Juxtaposition and Asynchronicity as Postcolonial Poetics in Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart

ABSTRACT

Literary studies, with the influence of critical theory inspired by Marxism and the Frankfurt School, have sidestepped concerns on aesthetics and poetics. Using Elleke Boehmer’s postcolonial poetics, this study aims to explore juxtaposition and asynchronicity in Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart. It discusses how juxtaposition and asynchronicity as postcolonial poetics interrogate the postcolonial politics in the novel and explains the novel’s contribution to enriching Filipinos’ counter-memory and in enabling resistance. The poetics of second-person narrator point of view, flashbacks, free indirect discourse, and elliptical narrative are ways through which the text has explored migrants’ efforts of forging and linking social relations in the interstitial spaces between homeland and host land. At the same time, the novel goes beyond essentialist contours of migrant experience such as heteronormative nationalism and nostalgia for lost origins. The paper demonstrates not only a critical reckoning with power structures but also renewed attempts and continued struggle, which lead to radical hope.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The study was funded by my university here in the Philippines. It might not be included in the Open Funder Registry.

Notes on contributors

Mark Louie Tabunan

Mark Louie Tabunan teaches English language and literature courses at the University of Northern Philippines, Vigan City, Ilocos Sur, Philippines and is also a PhD student in comparative literature at the University of the Philippines. His research interests are along literary studies and memory and trauma studies involving Philippines literatures in English and in Ilokano.