The potential for resistance is a crucial component of the emergent: according to Williams, a truly emergent culture must be “substantially alternative or oppositional” to the dominant, and it is an article of faith among minority discourse theorists that opposition to the dominant culture is an experience that all U.S minority cultures share. As Abdul JanMohammed and David Lloyd put it in the introduction to The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse (1990), “Cultures designated as minorities have certain shared experiences by virtue of their similar antagonistic relationship to the dominant culture.”7 Drawing on the work of the postcolonial theorist Frantz Fanon, JanMohammed and Lloyd argue “that minority discourse is, in the first instance, the product of damage—damage more or less systematically inflicted on cultures produced as minorities by the dominant culture. The destruction involved is manifold, bearing down on variant modes of social formation, dismantling previously functional economic systems, and deracinating whole populations at best or decimating them at worst.” 8 Minority discourse theory in the United States has been greatly influenced not only by the work of Williams but also by postcolonial theory, which has offered insights into the ways in which dominant cultures colonize the subjectivities of those whose cultures they marginalize, whether those subjectivities belong to subjugated native peoples, to immigrant populations, or to ethnic, racial, religious, sexual, or other minorities. What emergent writers in the United States share with native intellectuals in colonial and postcolonial contexts is the common project of decolonizing themselves.
When Silko’s character Auntie thinks about the cultural damage suffered by Native American cultures in the aftermath of European colonization, she thinks first of the linguistic damage that has occurred: “the fifth world had become entangled with European names: the names of the rivers, the hills, the names of the animals and plants—all of creation suddenly had two names: an Indian name and a white name”. The influential Kenyan dramatist, novelist, and critic Ngugi wa Thiong’o offers a similar insight in Decolonising the Mind (1986) when he writes, “The bullet was the means of physical subjugation. Language was the means of spiritual subjugation.” The imposition of English on the peoples of Kenya was a powerful way for the British to take cultural control, which, Ngugi argues, was a crucial part of the process of colonization:
Colonialism imposed its control of the social production of wealth through military conquest and subsequent political dictatorship. But its most important area of domination was the mental universe of the colonised, the control, through culture, of how people perceived themselves and their relationship to the world. Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control. To control a people’s culture is to control their tools of self-definition in relationship to others.
Ngugi dropped his given name—“James”—in 1972 as a way of resisting Christianity’s linguistic colonization of his people, and he would eventually renounce English as a language for African literary production, turning instead to his native Gikuyu. “We as African writers have always complained about the neo-colonial economic and political relationship to Euro America,” Ngugi writes and then asks: “But by our continuing to write in foreign languages, paying homage to them, are we not on the cultural level continuing that neo-colonial slavish and cringing spirit? What is the difference between a politician who says Africa cannot do without imperialism and the writer who says Africa cannot do without European languages?”9
In the United States, the process that Ngugi describes occurs not simply through imposition of English as the national language, but also through the powerful mythologies generated by U.S. popular culture. Recalling the powerful force exerted by Hollywood during her childhood in the Philippines, the Filipino American writer Jessica Hagedorn reflects:
Even though we also studied Tagalog, one of our native languages … and read some of the native literature … it was pretty clear to most of us growing up in the fifties and early sixties that what was really important, what was inevitably preferred, was the aping of our mythologized Hollywood universe. The colonization of our imagination was relentless and hard to shake off. Everywhere we turned, the images held up did not match our own. In order to be acknowledged, we had to strive to be as American as possible.10
Named for a derogatory stereotype of Filipinos, Hagedorn’s novel Dogeaters (1990) depicts the culture of the Philippines as the quintessential damaged culture, transformed by its encounter with America into an empty simulacrum that eschews its native forms in order to model itself on the sham culture depicted in Hollywood movies. The novel begins in “the air-conditioned darkness of the Avenue Theater, … Manila’s ‘Foremost! First-Run! English Movies Only!’ theater,” where one of the novel’s central characters, a young girl named Rio Gonzaga, sits with her “blond” “mestiza” cousin, Pucha, the two of them “enthralled” as they watch Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson, and Gloria Talbott in All That Heaven Allows: “we gasp at Gloria’s cool indifference, the offhand way she treats her grieving mother. Her casual arrogance seems inherently American, modern, and enviable.”11 Written in a present-tense pastiche of first-person narrative, third-person narrative, fictional newspaper accounts, to which are added quotations from the Associated Press, a poem by José Rizal, a speech by William McKinley, and Jean Mallat’s ethnographic study The Philippines (1856), Dogeaters depicts a thinly veiled version of the corrupt regime presided over by Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos from 1965 to 1986. Casual arrogance marks the novel’s depiction of the repressive social apparatus: the military regime led by General Nicasio Ledesma is ruthless, brutal, and efficient in its use of torture, rape, and murder to eliminate the enemies of the President and the First Lady. But even more powerful in ensuring the regime’s dominance is the culture’s ideological apparatus, which operates through religion, education, and (perhaps most powerfully) popular culture.
Dogeaters permits us to enter the thoughts of characters from the full spectrum of social classes: from Madame First Lady to the theater cashier, Trinidad Gamboa, from Severo Alacran, the richest man in the Philippines, to the junkie mulatto deejay, Joey Sands. Linked together through a series of violent events that culminate in an assassination, these characters are even more tightly bound together by their common fascination with the movies. “What would life be without movies?” the First Lady asks an American journalist off the record: “Unendurable, di ba? We Filipinos, we know how to endure, and we embrace the movies. With movies, everything is okay lang. It is one of our few earthly rewards.”12 Linking its characters together through violence and pop culture, the novel suggests that violence and pop culture are themselves inextricably linked. The entire country is addicted to the radio soap opera Love Letters, and Rio tells us in the novel’s first chapter that “without fail, someone dies on Love Letters. There’s always a lesson to be learned, and it’s always a painful one. Just like our Tagalog movies.”13 The connection is vividly dramatized in the novel’s most chilling scene, a gang rape carried out by military officers and a presidential aide while Love Letters plays in the background.
Dogeaters vividly explores the effects of American cultural colonization abroad, but emergent writers frequently dramatize the fact that American culture colonizes at home as well. Within its own boundaries a dominant culture seeks to colonize the imaginations of those whom it has marginalized. Mainstream U.S. culture teaches gays and lesbians that they are perverts and deviants; it constructs “Americanness” and “homosexuality” as opposites; it encourages gays and lesbians to remain closeted, to assimilate quietly—“don’t ask, don’t tell.” In Becoming a Man, Monette describes the experience of being made to feel like an enemy of the culture, a spy in one’s native land:
I speak for no one else here, if only because I don’t want to saddle the women and men of my tribe with the lead weight of my self-hatred, the particular doorless room of my internal exile. Yet I’ve come to learn that all our stories add up to the same imprisonment.