Afro-Filipina Aesthetics: Transnational Kinship Networks and Relational Performance

Abstract

Afro-Filipina Aesthetics: Transnational Kinship Networks and Relational Performance examines a cultural-political formation: Filipina and Black women and queer performers who formed aesthetic and social practices across the long twentieth century to the present. I argue that these migratory performers—in the Philippines, France, and United States—embodied relational performance practices that shaped shifting racial, gendered, and colonial formations across overlapping Euro-American empires. These performers developed what I call "Afro-Filipina aesthetics," strategic forms of self-fashioning of their bodies through dress, gestures, and vocals that challenged colonial ideas of Filipina and Black women as subservient, meek, unoriginal, and confined to the home. Filipina and Black women and queer dancers, singers, and musicians were active inventors and improvisers, whose bodily acts communicated both the constraints of their lives, and their desires and pleasures. In turn, their aesthetics—which adapted variety acts (singing, dancing, and comedy) from vaudeville and cabaret dance halls from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—also reveal the poetic intimacies these migratory performers had with one another, unveiling intertwined Filipina and Black performance genealogies that envisioned Global South feminist and queer politics and radical kinship networks. Two key questions guide my research. First, what personal and artistic relationships did Filipina, Black, and multiracial Afro-Filipina women and queer performing artists have with one another? Second, how did their cross-racial and collaborations draw from and/or reinvent literary and performance genres? To answer these questions, my project draws on literary and performance analyses, archival methodologies, and oral histories. Chapter 1 examines multiracial Afro-Filipina starlet Maggie Calloway’s interracial bodabil (vaudeville) performances in Manila and Singapore from the 1920s-1940s. Chapter 2 moves to multiracial Afro-Filipina actress and singer Marpessa Dawn’s 1950s theater and musical performances with Afro-French and Caribbean artists in Paris. Chapter 3 looks at the “Satin Sisters,” a 1970s poetry-theater collective in San Francisco and New York City that featured Jessica Hagedorn, Ntozake Shange, and Thulani Davis. Chapter 4 concludes my dissertation by examining queer Afro-Filipina aesthetics in the popular American reality television drag show RuPaul’s Drag Race and the spin-off Drag Race Philippines. This study offers critical contributions to the fields of Performance Studies, African American Studies, Philippine/Filipinx American Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Relational Ethnic Studies.