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blends such genres as poetry, fiction, songs, and
scripts, blurring the traditional boundaries among
them. Her art is as complex as her own ancestry,
which is a mixture of Filipino, Spanish, Chinese,
German, Scottish, Irish, and French roots. She
nevertheless defines herself primarily as Filipina
mainly due to the strong connection that she feels
with her Filipina grandmother. Drawing from her
very diverse influences, her works show an irrev-
erent attitude toward, and consistent efforts to
dismantle, any notions of cultural, national, and
racial essentialisms.
The multiple influences in Hagedorn’s artistic
production mirror the variety of elements shap-
ing the history and culture of the Philippines. The
Philippines were first colonized by Spain until
1896, dominated by the United States until World
War II, and occupied by Japan from 1942 to 1944.
Afterward it experienced the effects of U.S. neo-co-
lonialism, a point extensively dealt with in Hage-
dorn’s works. As her characters move between the
Philippines and other multicultural nations such
as the United States, Hagedorn examines how the
concept of cultural authenticity is constructed,
who transgresses it, and why. Displacement, cul-
tural heterogeneity and the self-(re)definition
of both individuals and communities are central
themes of her writings. Her major settings, the
urban areas of the Philippines and the United
States, help further raise questions about power
imbalances and struggles in postcolonial, class,
gender and sexual contexts.
Four Young Women (1973) was the first an-
thology to include Hagedorn’s poetry. Two years
later, her first collection of poems and fiction,
Dangerous Music, was published. In collaboration
with photographer Marisa Roth, Hagedorn also
published Burning Heart (1999), in which poems
and black-and-white photographs are paired to
depict the state of children in the Philippines. In
1975 she formed the experimental rock group
The West Coast Gangster Choir, which lasted for
a decade and was later renamed as The Gangster
Choir when she moved to New York. Her theater
productions include Where the Mississipi Meets the
Amazon (1977 collaboration with Thulani Davis
and Ntozake Shange), Mango Tango (1978), Tene-
ment Lover (1981), Holy Food (1988), Teenytown
(1990) and a stage adaptation of her novel DOG-
EATERS (1991). Her interest in performing arts,
music, and poetry has strongly shaped her fiction,
which shows an authorial concern with rhythm
and speech patterns and often contains excerpts
from songs, newspapers, script fragments, and
quotations from real or fictional people.
Her narratives offer controversial representa-
tions of Filipino, Filipino-American and Anglo-
American identities, exploring how they are
constructed and reinforced through a wide range
of cultural manifestations such as books, newspa-
pers, radio and television serials, films, and rock
and pop music. Hagedorn’s works, concerned with
the plight of marginal figures and strong female
characters, attempt to destabilize any rigid bound-
aries between “high” and “low” culture.
Hagedorn won the American Book Award
for her novella Pet Food and Tropical Apparitions
(1981). Her first novel, Dogeaters (1990), earned
her critical acclaim and was nominated for a Na-
tional Book Award. The GANGSTER OF LOVE (1996),
her second novel, develops further some of the
themes already outlined in Dogeaters. Her third
novel, Dream Jungle (2003), also studies the politi-
cal and cultural relationship between the Philip-
pines and the United States as the lives of diverse
Filipino, American, and Filipino-American char-
acters become intertwined. The two main events
in the novel are based on real historical events. The
discovery of a “lost” tribe in the Philippines called
the Taobos is a fictionalised allusion to the histori-
cal discovery of the Tasaday, and the filming of
Napalm Sunset is inspired by the filming of Apoca-
lypse Now in the country. These plots become en-
tangled with a portrayal of Manila from the 1970s
until the late 1990s, depicting Ferdinand Marcos’s
regime and the neo-colonial tensions between the
Philippines and the United States.
Among other projects, Hagedorn has also ed-
ited an anthology of Asian-American literature
entitled Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of
Contemporary Asian American Fiction (1993);
created with John Woo the short animated series
“Pink Palace,” featuring a Filipina mother and
her daughter living in California; and written the98 Hagedorn, Jessica Tarahata