By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion … How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?
---- Psalm 137
| c |
ontemporary cultural studies posit the demise of the nation as an unquestioned assumption, almost a doctrinal point of departure for speculations on the nature of the globalization process. Are concepts such as the nation state, national sovereignty, or nationalities, and their referents obsolete and useless? Whatever the rumors about the demise of the nation-state, or the obsolescence of nationalism in the wake of September 11, 2001, agencies that assume its healthy existence are busy: not only the members of the United Nations, but also the metropolitan powers, with the United States as its military spearhead, have all reaffirmed their civilizing nationalism with a vengeance. In this epoch of counterterrorism we have entered, the local and the global find a meeting ground in the transactions among nation-states and diverse nationalities while global hegemony is negotiated among the metropolitan powers. Their instrumentalities --- World Trade Organization, NATO, the World Bank and IMF, and other consortia --- are all exerting pressures and influence everywhere. Citizenship cards, passports, customs gatekeepers, and border patrols are still mundane regularities. Saskia Sassen has described the advent of the global city as a sign of the “incipient[3] unbundling of the exclusive territoriality of the nation-state.” At the same time, however, she adds that what we see looming in the horizon is the “transnational geography of centrality … consisting of multiple linkages and strategic concentrations of material infrastructure,” a “grid of states and linkages” between North and South still comprised of nation-states.
With WTO and finance capital in the saddle, the buying and selling of labor-power moves center stage once more. What has not escaped the most pachydermous[4] epigones[5] of free-market apologists[6] who have not been distracted by the Gulf War, the carnage in Bosnia and Kosovo, and now in Afghanistan and Iraq, are the frequency and volume of labor migration, flows of bodies of color (including mail-order brides, children, and the syndicated traffic in prostitutes and other commodified bodies), in consonance with the flight of labor-intensive industries to far-flung industrial zones in Mexico, Thailand, the Philippines, Haiti, China, and other dependent formations. These irregularities defy postmodernist[7] concepts of contingency, ambivalence, and indeterminacy. Such bodies are of course not the performative parodists of Judith Butler in quest of pleasure or the aesthetically fashioned selves idealized by Forcault and the pragmatic patriot, Richard Rorty.
In the Arena of Culture Wars
Culture wars are conducted by other means through the transport and exchange of bodies of color in the international bazaars. And the scaling of bodies proceeds according to corporeal[8] differences (sex, race, physical capacity, etc.) . Other diasporas --- in addition to the historic ones of the Jews, Africans, Chinese, Irish, Palestinians and so on --- are in the making. The editors of The South Atlantic Quarterly special issue on “diaspora[9] and immigration celebrate the political and cultural experiences of these nomadic cohorts who can “teach us hoe to think about our destiny and how to articulate the unity of science with the diversity of knowledges as we confront the politics of difference – the contours and direction of diasporas – are conceived as the arena of conflict among the disparate[10] philosophical/ideological standpoints.
Contesting the European discourse on modernity and pleading for the “inescapability and legitimate value of mutation, hybridity, and intermixture, Paul Gilroy has drawn up the trope[11] of the “Black Atlantic” on the basis of the “temporal and ontological[12] rupture of the middle passage.” Neither the Jewish nor the African diasporas can of course be held up as inviolable archetypes if we want to pursue an “infinite process of identity construction.” My interest here is historically focused: to inquire into how the specific geopolitical contingencies of the Filipino diaspora-in-the-making can problematize this infinitude[13] of identity formation in the context of “third world” principles of national liberation, given the persistent neocolonial, not postcolonial, predicament of the Philippines today. Postmodern Cultural Studies from the counter-terrorizing North is now replacing McKinley’s gunboat policy of “Benevolent Assimilation” at the turn of last century. Its missionary task is to discover how, without their knowing it, Filipina domestics are becoming cosmopolitans while working as maids (more exactly, domestic slaves), empowering themselves by devious tactics of evasion, accommodation, and making-do. Obviously this task of naturalizing servitude benefits the privileged few, the modern slave-masters. This is not due to a primordial irony in the nature of constructing their identity which, according to Ernesto Laclau, “presupposes the constitutive split” between the content and the function of identification as such since they --- like most modern subjects --- are the “empty places of an absent fullness”.
