Provocative and engaging, Martin Joseph Ponce’s Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading provides an archive, theory, and method for rethinking how diasporic authors negotiate the terms of national and transnational identities and communities. The book offers two important critical interventions. First, Ponce argues that the development of Anglophone Filipino literature in the United States and the Philippines is as much influenced by imaginings of sexuality as it is by formations of nation, gender, and race; Filipino literature, he contends, “has long been ‘diasporic’ and ‘queer’ ” (2). Second, and more importantly, Ponce makes an irrefutable case for the value of queer diasporic critique more broadly. Like Martin Manalansan, Gayatri Gopinath, David Eng, and Roderick Ferguson, Ponce’s critical framework stems from a multivalent sense of queer, a term that stands at the intersection of “gender, sexuality, eroticism and desire” (2). Although this book certainly includes queer authors and subjects, his expansive use of the term also highlights and questions the dominance of heterosexuality in mainstream versions of culture and history. He thus challenges the construction of the global South as a site of “‘traditional’ patriarchy, sexual conservatism, and homophobia” while the global North is configured as its opposite, a center of “ ‘modern’ gender equality, homo-tolerance, and sexual progressivism” (27).

Ponce’s complex portraiture of Filipino and Filipina artists and their texts links readings of aesthetic and political choices with analyses of reception and circulation; he calls for “complex theorizations among the politics of authority (who is doing the writing), the politics of representation (who is being written about), and the politics of address (who is being written to)” (20). His commitment to a truly transnational methodology is especially impressive, and he does not take the task of diasporic critique lightly. The book includes more familiar authors such as Carlos Bulosan, Jessica Hagedorn, and José Garcia Villa and also introduces readers to writers such as Ruth (Elynia) Mabanglo, Barbara Jane Reyes, Noel Alumit, Bino Realuyo, Gina Apostol, and Patrick Rosal. Ponce situates his work amid an extended dialogue with scholars based in the Philippines and the United States. Some of the book’s best moments stem from his skilled treatment of poetry, a genre often eclipsed in Asian American literary studies because of a longstanding emphasis on narrative prose (his chapter on Villa is a model of excellence). Beyond the Nation counters these tendencies by drawing our attention to works of Filipino poetry and by highlighting the poetic in fiction. In doing so, Ponce casts more familiar texts and authors in a completely new light, such as when he deftly reads the musical rhythms and influences in Jessica Hagedorn’s novels as a complement to the more common focus on her attention to the visual.

Beyond the Nation draws upon an elegant analysis of Filipino and Filipina literature, but its repercussions extend well beyond this realm. For postcolonial scholars, Ponce’s book will be especially revelatory. He recasts some of the foundational tropes and rubrics of postcolonial critique, such as the nationalist family romance and its seemingly obligatory male-female dynamics, the rise of the postcolonial intellectual and the exile’s longing, or the aesthetics of Anglophone literature and its dialogue with the nation. Indeed Beyond the Nation makes it clear that the very foundations of diasporic literature are not merely based in the heterosexual family plots so familiar to nationalism, or the male immigrant narrative that situates a mourning mother back in the homeland. To read Beyond the Nation is certainly to encounter new works and to approach more familiar texts differently. It demands that we mull over, with Ponce, our own ways of viewing the national, the transnational, and the diasporic and asks us to become cognizant of persistent structures of heterosexuality, and how and why male-female frameworks should be questioned. Ultimately, it reminds us of why we must continue to search beyond our usual boundaries for a “practice of connectivity” (232), a process that, however fraught, is nevertheless absolutely necessary.