a queer sensibility that is politically enabling, then what is that feeling proper to conscientization—that transformational moment of coming to political consciousness—if not the feeling of shock?

By shock I mean to refer to the emotion one feels when one confronts the unexpected or the uncanny; when what was initially perceived to be one thing turns out to be something else or when the connections of seemingly disparate events render a higher-order phenomenon—of a system at work. In this chapter, I want to argue that the form in which Rolling the R’s is written solicits this feeling of shock, particularly in the way the novel exposes the workings of an emergent world-system, of which a marginalized place like Kalihi is inextricably a part. I will demonstrate that Linmark’s distinct fragmentary style of narration allows for the gradual realization of a historical totality against which we can begin to mediate the children’s queer desires with their social relations, more specifically, to what I am calling the political economy of desire and the complex subjectivities and subjective practices it fashions. It is in this way that shock functions something akin to demystification in the novel, that often sublime, often uneasy unveiling of that which has been ideologically concealed, disguised, or repressed—what Lacan would call the “Real” or, as Jameson would argue, “History” itself.[33]

Written in the 1990s, the decade that saw the consolidation of America’s global power; the increased mass migration of people of color to the U.S.; the ebbing of the “culture wars” and the consequent rise and institutionalization of American multiculturalism; Linmark’s Rolling the R’s is an attempt to put into narrative form the cultural and material contradictions of a post-Cold War U.S. modernity.[34] As a story set at the close of the 1970s—that not-so-distant past which witnessed the political and economic changes geared toward the decentralization of global capital; the debilitating debt crisis of the Third World; and the egregious displays of militaristic and technological powers of the U.S.—Rolling the R’s offers a kind of mise-en-scène wherein these geopolitical transformations would leave their material traces onto the peripheral locality of Kalihi. Marked by both periods, too, is the increasing militarization and consolidation of corporate tourism in Hawai`i and the local struggles of sovereignty made against them. Such are the traces that form the historical subtext of U.S. cultural hegemony in Linmark’s story about a fiercely witty and equally defiant group of young immigrants in Kalihi, whose dreams and trials of growing up come to us in a non-sequential, fragmentary montage of letters, prayers, and Pidgin-inflected dialogue and poetry.

Indeed, for it is as though what we have only in Rolling the R’s are fragments, or rather, that fragmentation seems to be the only way of registering these profound historical and social transformations onto the text at hand. In its full literal and metaphorical senses, the sheer stream of fragmentation would function in Rolling the R’s as a particular way of representing the local,[35] which at times is humorous in effect, at times tragic, but all the same as a mode of writing difference and desire against that “supreme unifying force of contemporary history” we call late capitalism.[36] Challenging the tendency to view fragmentation as merely an aleatory play of signifiers, a random stringing together of events, in short, as a sign of postmodernist pastiche, I will demonstrate that fragmentation in Rolling the R’s allows us to sense the figuration of some deeper underlying structure in Linmark’s novel. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s assertion that we will not ask what a text means but rather how it works, we will see how fragmentation “works” in Rolling the R’s as a way to foreground the political economy of desire.[37] This underlying structure of the political economy of desire in Rolling the R’s will allow us to read, for instance, how the children’s disco fantasies of Scott Baio and Farrah Fawcett have something to do with the processes of commodity formation; how the consumption of commodities becomes literalized as also the consumption of bodies-turned-objects; and how the relationship between the local and the global is necessarily an ideological one. In so doing, I attempt to show how the political economy of desire names the social and material relations that inform the interrelatedness of consumer culture, national identity, and queer desires. As a simultaneously funny and woeful story, Rolling the R’s dramatizes the disjunctive, discordant effects of modernization, whereby the gradual realization of its obscenities produces the affect of shock proper to ideological demystification, that is, of political critique.

“Battle Poem of The Republic”; Or How to Map a Totality in Pidgin

Nowhere in Linmark’s novel is the ideological import of fragmentation more true than in the poem we have of Florante Sanchez, the fourth-grade Filipino immigrant whose family has been displaced to Hawai`i because of assassination attempts under Marcos’ rule. Although asked to write in “Standard English” for a statewide poetry contest, Florante, like the other children in the story, disobeys Mrs. Takemoto’s rule of “No Pidgin English Allowed.” Florante constructs a poem in Pidgin whose lines and sentences exemplify and perform Linmark’s distinct fragmentary style of narration. Florante’s disregard for rules and convention is further instanced by the way he turns inside-out the very process of writing the poem itself: “we were frustrated. / Line breaks, metaphors, similes, haole-write English.” The “we” in his admission preludes what would become the content of his poetic discourse, namely the multiplicity of experience that constitutes the everyday lives of Kalihi. He begins his labor of writing, then, as follows:

Rowell Cortez, the only Filipino who had enough courage to admit he ate black dogs, wrote ‘bout his first time at a cockfight in Waipahu.

Mai-Lan Phan wrote ‘bout coming to America and shopping at Kress.

Katherine Katrina-Trina Cruz wrote ‘bout her third time with her babe, star quarterback Erwin Castillo.

Edgar Ramirez wrote ‘bout being an altar boy and the fun he had with Father Pacheco who played with him and let him sleep over. (56)

As he continues to rewrite his friends’ poems, Florante would be charged of “plagiarism” and be given an “F” for failing to make something of his own, let alone for not writing in “Standard English.” All the same, he continues his labor, rewriting and quoting his friends’ poems about their day-to-day adventures. In doing so, Florante exposes, as in Edgar’s poem, the less-than-moral behaviors of adults like Father Pacheco, and reveals, as in Katrina’s poem, the not-so-childlike behavior she engages in that would make adults around her wince. Without reservation, Florante continues his litany of confessions:

Nelson Ariola, maggie’s ex, wrote ‘bout giving Christopher a black eye after school in front of Kress.

[…]

Juddy-Ann Katsura wrote ‘bout being grateful that she’s not Japanese and not Okinawan like Jared.

[…]

Stephen Bean wrote ‘bout the military importance in Hawai`i.

In Florante’s retelling, one needs only to imagine his teachers’ reactions—confused and shocked—as they listen to the rituals the children partake in and the confession of events that had initially escaped their attention.

The series of disclosures culminates in the final section of Florante’s poem, in which he presents to the reader the art of his poetic imagination:

I wrote ‘bout

Hungry bees eating space, black dogs losing it first time

America raiding scotch-taped Kalihi while Pedros drowned in Franco’s German-spit second time

Dim in the Philippines, PI Joes missing in Fort DeRussy’s dead-end pockets third time

Immigrants coming to Kalihi, dodging the American sham battle fourth time

Smiles that break evil bones after school, touch-dance brawling in front of Kress fifth time

Uninvited priests with dog-tattooed arms, grinding fighting cocks, and preaching last words sixth time

(And I wrote ‘bout a pig cap pen bleeding a hundred-dollar poem.) (58)

Florante’s poem need not be read as an exercise in or an expression of the indeterminacy of meaning and reality. Nor does its mere quoting or “plagiarism” of what has already been written be taken as some facile technique of pastiche. What we can glean from this passage, rather, is Florante’s distinct way of making sense of the social fragmentation he and his peers endure as members of Kalihi’s community. As each word “fixes” its meaning onto a detail contained in his classmates’ poems, Florante’s poem could be taken as a piecing together, as it were, of the experiential fragments that create Kalihi’s socius. Florante thereby sets in motion these fragments in order to suggest a series of spatial and temporal associations. By drawing these connections, Florante limns the troubled histories of Kalihi: U.S. corporate tourism and the militarization of Hawai`i (“America raiding scotch-taped Kalihi”; “For DeRussy’s dead-end pockets”) and the racial injury of assimilation that Kalihi’s immigrant community embodies (“Immigrants…dodging the American sham battle”).

