José Garcia Villa’s Book of Grotesques

Abstract

This chapter explores the ethnic character who severs art from biography through José Garcia Villa’s infamous disavowal of his racial and colonial identity. Focusing on Villa’s autobiographical short story cycle in Footnote to Youth (1933), this chapter rethinks Villa’s disavowal in terms of exposure. The grotesque characters of Villa’s fictive work draw attention to their own twisted forms and expose the social characterization of minorities and of Filipino colonial subjects, specifically their Orientalist and primitivist caricature. This chapter reveals Villa’s insistent disavowal of biography to be the result of social compulsion rather than eccentric choice.