Reinscribing Imperialism: Reading Jessica Hagedorn’s Dream Jungle
Date Issued
2014
Date
2014
Author(s)
Wu, Fan-Chien
Abstract
Jessica Hagedorn’s novel Dream Jungle, published in 2003, is a key literary text that re-presents the colonial and neo-colonial relationship between the US and the Philippines. The narrative in Dream Jungle follows two events in 1970s Philippines: the discovery of a supposedly Paleolithic tribe, and the arrival of an American crew to shoot a Vietnam War movie. Both of these fictionalized events are based upon actual historical moments in the Philippines: the Tasaday “Hoax” in 1971 and the shooting of the film Apocalypse Now from 1976 to 1977. Following Hagedorn, I have opted to focus on each of these events separately in Chapter Two and Three. This arrangement has allowed me to allocate the space to address these events and the questions that they provoke in a more comprehensive manner. At the same time, through the concept of reinscription, I have also endeavored to highlight the way that these two seemingly different and unrelated topics are in fact intertwined and connected with each other.
In the study of the Tasaday “Hoax,” my thesis is less concerned with the questions of authenticity and identity, and more with the modes of representation that bears responsibility both for the formation and the disavowal of the Tasaday/Taobo story. I turn to the work of Victor Li to identify an attribute and ideal—that of primitivism—which has persisted throughout the Tasaday incident. Drawing upon Li, I argue that the Tasaday/Taobo story can be read as a re-enactment or embodiment of neo-primitivism.
In my attempt to draw the seemingly unrelated film shoot into this discussion, I turned toward the titular “reinscription,” which is the term utilized by Edward Said to indicate a form of resistance, a way for the colonized subject to reshape and respond to narratives from the metropole. However, the “re-inscription” from Peter Hulme in Colonial Encounters, where it is used to highlight the way that old and new discourses co-exist in unstable competition, suggests a reading that takes account of unresolved tensions that may be unavoidable in the Saidian “reinscriptions”. Reading from this trajectory, my thesis critically examines a line of representations starting from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, to the documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse and Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now from Eleanor Coppola, and finally, Jessica Hagedorn’s Dream Jungle. In each of these texts, my thesis argues, the reinscription—the Saidian resistance—is shadowed by a re-inscription that marks them as ambivalent and complicit with the discourse they set out to critique, and Hagedorn is no exception.
In the conclusion, I turn to the question of choosing the Dream Jungle—a Filipino-American novel—as a topic of research in Taiwan, the perceived gap between the Philippines and Taiwan, the recent strives that soured our relationship, but also the connections and parallels that link us in unexpected places. Drawing upon the recent works of Chih-ming Wang regarding the question of doing Asian American research in Asia, I position my thesis in this context as an attempt to follow Wang’s call for reconceptualization and dialogue between trans-pacific locations.
Subjects
潔西卡‧海格苳《夢叢林》
塔薩代人騙局
法蘭西斯‧柯波拉《現代啟示錄》
約瑟夫‧康拉德《黑暗之心》
原始主義
重新銘刻
亞美研究
Type
thesis
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