Florante thus creates not a multiculturalist collage[38] of Kalihi, but rather his own “cognitive map” [39] of it. If his mapping is said to have a perspective, it is not an aerial view seen from above; it is rather from below, on the ground, in and through the very eyes of bodies that walk, sweat, and make Kalihi’s landscape. It is a perspective that is anathema to the gaze of tourists who prefer to see things (places, artifacts, costumed bodies, etc.) and who would rather, from a safe distance, look at—rather than through the eyes of—Hawai`i’s people. As an aspiring poet who arms himself with Pidgin, Florante uses language and memories to make sense of what comes to him as reality. It is a reality made from the exhilaration and violence of the sheer multiplicity of the everyday, experiential fragments whose meaning can only be grasped if we relate them to the totality to which they are a part. Like Florante, Linmark sets up this drama of the everyday, mapping the fragments of historical experience with the textures of the Pidgin language and against the backdrop of Kalihi’s heat. Florante’s map therefore is also Linmark’s.

Linmark’s map places Kalihi at the center, a region of Hawai`i not listed in the “Places To Visit In Oahu” (26). It is a community of working-class ethnic immigrants who come from different locations, bearing their own aspirations, dreams, and memories.[40] Many of them work as maids, gardeners, or service-workers while their children are sent to Waikiki’s Kodak Hula Show for school-sponsored fieldtrips. Inasmuch as its people constitute the collective labor that makes possible the experience of “Hawai`i” and insofar as its people are at the same time relegated to the margins, cordoned off from visibility—Kalihi is not “in” but rather is the “shadow of capital.” [41] This inequality is represented by the public transportation system serving Waikiki and Kalihi, whose buses are the vehicles through which we come to view the infrastructural differentiation of urban and underdeveloped spaces. The “#7 green bus,” we are told,

offers a passenger an hour’s tour around Kalihi: Kam Shopping Center, the open market between Kalakaua Intermediate and Kalihi-Kai, Libby’s Manapua Shop, Asagi Hatchery, Puuhale School, and Dillingham Prison…and the projects named after Hawaiian kings and princes (105).

This “hour’s tour around Kalihi” is markedly contrasted by the ostensibly more tourist-friendly destinations of the “yellow bus”:

Like a spaceship on wheels, the yellow bus flies from Waikiki and Ala Moana to: 1) the USS Arizona that looks like MacArthur’s dentures floating in Pearl Harbor; 2) the long stretches of pineapple fields in Whitmore Village, Wahiawa; 3) the sugar plantation in Waialua; or 4) Sea Life Park where Flipper’s understudies live (106).

As such, the two buses delineate a geography of Oahu, an expansive geography which maps out the asymmetrical socio-economic relations between Waikiki and Kalihi. This mapping signals how the buses, inasmuch as their routes are what organize the flows of capital and labor, produce and sustain the material conditions of Waikiki and Kalihi.

Shopping centers, open markets, schools, prisons, and housing projects—such are the spaces that make up the world of Rolling the R’s. By focusing his narrative on Kalihi, Linmark writes against the more typical representation of Hawai`i as a post-racial multi-ethnic tropical paradise. For Hawai`i in the American popular imagination, as many scholars have noted, is imagined as that region of the U.S. in which, despite the islands’ history of colonialism, social differences can and do coexist without conflict. In addition to the racial harmony it is purported to offer, Hawai`i is also imagined as a tropical paradise. This imagining packages Hawai`i as an image, a commodity, a paradisial simulacra readily made available for the islands’ tourist-oriented economy. The process by which Hawai`i becomes a vendible commodity to be consumed and experienced can be understood in terms of what Neferti Tadiar calls “fantasy-production,” a complex of imaginary and material practices that is part and parcel of “the dreamwork of the capitalist interstate world-system.”[42] In this fantasy-production, Hawai`i is produced as a commodified image, a consumable place created by the U.S. as the “other” within itself. On this view, it is an imaginary (but no less real) geography that is both located outside the continental borders of the U.S. and constitutively part of its national formation. To probe into how this “dreamwork” works to create the social reality of a small place like Kalihi, Linmark converges the dreams from below with those from above, or more specifically, the dream-practices of the children that create the world of Rolling the R’s and the fantasy-production of nation-states that render the social reality of just such a world.

The Religion of Commodity

The characters in the novel participate in this fantasy-production of Hawai`i to the extent that they are both consumers of U.S. cultural goods and witnesses to the realities of ethnic tensions, segregation, and social abuse. In Rolling the R’s, U.S. cultural goods in general and disco paraphernalia in particular become the materials by which the children mediate their sexuality and queer explorations. But what underlies the children’s desires for U.S. cultural goods like Scott Baio and Farrah Fawcett? What enables these cultural forms’ signifying power as iconic figures, significations that sway the dreams and desires of Kalihi’s children?

In Rolling the R’s, we are told that “Everybody in Kalihi wants to be Farrah,” the blonde “bombshell” featured in the TV hit show Charlie’s Angels (22). Farrah’s “long and graceful legs, pearly white teeth, glossy lips, [and] roller-derby hips” become the physical traits every-body wants to have. The ubiquity of Farrah’s image, enshrined in “pin-up posters thumbtacked on every wall of the house” (22), attests to her apparent universal power to influence others, for after all, “Who in Kalihi doesn’t want to be Farrah?” (22). Like the Virgin Mary statue at the top of Monte Street to which “the millisecond you turn towards Kalihi Valley, or even think to, you see her” (20), Farrah becomes an inescapable image pinned on every wall and transmitted through the global stream of media across “5,483,097.99” televisions (22). Farrah’s “pearly white teeth” and “glossy lips” bear for us an unmistakable resemblance to the form and materiality of religious statuettes like the Virgin Mary in Monte Street (22). Like the Virgin Mary to which her disciples worship and give their faith, Farrah compels her followers to give their devotion and affection. The fascination exerted by Farrah’s iconic stardom hence is informed by a kind of apotheosis of the image in consumer culture. In Rolling the R’s, the analogy between the religious and the popular is given its most parodic pitch in the description we get of Kalihi’s refurbished Virgin Mary: “Sophisticated with jaguar eyes of Bianca Jagger, pout of Sophia Loren, cheekbones of Lauren Hutton, arched brows of Brooke Shields, and the attitude of a Studio 54 Disco Mama” (21).

Linmark’s parody gives way to his irreverence to the religious, a blasphemy which in turn becomes the means through which his critique of U.S. commodity culture is made. Consider for example the prayer found in “Bino and Rowena Make A Litany To Our Lady Of the Mount”:

Hail Mary, Mother of Christ

[…]

Mother most pure

Queen of Camay

Mother most chaste

Queen of Lysol

Mother most flawless

Queen of Revlon (28-29)

Throughout Bino and Rowena’s litany, the liturgical script of “Hail Mary” becomes “remixed,” as it were, with celebrity and commercial brand names. This remixing transforms the litany from a prayer for worshiping to an inventory of cultural products for shopping.[43] What is conveyed here in Linmark’s treatment of U.S. cultural goods would seem to illustrate what Marx describes as the “fantastic form of a relation between things.” [44] In Bino and Rowena’s litany this fantastic form is presented as the virtual rupture of the seam separating the religious and the banal, a rupture which Linmark performs through the inscription of fragments: “Queen of VISA, Mastercard & American Express,” “Queen of all Angels / Kelly Garrett / Sabrina Duncan / Jill Munroe.”

Enchanted by the quasi-religious aura of Farrah, Edgar forms his own Farrah-Fawcett Fan Club, “The Triple-FC,” whose ritual it is to watch every episode of Charlie’s Angel and to keep up with the latest Angel’s paraphernalia. Their Farrah mania reaches a hyperbolic expression when they begin to pray “the novenas every Wednesday with Father Pacheco at Our Lady of the Mount Church,” all in an effort to keep the “the blond bombshell’s career alive” (23). Farrah then becomes not only an object to be looked at but also a figure to venerate, an idol deserving its own “Farrah piety” (23). The religious overtone here conveys the degree to which the commodity fetishism around Farrah relies on the literal fixation of her as an Angel, a goddess whose coveted blonde and golden hair acquires a particular symbolic import. Indeed, Farrah in the world of Rolling the R’s, is annealed as the absolute commodity every-body wants to have. Just as gold is the “general equivalent” to which commodities acquire their relative value, so the universal desire for Farrah’s blonde hair and the beauty it signifies: “Who doesn’t want that full-volumed, sunshine-gold mane?” (22; emphasis mine). But because commodities like “Farrah” need the labor of their consumers to keep their “careers alive,” so to speak, we shall see how the value they come to represent is neither natural nor objective, but rather as being determined through material and imaginary-practices, that is to say, by the children’s very own dream activities.

