I am an Assistant Professor of English and American Studies at Princeton University, where I teach courses on 20th and 21st century global Anglophone and Asian American literature. I joined the Princeton faculty in 2018, the inaugural year of Princeton University’s Certificate Program in Asian American Studies.

I am also an Elected Delegate (2020-2023) for the CLCS Southeast Asian and Southeast Asian Diasporic at the Modern Language Association.

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My research is broadly concerned with developing historicist and formalist approaches to the study of literature and economy, with specializations in the Asian American and Philippine Anglophone novel. I am working on two manuscript projects. The first is a study of Philippine literature in English in relation to the political economy of labor export and migrant remittances. Titled “Remittance Fiction,” the book writes a new history of the Filipino Anglophone novel (1934-2010) by showing how diasporic writers —working between the US and the Philippines through an international exchange of creative writing—forged the representational powers of literary realism to grapple with questions of political-economic development. Theorizing the agency of literature in shaping economic discourse, my project shows how an important precursor to the migrant worker was the writer abroad, whose narratives of return help us elucidate remittances not only as money but also as a social form. The second project extends my ongoing interest in economic and literary history through a study of the link between post-1965 global economic restructuring and Asian American literary emergence in the context of Cold War–era debates about race, family, and so-called neoliberal human capital formation.

I received my Ph.D. in Rhetoric from the University of California at Berkeley, where I was a dissertation fellow at the Institute of International Studies under the direction of Colleen Lye and Judith Butler. Before coming to Princeton, I held a visiting assistant professorship at The New School in New York City and an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellowship at Wellesley College.

I was born and raised in the Philippines and currently live in Princeton, NJ.

Nadal, Paul. “Cold War Remittance Economy: US Creative Writing and the Importation of New Criticism in the Philippines.” Accepted and forthcoming from American Quarterly. 

Abstract This essay reconstructs a literary genealogy of the impact of US creative writing on Philippine literature in English during the early Cold War period. It addresses the ways in which Filipino writers translated the New Criticism they learned in the United States into socially useful literature by engaging a concept of translation as economic exchange. The essay argues that this economic notion of translation not only names a rhetorical conceit of anglophone writing; it also historically refers to a “Cold War remittance economy,” that is, the large-scale foreign direct investments in Philippine literary culture by American creative writing programs and private institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation. Focusing on three Rockefeller Foundation fellows—Edilberto K. Tiempo, N. V. M. Gonzalez, and Nick Joaquin—the essay narrates the story of the importation of New Criticism into the Philippines as a confrontation between competing yet analogous values of form: autonomy and organic unity in the literary realm, and sovereignty and fiscal balance in the economic realm. In so doing, the essay models a historicist and formalist reading practice that grasps the relationship between literature and political economy not as homology but as a mediated relationship of mutual determination.

Nadal, Paul. “A Literary Remittance: Juan C. Laya’s His Native Soil and the Rise of Realism in the Filipino Novel in English.” American Literature 89.3 (2017): 591–626.

Abstract This essay recovers a once celebrated but now forgotten Filipino novel in English, Juan Cabreros Laya’s His Native Soil (1941), which marked the emergence of realism during the Philippine Commonwealth’s slow, decade-long transition to independence from the United States. Whereas the novel was originally praised as a landmark text in Philippine literature in English, His Native Soil was later dismissed by postwar critics as an imitative, formally flawed, and stylistically inferior work. Taking up Roberto Schwarz’s challenge to advance a reading practice that takes into account the difference between literature and social structure in the colonial periphery, I argue that rather than viewing His Native Soil’s improbabilities of plot and tonal dissonances as artistic flaws, they are more meaningfully read as the author’s attempt to adapt the realist protocols of the bildungsroman to capture the double-edged nature of independence: the adoption of a trade policy that would economically bind together the Philippines and the United States and that would render political freedom impossible for Filipinos unless relations of colonial dependency were to be continued after independence.

︎Download: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-4160906︎