Submission date
1 March 2023 at 2:37:02 pm
First name
Anne Nichole
Last name
Alegre
title
Assistant Professor
University of the Philippines, Diliman
Affiliation
Country
Philippines
Bio
Anne Nichole Alegre is a junior faculty member and assistant professor at the Department of English and Comparative Literature in the University of the Philippines, Diliman. She has taught Shakespeare and Medieval English literature and is currently teaching Writing as Thinking and Literature & Society. Her research interests include: interdisciplinary humanities, adaptation studies, and Anglo-American literary tradition.
Paper title
A Portrait of the Filipino as an OFW: The Short Story as a Canvas for the OFW Experience
Keywords
Philippine Literature in English, Migrant Filipino Workers, Realism
Abstract
In her essay entitled "American Education and Philippine Literature", Isabel Martin traces the influences of American colonial education on Philippine Literature in English. The Philippine short story in English is one of the most important products of this, most notably marked by Paz Marquez Benitez's "Dead Stars." While Martin claims that the complex development of short fiction in English "perpetuated the interests of American colonial ideology", my paper claims that later iterations of Philippine short fiction published between the 1950s-1990s, attempt to subvert American colonial ideology through the OFW experience and using the short story (an "American inheritance") as a canvas to present the complex relationship between the former colonizer and the formerly-colonized. This paper will be looking at three writers' works of short fiction in English: Bienvenido Santos (1911-1996), NVM Gonzalez (1915-1999), and Carlos Bulosan (1913-1956).
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