Disco Fantasies, Melancholic Dreams

Earlier in this thesis, we read how, on the one hand, Orlando’s fantasy to become “Farrah” could be read as a kind of allegory for that historical moment in which peripheral localities become absorbed into the global world-market, and on the other, how Orlando’s ambivalent relationship with the school authority is an instance of the integrative logic of the liberal state apparatus in which difference becomes accommodated and managed. That Orlando is able to fashion himself as “Farrah Flip” through the sheer consumption of commodities marks, too, his relative access to cultural capital as such, hence the “success” of his transformation: “Top of the Dean’s List; Current GPA: 4.0; This year’s Valedictorian” (25). It is in this way that a queer diasporic subject like Orlando becomes a legible and even legitimized subject of “America.”

But where “America” in the novel intones to the “restless kids age ten and above” to “Be Free” (26-27), Edgar Ramirez, the fifth-grade Filipino mestizo, says, “I wish I was bionic everyday so I no gotta have to give that extra push just for be myself” (41). For Edgar, to be himself—to “Be Free”—would mean to be “bionic everyday,” that is, to arm himself with the means to negotiate and come to terms with the daily homophobia and racism he confronts, punitive regimes that inexorably attempt to discipline him to be other than himself. While Edgar shares Orlando’s dream for the kind of fame Farrah enjoys, of becoming the “lead star” whom everyone wants to follow (36), Edgar is neither immune to or safe from the violence of others when he acts out just such desires: at school, “rubber grenades attackin’ from all sides, but they stay comin’ at me at a hundred miles per hour to sting my face like one swarm of bees” (6). For Edgar, physical pain is followed by psychic grief as other “fifth-grade bulls” assault him with names like “Homo” and “Sissy,” hurtful epithets that make him feel “like I the one ugly cuz I not like them” (10).

Surrounded by hostility and hate, Edgar seeks resuscitation and comfort in dreaming about love—that is, his “true love,” Scott Baio, the teen idol star of Happy Days. He writes letters to him, hoping that Scott, too, would reciprocate in return. But Edgar’s love is unrequited; Scott does not write back, leaving Edgar with no letters but his own. To fill in this lack, Edgar resorts to forging Scott’s letters himself, writing words as if they were his lover’s own. In doing so, Edgar commits to filling in the homosexual love that is not there, inscribing in the lack to himself, for himself. In effect, Edgar becomes a melancholic subject, a subject bereft of his object of affection.

Later, in a letter he wrote to radio and TV personality Casey Kasem, Edgar asks, “How many times I sent you letters already? I so hungry for this boy, Casey. And even if I one boy when you get to my name, how come, Casey, how come you no pick my letter for the week?” (124). Confessing in the same letter that “I one virgin when come findin’ the right words for explain that what I do and how I feel are not the same” (24), Edgar finds that though the meaning of his words are true to him, it is not for others. Written in Pidgin by a young Filipino boy who wants to share to the world his queer love for Scott, Edgar’s letters never reach Scott’s hands nor do they receive national airtime for the public to hear. In an environment where the use of Pidgin is both socially scorned and institutionally prohibited, and in a society where homosexuality is considered a perversion and a moral sin, the inscription of Edgar’s queer desires in Pidgin would thereby become a reinscription of a double lack. In psychoanalytic terms, it inscribes both the experience of loss of the object-love (Scott) and the alienation of the subject from the symbolic (“Standard English” and heterosexuality). This experience of loss and alienation marks Edgar a melancholic subject. Hence the disjunction Edgar feels between “what I do” and “how I feel,” a psychic space which defines his distance from the symbolic orders of language and sexuality.

Just as Edgar writes his love letters in Pidgin, he dreams, too, in Pidgin:

I close my eyes hard

and Scott Baio stay kissin’ me I kiss him back

I feel Mr. Campos’ chapped lips, his pomaded hair and greasy face

my father peepin’ through the keyhole, murder in his eyes I tell Mr.

Campos for get me off Quick

get off me get off me (10)

In Edgar’s dream, Scott Baio’s kiss becomes the kiss of Mr. Campos’ “chapped lips.” Edgar’s father enters his dream as the ominous third male figure, that is, as the Superego whose gaze symbolizes the prohibition of homosexuality. It is Edgar’s father, after all, who punishes him for his wont of flamboyant behavior. But while the appearance of his father intensifies Edgar’s fear of punishment, it also becomes a source of pleasure for Edgar, inasmuch as Edgar’s being-seen compensates for the lack of attention from his indifferent object-love (he signs his letters with “Invisible Edgar”) (124).

Edgar’s dream, then, is a promiscuous mix of fears and pleasures: “I tell Mr. / Campos for get me off Quick / get off me get off me” (10). There is a confusion of desires here which can be read in terms of what Julia Kristeva describes as the melancholic subject’s ambivalent identification with his or her object-love; Kristeva writes: “I love him/her…but, even more, I hate him/her; because I love him/her, in order not to lose him/her, I install him/her in myself.”[45] In Edgar’s dream, we can discern at least three levels on which this ambivalence plays out. First, Edgar’s desire for an object-experience, that is, in becoming an object for the sake of his love Scott Baio/Mr. Campos (“get me off Quick”). Second, Edgar’s fear of the Other as represented by his father (“get off me”). And third, Edgar’s paradoxical self-affirmation through self-annihilation or, in other words, Edgar’s vengeance against his object-love by renouncing his wish to be recognized by it (“for/get me”). This mixture of ambivalent desires, I want to suggest, reveals what is the latent preoccupation of Edgar’s dream: namely, the alienation he feels from becoming interpellated as a consumer-citizen.

If Edgar’s dream is the condensation of his desire to be with Scott, grief strikes him when this desire is denied its full realization: that is, when the object-love of his fantasy remains, in the last instance, an inert object for which there is no body. This decorporealized object is, of course, nothing other than the commodity form itself. Edgar’s desire is therefore not fulfilled because Scott remains a mere commodity, or better, like “Farrah,” an image without a body. We will say that this becoming-image is what Marx would call commodity fetishism. For Marx, commodity fetishism, above all, is the supersession of real human associations with “thing-like relations between persons.” [46] If consumer culture does not allow for real human attachments, only “thing-like relations,” then one exists in alienation. For Edgar, this alienation is intensified by the hostility which surrounds him when all he wants is “just for be myself.” The pressures to “straighten” his act and to speak “proper” English leave him at the end of the day with an unbearable loneliness. To cope with this loneliness, he dreams and fantasizes about Scott. But he dreams about Scott only to be betrayed by him, for Scott turns into Mr. Campos, the substitute body for Scott’s otherwise decorporealized image. On this view, Edgar’s dream is an expression of alienation, the dream of a melancholic subject alienated in consumer culture. Inasmuch as commodities come to signify “America” and so-called American values, we shall see how the alienation in consumer culture is coextensive with the alienation one feels in the nation-state.[47]

In Rolling the R’s, the children are assailed by U.S. pop cultural images such “Farrah” and “Scott Baio” because, as suggested above, they appear as objects that signify an ideal beauty and promise of love. It is in this sense that disco culture becomes the means through which the children mediate their desires of belonging, desires which can never be fully realized as such. From Orlando’s self-fashioning as Farrah Flip to Edgar’s adoration for Scott Baio, the rapacious appetite to consume only leaves the consuming subject with a loss sense of wholeness, that is, as we have seen, a subjective experience of alienation and melancholia marked by loss. (This insatiable hunger could be said to be the motor of consumer capitalism itself, what some economists even call “the psychology of the market.”) On this view, Rolling the R’s presents consumer culture as a site of an impossible national belonging, just as, for instance, Edgar’s love for Scott is an impossible one. In what follows, we will see how this impossibility is obscured by the fantasy-production of “America” as a specific disco-space in which one might see his or herself as loveable and whole, in short, a citizen consumer-subject of the U.S.