Signifiers of lack, female Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW) from poverty-stricken regions in the Philippines are presumably longing for a plenitude[14] symbolized by a stable, prosperous homeland/family that, according to postcolonial dogma, is forever deferred if not evacuated. Yet these maids (euphemized[15] as “domestics”) possess faculties of resourcefulness, stoic[16] boldness, and ingenuity. Despite this, it is alleged that Western experts are needed for them to acquire self-reflexive agency, to know that their very presence in such lands a Kuwait, Milan, Los Angeles, Taipei, Singapore, ad London and the cultural politics they spontaneously create are “complexly mediated and transformed by memory, fantasy and desire”. The time of labor has annihilated indeed the spaces of the body, home, community, and nation. The expenditure of a whole nation-people’s labor-power now confounds the narrative of individual progress on which the logic of capital and its metaphysics[17] of rationality are hitherto founded.
Bodies of Laboring Desire
Space-time particulars are needed if we want to ascertain the “power-geometry” that scales diasporic duration, the temporality of displacement. I might state at the outset an open secret: the annual remittance of billions of dollars by Filipino workers abroad, now more than nine million, suffices to keep the Philippine economy afloat and support the luxury and privileges of less than one percent of the people, the Filipino oligarchy. Since the seventies, Filipino bodies have been the no. 1 Filipino export, and their corpses (about five or six return in coffins daily) are becoming a serious item on the import ledger. In 1998 alone, according to the Commission on Filipinos Overseas, 755,000 Filipinos found work abroad, sending home a total of P7.5 billion; in the last three years, their annual remittance averages $5 billion.
Throughout the nineties, the average total migrant workers is about a million a year; they remit over five percent of the national GNP, not to mention the millions of pesos collected by the Philippine government in myriad taxes and fees. Hence these overseas cohorts are glorified as “modern heroes,” “mga bagong bayani” (the “new heroes”), the most famous of whom are Flor Contemplacion who was falsely accused and hanged in Singapore, and Sarah Balabagan, flogged in the United Arab Emirates (Abu Dhabi) for defending herself against her rapist-employer. This global marketing of Filipino labor is an unprecedented phenomenon, rivaled only by the trade of African slaves in the previous centuries. Over one thousand concerned Filipino American students made this the central topic of the 1997 FIND Conference at SUNY Binghamton where I was invited as keynote speaker. These concerned youth were bothered by the reputation of the Filipina/o as the “domestic help,” or glorified servant of the world. How did Filipinas/os come to find themselves scattered to the four corners of the earth and subjugated to the position of selling their selfhoods? What are we doing about it? In general, what is the meaning and import of this unprecedented traffic, millions of Filipinas/os in motion and in transit around the planet?
Lifting the Embargo
Of the nine million Filipinos, there are more than a million Filipina domestics (Filipino men are also recruited for contract labor, but Pinays are made to represent the entire nation in official and popular discourse) in Hong Kong, Sungapore, and Taiwan today, employed under terrible conditions. News reports of brutal and inhumane treatment, slavery, rape, suicide, and murder suffered by these workers abound. The reason why thousands of college-educated women continue to travel to HongKong and other destinations even as the procession of their sisters’ coffins greet them at the ports of embarkation is not a mystery. I can only sketch here the outline of the political economy of migrant labor as a subtext to the hermeneutics[18] of diasporic representation. Suffice it here to spell out the context of this transmigrancy: the accelerated impoverishment of millions of Filipino citizens, the oppressive unjust system (the Philippines as a neocolonial dependency of the US and the transnational corporate power-elite) managed by local compradors[19], landlords, and bureaucrat-capitalists who foster emigration to relieve unemployment and defuse mass unrest, combined with the economic enticements in Hong Kong and other Newly Industrializing Countries, and so on --- all these comprise the parameters for this ongoing process of the marketing of bodies. The convergence of complex global factors, including the internal conditions in the Philippines, has been carefully delineated by, among others, Bridget Anderson, Delia Aguilar, and Grace Chang. We may cite, in particular, the devalorization of women’s labor in global cities, the shrinking status of sovereignty for peripheral nation-states, and the new saliency of human rights in a feminist analytic of the “New World Order.”
In addition to the rampant pillage of the national treasury b corrupt Filipino middlemen, bureaucrats, and feudalistic property-owners, the plunder of the economy by transnational capital has been worsened by the “structural conditionalities” imposed by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Disaggregation of the economy has registered in the disintegration of ordinary Filipino lives (most from rural areas) due to forced migration because of lack of employment, recruiting appeals of governments and business agencies, and the dissolution of the homeland as psychic and physical anchorage in the vortex[20] of the rapid depredation[21] of finance capital.
