Writing a Personal Archipelago in Luis H. Francia’s The Eye of Fish

This paper treats Luis H. Francia’s The Eye of Fish: A Personal Archipelago (2001) as a text metonymic of Filipino American writing and identity formation. Using a Foucauldean framework that highlights Francia’s awareness of his subject position as being both the writer and the product of his work, self-writing is presented as an ongoing process of creation a blurring of the boundaries between the imaginative and autobiographical, the literary and the extraliterary (historical, social, and critical). Part of the examination of Francia’s imagined “personal archipelago” is the complex intersections of Philippine geography and society, its neocolonial and diasporic history, and the argument that Filipino America is a space that provides for the continuous re-creation of identity and imagination.