In “Remixing America,” Linmark gives form to this fantasy of national belonging in a vignette about the lights, glitz, and glamour of U.S. disco culture. Where tourism and multiculturalism furnish a kind of utopia for the would-be tourist of Hawai`i, disco culture creates a utopic space for the would-be-consumer, a space in which his or her sense of belonging would be articulated through the inordinate desire for consumption and sex. Linmark parodies this representation of disco culture by caricaturing its liberatory ethos. Linmark does this by compressing all the sounds and lights of disco to present a “mediascape”[48] of U.S. culture that is absurd. As the title suggests, Linmark “remixes” America by combining disco song lyrics with American patriotic slogans. Disco songs like Sister Sledge’s “We Are Family” give way to the U.S. national anthem, effecting a satiric bricolage of patriotic sloganeering: “the home of the brave and the wild and the free” (26-27). What can be heard from Linmark’s stereophonic coupling of ‘70s disco songs with Pax Americana shibboleths is nothing less than his parodic replay of an endorsed style of national belonging. By combining the national anthem’s love for one’s country with disco anthem’s love for one’s body, Linmark “remixes” U.S. culture into a phantasmatic symbol of sexual liberation and democracy. Pitched in the superlative (“America’s got everythin’ your heart desires”) and riddled with sexual innuendos (“eye-to-eye, skin-to-skin, our flesh touchin’”), the singing voice we have here of disco America beckons to all “restless kids age ten and above” to “Be Free” (26-27). As an orgasmic phantasmagoria of commercialism and consumption, however, “America” is recast as an absurd, schizophrenic fantasy.

Interestingly, this representation of “America” comes to us as a disembodied voice, for it sings to the children of Kalihi without a body to be seen. In this respect, it is akin to the lack of corporeality described earlier in the quasi-religious image-production of “Farrah” and “Scott Baio,” a repression of the body which is basic to the logic of substitution operative in the commodity form. For Edgar, what appears to him as a representation of a body is merely an object, an image bereft of a body for which the original cannot be found. By the same token, the making of “America” into a voice without a body mirrors this process of commodity formation, whereby “America” becomes abstracted as an object to be universally consumed and experienced, and in so doing, becomes embodied through and by others.

The nation-state form, in a certain sense, is already disembodied insofar as its formation relies on the sum total of its people to create at once a sense of an “imagined community” and a national identity.[49] In the U.S. context, this sense of unity is created in the image of a collective spirit, a national fantasy: namely, the “American Dream.” As Lauren Berlant argues, the American Dream “fuses private fortune with that of the nation: it promises that if you invest your energies in work and family-making, the nation will secure the broader and social and economic condition in which your labor can gain value and your life can be lived with dignity.”[50] Through the American Dream, the U.S. would present an image of itself as a paragon of democracy and modern nationhood. To guarantee the circulation of this image, the American Dream is presented as a goal everyone should strive for, a dream everybody should work toward to embody. Where the American Dream would find purchase not only in the imaginations of people within its borders but also of those outside, “America” begins to acquire a universal, global value. This is precisely what Linmark parodies as an absurd national fantasy in Rolling the R’s. For even as the disembodied, schizophrenic voice of “America” enjoins the children to “Be Free,” such ideals of freedom and equality are ultimately denied—not the least because of the very real, all too real, social antagonisms that the children and people of Kalihi are left to endure in their dreaming and waking lives.

Confronting the Real

The disembodied voice of “America” returns, as it were, in a more traumatized body. Later in the novel, the reader is introduced to Lily, a middle-aged white woman from Montana who is christened by the children as the “exorcist lady.” Making a spectacle of herself, she screams—and we cannot help but hear how her sexual solicitations hauntingly echo the voice and seductions of “Remixing America”:

“Fuck me” (she screams), “hey, handsome man” (her eyes changing from blue to green), “fuck me, please” (legs spreading out like a gate), “fuck me, please” (voice shifting from alto to guttural), “I said fuck me” (until it sounds like a record spinning on a dying phonograph), “please fa-aah-aaa…” (98; my emphasis).

Amongst the flotsam and jetsam of Kalihi, the exorcist lady loiters in the Kam Shopping Center parking lot, existing as such in the margins of that synechdochal space of U.S. market consumerism. We learn, too, that she is “notorious for smelling men of overflowing virility from miles away,” which makes “[a]ll men afraid of her” (98). When Father Pacheco exits the shopping center, Lily approaches him and exposes her breasts, accusing him at the same time of molesting children. What she makes public then are the insatiable and inordinate desires that consume her and the people of Kalihi who are themselves consumers. Such is the pain that afflicts her body, the excess of her being that would need to be “exorcised,” and to which others fear. If the circulation of “America” as a global sign of modernity entails a certain disembodiment, then it is as though the exorcist lady is the “return of the repressed,” that is to say, the corporeal subject whose existence it is, but ultimately fail to, to embody that reified national fantasy of the American Dream. On this view, the exorcist lady is the body emerging out of the ruins of the fantasy-production of “America,” the abject out-of-bounds with the fantasy that is the American Dream.

Similarly, at that same space of Kam Shopping Center, we are introduced to “Irma, the TNT Lady,” a Filipina mail-order bride who has been sold to Mr. Miller. We learn that she comes to Hawai`i because her mother has sold her body. The mother sells her daughter’s body as a commodity in exchange for a U.S. passport and the American Dream it represents. This transaction is made possible by the mail-order bride catalogs that are circulated from the Philippines to Hawai`i and elsewhere. Just as Farrah Fawcett’s image is reproduced and transmitted everywhere, Irma’s body is photographed and reprinted along congruent transnational media circuits. But Irma’s becoming-image is of different consequence than the making of “Farrah.” First, where “Farrah” is conspicuously reproduced as the “reigning queen of pin-up posters thumbtacked on every wall” (22), Irma is a “TNT,” tago-ng-tago, which in Tagalog means “always in hiding,” referring to the constant state of invisibility that Filipino workers abroad must and are made to endure and live. For Irma, she is a “TNT” because she must hide herself, that is, must hide her body from the violent desires of Mr. Miller. Second, whereas “Farrah” becomes a commodity through a kind of decorporealization (we never confront her body, only her image), Irma, by contrast, becomes an object of consumption precisely because of the use-value her body is made to represent and serve. It is a use-value determined by the racial difference she embodies. As Tadiar argues, Filipina overseas workers are rendered as “corporeal objects at the mercy and for the pleasure of those who buy them…paid not for a specific skill but rather for their gendered bodies—for their embodiment of a variety of functions and services which they are expected to provide at the beck and call of their employers.” It is in this way that Filipinas become “labour-commodities” for the immediate needs and satisfaction of others.[51] Once in Hawai`i, Irma is raped by Mr. Miller who voraciously eats her and “brings his friends, young and old, married or single, to his home and feeds them Irma tied up to the bedpost, blindfolded, gagged. He takes the first bite while the others wax their wings and flock around the room, waiting to peck on Irma” (100; emphases mine). The violence behind Irma’s body-becoming-object is therefore nothing less than its virtual literalization: she is a racialized and gendered object to be eaten, fed.

Determined by fantasies not of her own making, Irma thus finds herself caught in the traffic of various fantasy-productions: her mother’s dream for U.S. modernity, on the one hand, and Mr. Miller’s fetish for the Filipina exotic, on the other. Embodied as such, Irma becomes the corporeal object of a certain exchange-value, in which her body and the use-value it is made to serve are rendered “surplus, in the sense of excess, surfeit human matter.”[52] This “surplus” lies in the perceived fixity of the (racial and gender) difference her body is made to represent, “made to” because it is extracted and packaged as such in her becoming-image: “She has no one to blame except her natural curls, permanently tanned skin, a cheap foundation her mother mopped on her face, a Polaroid Instamatic, and page ten of a catalog” (100). In other words, Irma’s becoming-image through mail-order bride catalogs is but the means through which her body-image becomes, in the process, the corporeal object whose “excess” human flesh not only excite Mr. Miller to “eat” it but also compel him to “feed” it to others.

