David Siglos

Dr. David G. Siglos Jr. received his Ph.D. in English at the University of California, Riverside. He is currently a lecturer in the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign where he teaches Intro to Asian American Studies, U.S. Race and Empire, U.S. Citizenship Comparatively, Food and Asian Americans, and Theories of Race, Gender, and Sexuality. His book project, Filipino Style: Salvaging the Novel and the U.S. Empire, provides a transnational perspective on Filipino American novels and visual media to describe the decolonial aesthetics and logics of everyday Filipino performances, what he calls “Filipino style.” His formulation of style serves as an aesthetic catalog of speech, actions, and gestures that improvises different ways of being in a world overdetermined by the genres and violence of empire. Through his selection of novels (Dogeaters, Insurrecto, and Leche) and visual media (Film, TV, and YouTube), he argues that the carnivalesque quality of the Filipino culture, particularly its everyday linguistic and performative modes—characterized by constant coding, imitation, repetition, and wordplay—not only defies global capitalist logics of development, modernity, and progress, but also gives rise to new literary forms that cannot be accounted for by the Western theory of the novel.