Migratory Aesthetics in Diasporic Claustrophobia

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The studies of people’s migration and artistic mobilisation are traditionally viewed separately as discreet critical and disciplinary practices: the former is said to belong to the social sciences and the latter, to the humanities. From this perspective, Literature, for example, is considered to belong to the Arts and Humanities. However, this paper suggests that Literature could constitute an axis of articulation of mobile forces of real diasporic lives studied by the social sciences and of itinerant figures of imagined lives depicted by the arts. This paper shows such an intersection through a close reading of “Arrivederci,” an award-winning Tagalog short story written by Fanny A. Garcia, a multi-awarded fictionist in the Philippines. This short story was published in the early 1980s, during the early years of “exporting” Filipino labour as government policy during the Marcos dictatorship. The analysis points to how a literary text could both depict the dire conditions of the life of Filipino domestic workers in diaspora and foreshadow the by-now-familiar narrative of the so-called “mga bagong bayani” (“the new heroes”)‚ the overseas Filipino workers (OFWs). In this narrative, what unfold are the textualualization of the concrete experience of migration of Filipino overseas domestic helpers and the realisation of the principle of aesthetic structuring in a literary text. Both in Philippine literary history and the history of Filipino migration since the 1970s, the significance of “Arrivederci” is in its early, almost prescient,literary iteration of the specificity of the experience of the overseas contract workers, foreshadowing its later reiteration in their real lives, which this paper refers to as diasporic claustrophobia.