Furthermore, just as we were able to discern how the exorcist lady becomes a kind of uncanny embodiment of the phantasmatic voice of “America,” so too can we read Irma as the “excess” human matter behind the commodity-image production involved in the making of “Farrah.” This is registered in at least two ways. First, where “America” effects its universal value through its projected image of the “American Dream,” “Farrah,” as the “reigning queen of pinup posters,” becomes the “general equivalent,” the “absolute commodity,” by which other image-commodities acquire their relative value (e.g., Farrah is white, Irma is not). Second, where “Farrah” would certainly also be the object of desire in Mr. Miller and his friends’ heterosexist and masculinist fantasies, but an object-experience which is determinately out of reach for them—Irma, in this relation, becomes a kind of substitute object-experience to satisfy their immediate, unfulfilled desires.[53] In reading Irma as the body that is at once repressed in and becomes the supplementary object of the production of “Farrah,” we can begin to foreground both the human subjects that make possible the dream-practices of individuals and a political economy that operates within an apparent international division of labor (“Farrah” is an image “thumbtacked on every wall”; Irma is a body “tied up to the bedpost, blindfolded, gagged”). The cross-associations I have sketched here—from “Farrah” and “America” to Irma and Lily—delimit the social relations that make up the mode of production I am calling the political economy of desire. We can map out how these paradigmatic relations work in Rolling the R’s by way of a Gremasian semiotic square:

What we can begin to observe in this mapping is the way in which the political economy of desire entails a mode of production whereby the consumption of commodities would become one of the constitutive means of subjectification and national belonging. In this way, the citizen-subject is interpellated as a consuming subject, that is to say, a consumer. In the context of U.S. nationalism, consumer culture takes on a national determination insofar as commodities become the materials by which desires and social relations are mediated with the nation-state. This is how, in Rolling the R’s, the consumption of “Farrah” and “America” would come to stand for imaginary racial, gender, and sexual identifications: “Farrah” as the ideal of white American femininity and (disco) “America” as the ideal space and articulation of U.S. national belonging. I say “imaginary” to underscore, rather schematically, the disjunction of what commodities project to do (exchange-value) and what they actually can or cannot do (use-value). We have observed that this disjunction, or rather, contradiction in the commodity form has two consequences. First, as we have seen in Edgar, this disjunction effectively splits the subject into a state of alienation and melancholia, precisely in the expropriation of one’s labor (in Edgar’s case, labor of love). Second, this disjunction is also based on the corporeal dimension of production to be eschewed and differentiated amongst image-commodities, which are then circulated for their exchange-value, only to be supplemented in the process by other bodies whose differences are extracted as and for objectified surplus labor, that is, as/for mere use-value in the sphere of consumption (in Irma’s case, her labor to “love”).

In regards to subjectification, consumer culture interpellates subjects into its differential system of production—as producers, consumers, and so on—along lines of race, class, and gender. This differentiation of productive forces is necessarily rendered invisible inasmuch as commodities, by their very definition, require the erasure of human labor as such. With this in mind, the introduction of Irma as the “TNT Lady” and Lily as the “exorcist lady” serves, then, to suggest how the fantasy-production of “Farrah” and “America” also requires the erasure or repression of corporeality. Irma and Lily are embodied in such a way as to show the material, corporeal consequences of just such a disavowal: Lily is the perverse excess of the American Dream while Irma is at once the human supplement of “Farrah” and the corporeal object of those who would want “Farrah.” Taken together, what is ultimately shocking about these series of cross-associations is the gradual realization that the commodification and exploitation of particular bodies are in some fundamental way structurally necessary not only to capital but also to the production of desires (belonging, consumption, love, etc.). This is perhaps the shock contained in and expressed by the exorcist lady’s shrieks and Irma’s cries for help, for their embodied voices are nothing less than the corporeal matters that are in excess of that space of fantasy and consumption. As such, their agonized bodies materialize a certain limit against which socio-economic contradictions come to assume their symptomatic forms. We can now fill in the semiotic square to show how Rolling the R’s narratively configures the workings of this political economy of desire:

The density of these connections needs to be grounded in history itself: the international division of labor, the reification of life in the global codification of culture, and the hegemonic grip of U.S. cultural and political imperialism. Beneath the diegetic level of the novel, the movement of these oppositions is performed to assert the determination of desires and desiring-subjects by forces of production. This inner logic at work in Linmark’s textual production effectively unsettles us precisely because it suggests that desires are entangled within an exploitive, totalizing system. Our pleasures are always someone else’s misery. On this view, the question of the political and the notion of difference become especially more challenging not least because any theorization of desire as such needs to take into account the insidious and exploitive workings of capital. The political economy of desire that I have attempted to articulate thus demands the interrogation of capital as an uneven global process and regime of accumulation and commodification. As importantly, it demands as much a critical practice of mediation through which we can relate just such a mode of production and the kinds of subjective-practices it creates with the histories of colonialism and its attendant discourses of race, gender, and sexuality.[54]

Such is the world that Linmark presents to the reader of Rolling the R’s, a local geography in which the dreams of the young and old burn of traumatic loss and histories of violence. It is an area “not listed in Places To Visit In Oahu,” and as such, remains invisible to those viewing from outside. It is an invisibility necessary for the production of Hawai`i as at once a postracial, multicultural society and a tourist-friendly tropical paradise. But as Edgar says, Kalihi is “not the freakin’ meltin’ pot but one volcano” (70). One of the first people to be swallowed by Kalihi’s heat is, of course, the “deaf-and-dumb couple visiting from Orange County, California” who, by accident, boards the #7 green bus serving Kalihi. What the couple confronts inside the bus are nothing other than the warm, breathing bodies that make possible the Hawai`i they sought to consume and experience: “The bus was jammed with passengers, mostly students and hotel workers in their hotel uniforms” (105). Shocked by this encounter, the woman becomes stricken with asthma and dies. Her body is in shock precisely because she cannot countenance what she was never meant to see: the marginalized minority subjects whose daily work it is to produce and make possible her fantasy-experience. By situating the reader face-to-face with the people that make the world of Kalihi, Linmark brings to relief the uneven socio-economic structures and material relations that undergird Kalihi. These convergences create friction and the heat that is Kalihi. “So hot in there, I feel like I in one sauna,” Edgar says of Kalihi, a place in which, as Marx once put it, all things solid melt into air.

***

I WOULD LIKE TO END, in place of a conclusion, with the very question with which Rolling the R’s begins. It is Edgar’s query, two words which initiate us as readers into the narrative that would unfold—“So what?” Throughout this thesis, Edgar’s question, a question about relevance, has driven (haunted) the kind of reading I have tried to engage in here: to draw connections; to delimit relations out of fragments; and to reconstruct the experience of history through the affect of shock in order to set it in motion, to make it felt. Fragments, connections, shock—words which are for me about our capacity to respond, feel, and relate our experiences with one another toward a sense of belonging in this world. It is a practice of reading that attempts to (desires to) draw connections where it may prove too difficult, impossible, or even undesirable, so to begin the work of imagining new forms of being and becoming. “What of desires after discursive effects?” As a thesis about the political economy of desire, it grapples with this fundamental problematic: how to read, theorize, and represent difference, when difference and the very categories through which we express and understand difference are in some way already accomodated by the totalizing production of social reality we call capital. To think desires beyond discursive effects involves the necessary first step of addressing this problematic of difference and representation. Only then can we begin the critical labor of searching, releasing, and activating hitherto unthought-of desires and other life-activities for transformative ends. “What forms of counter-hegemonic politics does the idea of difference still allow?” The crucial challenge will be the task of affirming difference onto other planes and horizons of meaning, an enunciation of difference against the co-optive systems of reification that abound. What therefore becomes necessary is a sustained analysis of the dialectic between consciousness and external forces, between subjects and historical experience, and the narratives of hope and change one can make out of such a dialectic. “Our pleasures are always someone else’s misery.” In an uneven world, what is needed, too, is a politics of location, a politics that requires a critical awareness of the increasing interrelatedness of experiences and events. Indeed, our practices of resistance are turned against us by the way the unevenness of capital renders desires, pleasures, and the idea of freedom at the expense of others. In such a situation, we are reminded of Florante’s poem and the labor of mediation it performs. For in the shrinking of space and time we call our present, Florante’s poem offers us a dialogic imaginary, a syncretic awareness of discordant social assemblages to which we are impelled to engage and find meaning in.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

THE JOURNEY that took me to writing these few pages has been both enriching and challenging. Along the way, I was very fortunate to have met people whose company and intellect I have greatly benefited from and whose encouragement this project could not be without.

