The Heartland of U.S. Empire
Race, Region, and the Queer Filipinx Midwest
Thomas Xavier Sarmiento author
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Temple University Press,U.S.
Published:20th Mar '26
£96.00
Supplier delay - available to order, but may take longer than usual.
Examining Filipinx cultural representations in the Midwest since the early twentieth century, Thomas Sarmiento shrewdly considers the impact of American exceptionalism and U.S. imperialism in a region where white, middle class, heterosexual, and Christian is the norm. The Heartland of U.S. Empire offers a cogent analysis of the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair and its infamous Philippine Exhibit alongside minor museum displays and archives of Midwesterners in the Philippines. Sarmiento also considers the "exile literature" of Filipino/American writer Bienvenido Santos as well as the TV shows Glee and Superstore, which provide mainstream visibility of the queer Filipinx Midwest.
He employs a queer, decolonial Filipinx methodology that traces how narratives of America's heartland position Filipinxs in the region as nonnormative due to their racial, gender, sexual, and national statuses. The Heartland of U.S. Empire locates queer Filipinxs in the geographic center of the nation and at the center of cultural narratives, thereby mapping alternative images of diasporic Filipinx identity and experience alongside U.S. regional and national identities, histories, and realities.
In the series Asian American History and Culture
"The Heartland of U.S. Empire is a wonder. There is nothing else like it out there. Braiding personal history with piercing analyses, Thomas Xavier Sarmiento makes a stunningly original contribution to our understanding of Filipinx communities within the U.S. Midwest. From start to finish, this book proves to be an absolute gift to scholars committed to entwined interdisciplinary projects in queer studies, Asian American studies, and place-based critique." - Scott Herring, Professor of American Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University, and author of Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism
"Productively vertiginous, The Heartland of U.S. Empire tilts the axis of Filipinx American studies away from the West Coast and the dominance of demographic argumentation to the Midwest. At once a place and a no-place, the Midwest is the heart of empire, maintained by colonial technocrats, soldiers, and educators. And in their displacement, disorientation, and dissatisfaction, Filipinxs located in so-called 'flyover' country forge a queer relation to this well of loneliness—now opened to racial and colonial critique—that is the Midwest. Sarmiento's book persuasively reorients Filipinx American studies to America's heartland, revealing how quietly, centrally, and brutally formative it has been to the Filipinx experience in general." - Sarita Echavez See, Professor Emerita of English at the University of California, Riverside, and author of The Filipino Primitive: Accumulation and Resistance in the American Museum
ISBN: 9781439927663
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 454g
294 pages