제시카 하게돈의 『드림 정글』에 나타난 포스트식민 공간의 오리엔탈리즘 (Orientalism and Postcolonial Space in Jessica Hagedorn’s Dream Jungle)

Postcoloniality is a historical condition in which both freedom mechanisms achieved by political independence and memories or traces of colonial oppressions coexist. Postcolonial space, more often than not, contains colonized values and knowledge as complex problems, which should be solved by the people of the so-called independent nation. In Dream Jungle (2003), Jessica Hagedorn attempts to reveal the links between two apparently unrelated events in the postcolonial space of the Philippines. Both the anthropological discovery of a purportedly ‘lost’ primitive stone-age tribe by Spaniard mestizo Zamora Lopez de Legazpi, who is one of the richest men in the Philippines, and the production of an epic Vietnam War film by American film-maker Tony Pierce, who is exploiting the Philippines for its supposedly Vietnam-like landscape, climate and people and who presumes an Orientalist viewing audience, construct the Philippine jungle a postcolonial space where dreams come true for Western filmmakers, anthropologists home and abroad, and Filipino nationalists alike. These two Oriental and neocolonial cultural myth-making attempts show that Edward Said’s Orientalism is still effective in the postcolonial space of the latter part of the twentieth century.
At the same time, Hagedorn criticizes the gendered Orientalism of the West by using a picture of an “Anonymous Visayan Beauty” as a book cover. Her narrative strategy which provides the almost equal amount of voice to the female character, Lina, as it does to the Caucasian males, Legazpi and Pierce, makes the typical Orientalist representation of Filipino woman as the exotic and sexualized Other problematic. Furthermore, it is suspected that the fantasized gendered Oriental image might be one of the direct causes of their sufferings in a neo-colonialized space. Therefore, it is significant that Hagedorn attempts to find ways in which the ever suffering Filipino females could be anti-Orientalist and anti-colonial forces in all its effectiveness and risks.

Postcoloniality is a historical condition in which both freedom mechanisms achieved by political independence and memories or traces of colonial oppressions coexist. Postcolonial space, more often than not, contains colonized values and knowledge as complex problems, which should be solved by the people of the so-called independent nation. In Dream Jungle (2003), Jessica Hagedorn attempts to reveal the links between two apparently unrelated events in the postcolonial space of the Philippines. Both the anthropological discovery of a purportedly ‘lost’ primitive stone-age tribe by Spaniard mestizo Zamora Lopez de Legazpi, who is one of the richest men in the Philippines, and the production of an epic Vietnam War film by American film-maker Tony Pierce, who is exploiting the Philippines for its supposedly Vietnam-like landscape, climate and people and who presumes an Orientalist viewing audience, construct the Philippine jungle a postcolonial space where dreams come true for Western filmmakers, anthropologists home and abroad, and Filipino nationalists alike. These two Oriental and neocolonial cultural myth-making attempts show that Edward Said’s Orientalism is still effective in the postcolonial space of the latter part of the twentieth century.
At the same time, Hagedorn criticizes the gendered Orientalism of the West by using a picture of an “Anonymous Visayan Beauty” as a book cover. Her narrative strategy which provides the almost equal amount of voice to the female character, Lina, as it does to the Caucasian males, Legazpi and Pierce, makes the typical Orientalist representation of Filipino woman as the exotic and sexualized Other problematic. Furthermore, it is suspected that the fantasized gendered Oriental image might be one of the direct causes of their sufferings in a neo-colonialized space. Therefore, it is significant that Hagedorn attempts to find ways in which the ever suffering Filipino females could be anti-Orientalist and anti-colonial forces in all its effectiveness and risks.