While all the shortcomings of this thesis are my entire responsibility, I want to give my deepest gratitude to my committee members, Lucy Burns, King-Kok Cheung, and Jinqi Ling, who all have greatly helped me with this project. I thank Lucy Burns for the enthusiasm and support she has generously given me over the past two years. She has walked me through this project since its inception, sharing with me her time, knowledge, and, most importantly, her friendship. Even in the most trying times, I was comforted by the thought that she was just a phone call away. Lucy continues to instill in me the meaning and value of community. My most heartfelt thanks goes to King-Kok Cheung, whose faith in my abilities as a critic has meant the world to me. Along with the boxes of books and perceptive criticisms that she shared, her early encouragement for me not to hide my voice has carried me through to this day. More than anyone else, I owe my biggest intellectual debt to Jinqi Ling. His knowledge of the field, his intellectual rigor, and commitment to the historicity of theory and literature have had a profound and enabling influence in my own thought. His mentorship taught me more than he might ever know. To my committee: for believing in whatever small potential I may have and for opening new worlds for me to explore, I give my deepest thanks.

I want to acknowledge the granting institutions that financially supported this project: UCLA’s Graduate Division and the Institute of American Cultures Pre-doctoral Fellowship. At UCLA, I had the opportunity to be in the company of professors whose scholarship provoked my thinking and whose encouragement kept me going: Shu-mei Shih, Rachel Lee, Kyeyoung Park, Valerie Matsumoto, Don Nakanishi, and Nenita Domingo. I also wish to thank Michael Salman for sharing his considerable insight and for his helpful comments on earlier drafts of this thesis. Finally, I want to express my indebtedness to Eleanor Kaufman, who crossed disciplines and departmental obligations to extend her hand in support in more than one occasion. Eleanor’s seminar on critical theory, her invitation to Fredric Jameson’s course on the dialectic, and her unstinting guidance and labor during the entire application process all helped create the road for me ahead to Duke’s Program in Literature.

The following names of persons have sustained and inspired me with their own special way of making me laugh and think. Asian American Studies was a special place because of Christine Lee, Mark Villegas, Gena Hamamoto, Hye-young Kwon, Hui Wang, Ronald Noche, Lindsay Gervacio, Preeti Sharma, Rukshana Singh, Mike Gonzalez, John Tan, Paul Ocampo, and Napoleon Lustre. I am grateful to Jean-Paul deGuzman for his infinite good cheer; Satish Kunisi for being a sharp interlocutor; Jolie Chea for her humor and example of strength; and Theresa Jaranilla for nourishing me with her immeasurable kindness and good heart. Theri Pickens, Tim Lee, Lisa Felipe, Naomi Baldinger, and Simona Livescu made Comparative Literature a second home for me. Kolleen Duley, Tina Beyene, Jane Kim, Oiyan Poon, Carolina San Juan, Tracy Buenevista also helped create a sense of belonging. Because of Nahrain Al-Mousawi, I will think back to my time here at UCLA with a smile. Her fierce wit, sharp intellect, and enduring friendship carried me through every day. She proved herself to be a scrupulous editor, too. I am also grateful to the friendship and camaraderie that Gladys Nubla has extended to me; our many conversations about Filipina/o American culture and politics have provided me with valuable lessons.

I also want to give thanks to my teachers at the University of Washington, who were patient with my idiosyncratic ideas and who encouraged me to go where I never thought I could: Connie So, Patrick Rivers, Kate Cummings, James Tollefson, Deborah Caplow, Rick Bonus, and the late Sam Solberg who made a home for me in Asian American literature.

As I complete this thesis, I’ve come to realize that many of my theoretical reflections are deeply personal ones (perhaps this is inevitable in any intellectual endeavor). I’ll take the risk of prompting your readings and acknowledge that some of these include my own thinking about my role as an ethnic studies student in U.S. academia (the difference I represent and how and why I came to do what I do); my grappling with the forces that brought me from a rural town in the Philippines to a metropolis like L.A.; and a working through of my own desires and aspirations of becoming a Filipino scholar and critic, the role I would play, and the ethics that come with it. Lastly, this thesis was written in a time of war: an unnecessary war to which my brother, Wendell Nadal, finds himself in. As an effort in thinking through, however small in its achievements, the histories and contradictions that led my family—Anna Marie Nadal Streeter, Kevin Lee Streeter, and Rufina Nadal—to the U.S. and my younger brother in Iraq, this thesis is dedicated to him and to the members of my family here and in the Philippines.

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Bascara, Victor. Model-Minority Imperialism. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

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Cheng, Anne Anlin. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Chuh, Kandice. Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003.

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Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

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Eng, David L., and Alice Y. Hom, eds. Q&A: Queer in Asian America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998.

Gopinath, Gayatri. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005.

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Hardt, Michael. "Affective Labor." boundary 2 26.2 (1999): 89-100.

Hing, Bill Ong. Making and Remaking Asian America through Immigration Policy, 1850-1990. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993.

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.

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---. "Cognitive Mapping." Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Lawrence Grossberg Cary Nelson. Urbana: University Illinois Press, 1988. 347-360.

---. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

Kang, Laura Hyun Yi. Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002.

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Kristeva, Julia. "On the Melancholic Imaginary." Discourse in Psychoanalysis and Literature. Ed. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan. New York: Methuem & Co. Ltd., 1987. 104-123.

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Leong, Russell, ed. Asian American Sexualities: Dimensions of the Gay and Lesbian Experience. New York: Routledge, 1996.

Ling, Jinqi. "Forging a North-South Perspective: Nikkei Migration in Karen Tei Yamashita's Novels." Amerasia 32.3 (2006): 1-22.

Linmark, R. Zamora. Rolling the R's. New York: Kaya, 1995.

Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996.

---. "The International within the National: American Studies and Asian American Critique." Cultural Critique 40. (1998): 29-47.

Lowe, Lisa, and David Lloyd, eds. The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin, 1990.

Moreiras, Alberto. "Global Fragments: A Second Latinamericanism." The Cultures of Globalization. Eds. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998.

Nguyen, Viet Thanh. Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Parikh, Crystal. "Blue Hawaii: Asian Hawaiian Cultural Production and Racial Melancholia." Journal of Asian American Studies 5 (2002): 199-216.

Radhakrishnan, R. Theory in an Uneven World. Malden and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2003.

San Juan, E., Jr. The Philippine Temptation: Dialectics of Philippine-U.S. Literary Relations. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996.

---. Working through the Contradictions: From Cultural Theory to Critical Practice. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2004.

Surin, Kenneth. "On Producing the Concept of a Global Culture." Nations, Identities, Cultures. Ed. V.Y. Mudimbe. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997. 199-219.

Tadiar, Neferti Xina M. "Developing Subjects: Makings of Historical Experience and Contemporary Philippine Literatures." Dissertation. Duke University, 1996.

---. Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2004.

Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. Boston, New York, and London: Little, Brown and Company, 1989.

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---

[1] Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 102.

[2] For a critique of the disciplinary formation of Asian American Studies and its self-production of difference in the name of identity, particularly in relation to gender difference, see Laura Hyun Yi Kang, Compositional Subjects: Enfiguring Asian/American Women (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002). Against taking for granted the intelligibility of “Asian American women,” Kang makes an intervention into the agonistic claims made on behalf of this social formation. While many may praise the increasing circulation of the term “Asian American women” as a sign of progress and an achievement of indentitarian movements’ struggles for visibility and social recognition, she makes suspect such so-called “progressive” incorporation into the national body politic and social imaginary. She does this in order to interrogate the categorization of “Asian American women,” which, as she notes, increasingly functions as a taken-for-granted ontology, social body, and category of analysis. Where the designation “Asian American women” becomes what she calls a “generic fixation,” Kang interrogates its legibility with a slash, denoting in the process the vexed contradictions and differences that have been flattened out in the name of identity. In effect, Kang’s reconfiguration, “Asian/American women,” poses a conceptual problematic that resists full and easy coherence from those who, with the desire and will to know, would lay claim to an epistemological authority over its constitution. What Kang makes decipherable, then, are the fraught connections between multiple forms of knowledge production and invariable technologies of control, or, to put it another way, the mutual constitution of difference and disciplinarity.

