ABSTRACT
A nostalgic longing for “authentic” Filipinoness emerges in YouTube videos created by second-generation Filipino Americans in their representations and reenactments of Filipino language, tradition, and everyday life. While a sense of creativity and self-effacing humor are immediately consumed by viewers of this genre of videos, the signifiers of Filipino identity and culture in these parodies risk reinforcing scripts influenced by colonial gazing and imperialist nostalgia. This chapter claims that notions of an authentic Filipino identity and a nostalgic orientation necessitate an analysis that explores a creative way to engage with representations of a culture and acknowledge the struggles of Filipino Americans to identify with a heritage from which they are displaced. Nostalgia is recast here as an estranging position, one that considers familiar markers of Filipinoness that risk reinscribing dominant frameworks of identity on the one hand, but also provides us with an emerging rhetoric with which to discourse about Filipino American identity as lived and enacted by second-generation, mixed-race individuals. Vernacular video acts as a transition that demonstrates these videographers’ own self-consciousness as estranged beings from (an imagined) culture and homeland. These images become a starting point for a discourse on history, identity, and of imagining an alternative idea of Filipinoness. It suggests not a new home, but a new way to think of oneself as at-home.
