Photo Courtesy of the Thulani Davis Collection at Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library

My dissertation, Afro-Filipina Aesthetics: Transnational Sound Cultures and Dance Performances, examines a cultural-political formation: transnational Filipina and Black women performers who formed aesthetic and social practices across the long twentieth century. Drawing on archival research and interviews conducted in Southeast Asia, France, and the United States, I analyze Filipina and Black women performers and their relationships across a number of global entertainment circuits. In doing so, I argue that migratory Filipina and Black women performers shaped Euro-American imperial notions of race, gender, nation, and migration. These performers developed what I call "Afro-Filipina aesthetics," strategic forms of self-fashioning of their bodies through dress, gestures, and vocals that challenged colonial ideas of Filipina and Black women as subservient, meek, unoriginal, and confined to the home. I argue Filipina and Black women dancers, singers, and musicians were active inventors and improvisers, whose bodily acts communicated both the constraints of their lives, and their desires and pleasures. In turn, their aesthetics also reveal the intimacies these migratory performers had with one another, unveiling intertwined Filipina and Black performance genealogies that envisioned Global South feminist and queer politics and radical kinship networks.

Two key questions guide my research. First, what personal and artistic relationships did Filipina, Black, and mixed-race Afro-Filipina women performing artists have with one another? Second, how did Afro-Filipina women’s cross-racial and experimental collaborations draw from and/or reinvent literary and performance genres? To answer these questions, my project draws on literary analysis, performance theories, and archival methodologies. Chapter 1 examines mixed-race Afro-Filipina starlet Maggie Calloway’s interracial bodabil (vaudeville) performances in Manila and Singapore from the 1920s-1940s. Chapter 2 moves to mixed-race Afro-Filipina actress and singer Marpessa Dawn’s 1950s theater and musical performances with Afro-French and Caribbean artists in Paris. Chapter 3 looks at the “Satin Sisters,” a 1970s poetry-theater collective in San Francisco and New York City that featured Jessica Hagedorn, Ntozake Shange, and Thulani Davis. Chapter 4 concludes my dissertation by examining queer Afro-Filipina aesthetics in the popular American reality television drag show RuPaul’s Drag Race. My work is the first study to compare and contrast how these cross-racial aesthetics developed across major entertainment capitals—Manila, Singapore, Paris, San Francisco, and New York City—during the interwar and post-World War II periods.