[3] See in particular David L. Eng and Alice Y. Hom, eds., Q&A: Queer in Asian America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998). And Russell Leong, ed., Asian American Sexualities: Dimensions of the Gay and Lesbian Experience (New York: Routledge, 1996). The publication of Leong’s Asian American Sexualities in 1996 offered an anthology of essays that addresses the following question: “How do the political and personal identities of Asian American gays, lesbians, and bisexuals emerge out of the intersections of history, race, and sexuality?” (p. 2). Of consistent concern throughout Leong’s anthology is the “silencing” of alternative sexual identities in the narratives of Asian America. Thus the essays engage in the making visible the narratives that have been obscured by latent and manifest forms of heteronormativity in Asian American Studies. By the same token, Eng and Hom, with their publication of Q&A, take up the issue of how “racial difference is sublimated into and masked by questions of sex and sexual difference in the narrating of history, the writing of literature, and the production of subjects and cultures…[and] how race and queerness merge—how they collide—in the fields of the psychic, the social, and the material” (p. 4). What binds these two texts together is not only their concerns over the “silencing” or “masking” of racial and sexual identities, but also their interest in the methodology of intersectionality for analyzing racial, gender, and sexual difference.

[4] Lisa Lowe argues for the necessity to think about the multiplicity and heterogeneity of “Asian America” in order to complicate any articulation of the Asian American subject as such. On this view, the hybridity, multiplicity, and heterogeneity of “Asian America” lend various strategic positions in which the nation-state can be challenged, insofar as the multivalence of the Asian American subject is born out of contradictions that inhere in U.S. discursive and material practices of citizenship and exclusion. See Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 66-72.

[5] See Sau-Ling C. Wong, "Denationalization Reconsidered: Asian American Cultural Criticism at a Theoretical Crossroad," Amerasia 21.1 & 2 (1995), pp. 1-27. See my discussion below on Wong in the context of the transnational debate in Asian American Studies.

[6] For recent articulations of postcolonial studies in Asian American literature, see Victor Bascara, Model-Minority Imperialism (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), Kandice Chuh, Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003). Viet Thanh Nguyen, Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

[7] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 30.

[8] See Michael Hardt, "Affective Labor," boundary 2 26.2 (1999). Hardt demonstrates this inseparability between desire and production in his discussion of affective labor, that is, the differentiation of labor-power toward the production of services, communication, and other forms of human-interactions for surplus. Indeed, as Hardt writes, “the processes of economic postmodernization that have been in course for the past twenty-five years have positioned affective labor in a role that is not only directly productive of capital but at the very pinnacle of the hierarchy of laboring forms” (p. 90).

[9] “Late Capitalism” here is to be understood in terms of Fredric Jameson’s analysis of this historical development. See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). According to Jameson, some characteristic features of late capitalism include “the new international division of labor, a vertiginous new dynamic of international banking and the stock exchanges (including the enormous Second and Third World debt), new forms of media interrelationships (very much including transportation systems such as containerization), computers and automation, the flight of production to advanced Third World areas, along with all the more familiar social consequences, including the crisis of traditional labor” (p. xix). Taken together, late capitalism denotes the shift (roughly after World War II) from a primarily industrialized mode of production to one in which media, technology, information, electronic, and consumerism create a postmodernized, or more abstract and algorithmic production of capital. Other labels used to characterized this phenomenon of capitalist development include “multinational capitalism,” “disorganized capitalism,” “advanced capitalism,” and “post-Fordism.”

[10] See Kenneth Surin, "On Producing the Concept of a Global Culture," Nations, Identities, Cultures, ed. V.Y. Mudimbe (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997). This “new regime of accumulation” is described by Surin as a “kind of production of production, a higher-order or metaproduction, with markets that deal not so much in goods or merchandise…as in stocks, services, and instruments for the telematic orchestration of images and spectacles” (p. 205). This “current phase of capitalist expansion,” according to Surin, “with its progressively more extensive systems of metaproduction, has created a social order in which all the conditions of production and reproduction have been directly absorbed by capital—as a result of abolishing the boundary between society and capital, capital has itself become social” (p. 207).

[11] See Alberto Moreiras, "Global Fragments: A Second Latinamericanism," The Cultures of Globalization, eds. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 81. Although Moreiras is writing in the specific context of Latinamericanism, he articulates a problematic that is shared by those working on minor or oppositional cultural productions. Moreiras writes, “Latinamericanism attempts to be an instance of antiglobal theory, insofar as it opposes the imperial formation of knowledge that has accompanied the move of capital toward universal subsumption in globalization,” the question, however, is “whether or not antiglobality can remain strong enough,” in light of the fact that “there is no guarantee that the immigrant difference will not be ultimately assimilated—indeed, has not already been assimilated—by the global apparatus and its constant recourse to the homogenization of difference” (p. 84).

[12] Wong, "Denationalization Reconsidered," p. 2. Emphasis is mine.

[13] Wong, "Denationalization Reconsidered," p. 18.

[14] Susan Koshy, "The Fiction of Asian American Literature," Asian American Studies: A Reader, eds. Jean Yu-wen Shen Wu and Min Song (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2000), p. 491.

[15] Koshy, "The Fiction of Asian American Literature," p. 491.

[16] See Gayatri Gopinath, Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005). Gopinath is very much aware of this as she formulates “queer diaspora” as an analytic for the critique of “the nation form on the one hand, and its contestation of the hegemonic forces of globalization on the other” (p. 6).

[17] Neferti Xina M. Tadiar, "Developing Subjects: Makings of Historical Experience and Contemporary Philippine Literatures," Dissertation, Duke University, 1996, p. 72. On the reconsolidation of the U.S. nation-state under global capitalism, see also Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). Hence, Grewal notes, “in the decentralization of [capital], new centers developed, and deterritorialization was accompanied by reterritorialization; thus, America remained an undiminished source of both decentralized and centralized power through neoliberal regimes, technologies, and rationalities” (p. 21; my emphasis). Useful in this context, too, is Jinqi Ling’s study of Karen Tei Yamashita’s novels, which deploys the category of transnationalism with keen attention to Japanese-Brazillian relations in order to create historical linkages between the U.S., Asia-Pacific, and South America; see Jinqi Ling, "Forging a North-South Perspective: Nikkei Migration in Karen Tei Yamashita's Novels," Amerasia 32.3 (2006).

[18] Surin, "On Producing the Concept of a Global Culture," p. 207.

[19] We should equally locate these changing orientations as consequences of the domestic and international crises that led to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. See for example, Lisa Lowe, "The International within the National: American Studies and Asian American Critique," Cultural Critique 40. (1998). Lowe observes that as a response to the economic crises of the U.S. nation-state and its demand for an ethnicized, segmented labor force, “since 1965, the profile of Asian immigration consists of both low-wage service-sector workers as well as ‘proletarianized’ white-collar professionals, the former group which at once supplies laborers for services and manufacturing, and the latter which furnishes a technically trained labor force” (p. 36). For a comprehensive historical survey of post-1965 Asian American formations, see in particular Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (New York: Twane Publishers, 1991), pp. 145-165. For an appendix of the 1965 Act’s preferential categories such as family reunification, professionals with “exceptional abilities,” and “persons fleeing from a Communist-dominated country” see Bill Ong Hing, Making and Remaking Asian America through Immigration Policy, 1850-1990 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 198-200. In Asian American literature, such historical and geopolitical changes are registered in the “diasporic immigrant imaginaries” of contemporary Asian American writers; Jessica Hagedorn and Karen Tei Yamashita are exemplary in this regard.

[20] R. Zamora Linmark, Rolling the R's (New York: Kaya, 1995), p. 22. All subsequent citations of this book will be indicated in the main text.

[21] David L. Eng, Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 228.

[22] See Jameson, The Political Unconscious. Jameson writes, “that history is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but that, as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form, and that our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious” (p. 35).

[23] Bascara, Model-Minority Imperialism, p. 127.

[24] Bascara, Model-Minority Imperialism, p. 127.

[25] E. San Juan, Jr., The Philippine Temptation: Dialectics of Philippine-U.S. Literary Relations (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), pp. 105-128.

[26] San Juan, The Philippine Temptation, p. 126.

[27] San Juan, The Philippine Temptation, p. 127.

