E. San Juan, Jr. on Hagedorn’s Dogeaters and the “Multicultural” Canon: 

            Conflating heresy and orthodoxy, Hagedorn’s Dogeaters possesses the qualities of a canonical text in the making—for the chic multiculturati.  She unfolds the crisis of U.S. hegemony in the Philippines through a collage of character types who embody the corruption of the Americanizing oligarchic elite.  In trying to extract some intelligible meaning from the fragmentation of the comprador-patriarchal order that sacrifices everything to acquisitive lust, she resorts to pastiche, aleatory montage of diverse styles, clichés, ersatz rituals, hyper-real hallucinations—a parodic bricolage of western high postmodernism—the cumulative force of which blunts whatever satire or criticism is embedded in her character portrayals and authorial intrusions.

            This narrative machine of the novel converts the concluding prayer of exorcism and ressentiment into a gesture of stylized protest.  Addressed mainly to a cosmopolitan audience, Hagedorn’s trendy artifice is undermined by postmodern irony: it lends itself easily to consumer liberalism’s drive to sublimate everything (dreams, eros, New People’s Army, feminism, anarchist dissent) into an ensemble of self-gratifying spectacles.  At best, Dogeaters measures the distance between the partisanship of Bulosan’s peasants-become-organic-intellectuals and the pseudo-yuppie lifestyles of recent arrivals.  As a safe substitute for Bulosan and as one of the few practitioners of Third World / feminine “magic realism,” Hagedorn may easily be the next season’s pick for the Establishment celebration of its multicultural canon. 

— from  The Philippine Temptation: Dialectics of Philippines-U. S. Literary Relations (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996): 125.