Search

In this paper, I look into the lesser-known history of "comfort women" in the Philippines. I engage with the following questions: how did the trafficking and sexual exploitation of Filipino women emerge as part of state policy in the Japanese Empire? How was it dealt with in the aftermath of the war, especially in the face of shifting post-war alliances and the changing place of Japan in the geo-politics of the Cold War? How did events in the international arena, in turn, affect diplomatic relations between the Philippines and Japan, specifically with respect to aid and trade? Finally, how did the market forces at play affect state policy in the Philippines? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is part of a larger project that looks at Asian writers in the English-speaking world. It focuses on literature representing British-Muslim identities in relation to post- 9/11 and post-7/7 debates on national identity, cultural and religious expression, and the future of multiculturalism in Britain. While the postcolonial paradigm offers a rich site for examining the long-term consequences of colonialism in relation to first- and secondgeneration writers, the complex politics of location in recent British-South Asian fiction points to the emergence of a new set of positionalities. I argue that much contemporary minority writing has come to reflect a significantly altered context in which secularism, cosmopolitanism and hybridization are being challenged by a politics of faith and insurgency-a politics that is at once defined and contested within specific communities and along transnational lines. At the fulcrum of these political debates spurred by minority writing are questions of honor and shame articulated on the physical location and moral evaluation of women in diasporic communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]