The politics of relation: Creole languages in Dogeaters and Rolling the R's

This essay considers Taglish and Hawai'i Pidgin as creole languages in Edouard Glissant's sense and examines their relationships to mass consumerism and popular culture with regard to the workings of transnational capitalism in the Philippines and Hawai'i, respectively. In my readings of the novels, Taglish and Pidgin are determined not only by the history of American colonialism in the Philippines and Hawai'i but also by class, race, gender, and sexuality. Both languages, at this particular historical moment, effectively expose the logic and effects of global capitalism: neocolonialism, cultural hegemony, center-periphery relationships, and a global division of labor where migrant laborers from economically disadvantaged countries are heavily exploited and abused by host countries. I argue that the use of the creole languages in the novels sustains an effective critique of both American cultural hegemony in former US colonies and the "common culture" as articulated by the related discourses of American multiculturalism and nationalism in the actual political and cultural economy in which the novels circulate as commodities.

Taglish, Pidgin, and the Theory of Relation

Glissant privileges creolization as a site of resistance in a certain kind of center-periphery relationship: a nation's colonial or neocolonial relationship with its (former) colonizers. According to his theory, "creolization approximates the idea of Relation," which is global, multilingual, open, and always changing (34). Creole language, then, as connected to creole culture, evinces the logic of Relation, constantly changing as a result of influxes of different languages and new practices, particularly at the intersection of transnational capitalism and (neo)colonialism. The Creole language of Glissant's Martinique makes the French in France uneasy because it seems a bastardization of "pure French." (4)

Taglish exhibits these particular characteristics of Glissant's Relation and creolization quite well. (5) We have already seen the way Hagedorn's use of Taglish has made at least one book reviewer for the highly distinguished and widely disseminated New York Times Book Review uneasy. The novel does not accommodate the reviewer, who thinks it is simply "amusing to interbreed the languages and the music like that [... but would] like to know what it means." Historically, what is now recognized as Taglish originated in and around Manila, which lies at the intersection of various social, economic, and cultural fields and provides the meeting ground for different groups of people from other regions in the Philippines and foreign countries. Significantly, this particular form of cosmopolitanism emerged from the difficult and complicated histories of Spanish and American colonialism in the Philippines, which involved, among other things, language importation and religious conversion. (6) The fusion of different languages and religious terms into what became known as the Tagalog language contributed to the formation of Taglish. And, by extension, Taglish functions as a short-hand embodiment of the creole culture of Manila. (7)