SOURCE: Casper, Leonard. “Four Filipina Writers: Recultivating Eden.” Amerasia Journal 24, no. 3 (1998): 143-59.

In the following essay, Casper analyses the influence of colonialism and neocolonialism on the works of four female writers from the Philippines—Hagedorn, Ninotchka Rosca, Cecilia Manguerra-Brainard, and Linda Ty-Casper. While discussing Dogeaters, Casper links the recurring motifs of food, mass media, and gossip to the novel's central theme of escapist dreams and fantasies.

Innumerable historians have traced the Hispanization and Americanization¹ of Philippine culture during continuous colonial rule throughout 400 years. Far too little attention, however, has been paid the counter Filipinization of these influences, through adaptations in religion, government, architecture, the culinary arts, and similar spheres of daily life.² A century after Commodore Dewey's one-day defeat of the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay (May 1898) and the subsequent arrival of American ground forces, and half a century after formation of the Republic of the Philippines (1946), Americans...