[28] For Oscar Campamones, this desire in Filipino American literature expresses itself in the form of an exilic sensibility; see Oscar V. Campomanes, "Filipinos in the United States and Their Literature of Exile," Reading the Literatures of Asian America, eds. Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992). Campomanes writes, “I argue for a literature of exile and emergence rather than a literature of immigration and settlement whereby life in the United States serves as the space for displacement, suspension, and perspective. Exile becomes a necessary, if, inescapable, state for Filipinos in the United States—at once susceptible to the vagaries of the (neo)colonial U.S.-Philippine relationship and redeemable only by its radical restructuring” (p. 51). What remains crucial and significant here is Campomanes’ historicization of this affect and sensibility of exile in the Filipino diasporic experience.

[29] See Jameson, The Political Unconscious, pp. 39-46. The task at hand is to relate Filipino American literature to its history, not merely by bringing in “context,” but rather by historicizing it through a process of mediation. Jameson defines “mediation” as “the relationship between the levels or instances, and the possibility of adapting analyses and findings from one level to another” (p. 39). On this view, “context” and “text” need not be collapsed in a kind of mimetic equivalence; but rather, as Jameson writes, “[t]o describe mediation as the strategic and local invention of a code which can be used about two distinct phenomena does not imply any obligation for the same message to be transmitted in the two cases; to put it another way, one cannot enumerate the differences between things except against the background of some more general identity. Mediation undertakes to establish this initial identity, against which then—but only then—local identification or differentiation can be registered” (pp. 41-42).

[30] Bascara, Model-Minority Imperialism, p. 133.

[31] Parikh suggests, for example, that Linmark’s critique of American multiculturalism highlights deep-seated class, racial, and sexual conflicts in Hawai`i—a state which in itself has been posited as a Edenic paradise of multiracial coexistence. Parikh writes, “Differences between these Filipino characters [in the novel] are marked along a number of axes: diaspora—Vicente and Florante have recently immigrated from the Philippines (another friend, Mai Lan, is from Vietnam), whereas Edgar and Katrina are Hawaiian-born and, consequently pidgin-speaking; sexuality—Edgar and Vicente are gay (although the latter is closeted); and sexual activity—while Edgar and Katrina are sexually active, the others are inexperienced. Such a range of differences provides for the shifting identifications, conflicts, and betrayals around which the narrative coalesces and loss is described.” In Crystal Parikh, "Blue Hawaii: Asian Hawaiian Cultural Production and Racial Melancholia," Journal of Asian American Studies 5 (2002), p. 209.

[32] That Linmark is able to yield such a depth of affect is in it of itself significant in light of what Jameson has described as that perceptible flattening or waning of affect in our contemporary, postmodern culture. Jameson argues that the waning of affect in postmodernism is tantamount to one’s lost sense of history. See Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 15.

[33] I mean to invoke both Lacan and Jameson here in order to arrive at the interrelation between desire and history. Where the Real for Lacan is that which is beyond language and therefore “resists symbolization,” the Real in Jameson’s work stands for History, which is itself fundamentally inaccessible except through its effects on the symbolic, that is, the text. What follows in my analysis of Rolling the R’s continues to bear in mind this Jamesonian idea of history by making salient the intimations or symptoms of the Real. See Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, Trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1977), p. 65. Also, Jameson, The Political Unconscious, pp. 32-35.

[34] E. San Juan Jr. has critically examined the collusion and mutual constitution of multiculturalism and the market logic of capital. See in particular E. San Juan, Jr., Working through the Contradictions: From Cultural Theory to Critical Practice (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2004), pp. 48-51.

[35] My reading of the “local” in Rolling the R’s bears Brenda Kwon’s argument for the specificity of reading Hawaiian literature: she writes, “[r]eading island literature apart from its historical context isolates Hawai`i as the paradise in the middle of the sea. In order to counteract theorizing that essentializes local culture, it is necessary to include and examine marginalized voices in the ‘paradise’” (p. 4). See Brenda Kwon, Beyond Ke’eaumoku: Koreans, Nationalism, and Local Culture in Hawaii (New York: Routledge, 1999).

[36] Fredric Jameson, "A Brief Response," Social Text 17 (1987), p. 27.

[37] See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 4. See also Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 22.

[38] On the form of the multiculturalist collage, see R. Radhakrishnan, Theory in an Uneven World (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2003). Radhakrishnan asks, “If the frame of multiculturalist collage were to speak, how would it speak: as one voice, as many voices, symphonically or cacophonously, as voices speaking simultaneity on one or multiple registers, or as voices taking turns according to a prior and invisible measure of prioritization and gerrymandering, or as voices interrupting one another?” Radhakrishnan warns against the “prematurely postmodern celebration of the collage form” for it lacks “a multilateral syncretic awareness of the interconnectedness among its ingredients,” which in effect, “merely reproduces the ideology of the status quo” (p. 41). As we see here, Florante’s imbrication of experiential fragments into his composition attempts to relate and extend one’s social relation to others, highlighting the “synretic interrelatedness” of disparate experiences and grounding them into histories that give them meaning.

[39] See Fredric Jameson, "Cognitive Mapping," Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Lawrence Grossberg Cary Nelson (Urbana: University Illinois Press, 1988). Jameson defines “cognitive map” as “that mental map of the social and global totality” (p. 353). Indeed, the significance of Florante’s cognitive map lies in his capacity to relate and recreate the complexity of his surroundings.

[40] For a general survey of the historical formation of Asian American communities in Hawai`i starting from the mid-nineteenth century Hawaiian plantation system, see Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston, New York, and London: Little, Brown and Company, 1989), pp. 132-176.

[41] See Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, eds., The Politics of Culture in the Shadow of Capital (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997).

[42] Neferti Xina M. Tadiar, Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2004), p. 5. Tadiar defines fantasy-production as “the imaginary of a regime of accumulation and representation of universal value, under the sway of which capitalist nations organize themselves individually and collectively in the ‘system’ of the Free World” (p. 6).

[43] On the homology between religious and social ideologies, see Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), p. 180.

[44] Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1, Trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1990), p. 164. Marx writes of commodity fetishism: "The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men's own labour as objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-natural properties of these things" (pp. 164-65).

[45] Julia Kristeva, "On the Melancholic Imaginary," Discourse in Psychoanalysis and Literature, ed. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan (New York: Methuem & Co. Ltd., 1987), p. 106.

[46] Marx, Capital, p. 165.

[47] We shall see that this alienation has racial, class, and sexual dimensions. The alienation induced by melancholia can be read alongside Anne Anlin Cheng’s formulation of racial melancholia: she writes, “Melancholia also presents a particularly apt paradigm for elucidating the activity and components of racialization. Racialization in America may be said to operate through the institituional process of producing a dominant, standard, white national ideal, which is sustained by the exclusion-yet-retention of racialized others” (p. 10). In Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

[48] See Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). In addition to “ethnoscapes,” “technoscapes,” “financescapes,” and “ideoscapes,” he includes “mediascapes,” which are the “narrative-based accounts of strips of reality…a complex set of metaphors by which people live” (pp. 35-36).

[49] See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Pasig City: Anvil Publishing, Inc., 2003), pp. 6-7.

[50] Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 4.

[51] Tadiar, Fantasy-Production, p. 115. I am indebted here to Tadiar’s provocative analysis of difference, commodification, and surplus-value in the racialized and gendered determination of Filipino overseas contract workers, a collectivity which, as she notes, “has begun to acquire a female form” due to the “’feminization’ of migrant labour” (p. 114).

[52] Tadiar, Fantasy-Production, p. 120.

[53] Moreover, her “actual” racialized and gendered body becomes, too, a means through which the men assert just as well their flagging masculinity in an otherwise ostensible homosocial space (the men “wax their wings and flock around the room”).

[54] I would like to suggest for further study that the chiastic relationships I have made here can also be extended to the gendering of the Asia-Pacific Rim in general and Hawai`i in particular. Haunani-Kay Trask has described this in terms of the “prostituting” of Hawaiian culture by U.S. colonization and corporate tourism. For instance, Trask writes, “Hawai`i, like a lovely woman, is there for the taking. Those with only a little money get a brief encounter, those with a lot of money, like the Japanese get more. … Just as the pimp regulates prices and guards the commodity of the prostitute, so the State bargains with developers for access to Hawaiian land and culture” (p. 194). See Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawai'i (Monroe: Common Courage Press, 1993).

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