The Aspects of Postcolonialism in Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters

The Aspects of Postcolonialism in Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters

Jessica Hagedorn was born to a Scots-Irish-French-Filipino mother and a Filipino-Spanish father with one Chinese ancestor. This mixed background perks up her unique perspective on Asian American performance and literature. Her experimental media style often incorporates song, poetry, images, and spoken dialogue. Among many works, Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters establishes readers to countless tales distinctively associated with the Philippines after its colonization from Spain and America. It depicts unique lives surrounded by the Filipino, American, and European structures from the mid-1950s throughout the 1980s. It portrays many different dark aspects of the Filipino experiences, focusing on the influence and consequence of post-colonialism by Spain and America. This paper mainly emphasizes the power relations, specifically the influence and consequence of post-colonialism present in the novel. With the basis of Homi Bhabha’s post-colonial theories, the paper also reveals what aspects in the novel Dogeaters represent mimicry, ambivalence, and hybridity