Boondocks and Swamps
In general, as informed critiques have argued, imperial globalization and the anarchy of the “free market” are responsible for the dislocations in dependent societies. They engender incongruities, nonsynchronies and shifting subject-positions of the Other inscribed in the liminal[22] space of subjugated territory. Capital accumulation is the matrix of unequal power between metropolis and colonies. The historical reality of uneven sociopolitical development in a US colonial and, later, in a neocolonial society like the Philippines is evident in the systematic Americanization of schooling, mass media, sports, music, and diverse channels of mass communication (advertisements, TV and films, cyberspace). Backwardness now helps hi-tech business.
Since the seventies, neoliberal globalization has concentrated on the exploitation of local tastes and idioms for niche marketing. Meanwhile, the impact of the Filipino diaspora in the huge flow of remittances from OFWs has accentuated the discrepancy between metropolitan wealth and neocolonial poverty, with the consumerist habitus made egregiously[23] flagrant[24] in the conspicuous consumption of domestics returning from the Middle East, Europe, Hong Kong, Japan, and other places with balikbayan (returness) boxes. Unbeknownst to observers of this postmodern “cargo cult,” coffins of these workers 9one of them martyred in Singapore, Flor Contemplacion, achieved the status of national saint) arrive in Manila at the rate of five or six a day without too much fanfare.
Notwithstanding this massive research into the structural and historical background of these “new heroes” (as President Corazon all them in acknowledgement of their contribution to the country’s dollar reserves), their plight remains shrouded in bureaucratic fatuities.[25] A recent ethnographic account of the lives of Filipina domestics celebrates their newfound subjectivity within various disciplinary regimes. Deploying Foucault’s notion of “localized power,” the American anthropologist Nicole Constable seeks to “situate Filipina domestic workers within the field of power, not as equal players but as participants”. Ambivalence supposedly characterizes the narratives of these women: they resist oppression at the same time as the “participate in their own subordination.” And how is their agency[26] manifested? How else but in their consuming power?
Consider this spectacle: During their Sundays off, Filipina maids gather to certain places like the food restaurants of the Central District in Hong Kong and demand prompt service or complain to the mangers if they are not attended to properly. They also have the option of exercising agency at McDonald’s if they ask for extra condiments or napkins. Apart from these anecdotal examples, the fact that these maids were able to negotiate their way through a bewildering array of institutions in order to secure their job is testimony to what Constable calls “the subtler and more complex forms of power, discipline, and resistance in their everyday lives”.
According to one reviewer, this scholarly attempt to ferret[27] out signs of tension or conflict in the routine lives of domestics obfuscates[28] the larger context that defines the subordination of these women and the instrumentalities that reproduce their subjugation. In short, functionalism[29] has given way to neopositivism[30]. To put it another way, Constable shares Foucault’s dilemma of ascribing resistance to subjects while devaluing history as “meaningless kaleidoscopic changes of shape in discourse totalities”. Anne Lacsamana pronounces a felicitous verdict on this specimen of cultural studies: “TO dismiss the broader history of Filipino OFWs in favor of more trivial pursuits (such as watching them eat at a fastfood restaurant) reenacts a Western superiority that has already created (and is responsible for) many of the social, economic, and political woes that continue to plague the country”. Nor is Constable alone in this quite trendy vocation. Donna Haraway, among others has earlier urged the practitioners of cultural studies to abandon the politics of representation which allegedly objectifies and disempowers whatever it represents. She wants us to choose instead local struggles for strategic articulations that are always impermanent, vulnerable, and contingent. This precept forbids the critique of ideology – how can one distinguish the truth from falsehood since there are only “truth effects” contrived by power? This populist and often demagogic[31] stance promotes a “radical skepticism” that cannot discriminate truth-claims, nor establish a basis for sustained and organized political action.
The more flagrant erasure in Constable’s postmodernist inventory of episodes seems more serious. This is her discounting of the unequal relation between the Philippines and a peripheral capitalist city like Hong Kong, a relation enabled by the continuing neocolonial domination of Filipinos by Western corporate interests led by the United States. But this microphysics of learning how to survive performed by Filipino maids cannot exonerate the ethnographist from complicity with this strategy of displacing causality ( a technique of inversion also found in mainstream historians of the Philippines such as Glenn May, David Steinberg, Stanley Karnow) and apologizing for the victims by oblique patronage, endowing domestics with spurious[32] honorific titles as “transnational” or “transmigrant.”
Such views about the Filipino diaspora are half-truths closer to rumor, if not sheer mystifications. Spurious distinctions about cognition and perception concerning ethnic identity will remain vacuous[33] if they do not take into account the reality of imperial world-systematic changes and their concrete multilayered ramifications that condition Filipino society. Lacking any dialectical materialist analysis of the dynamics of colonialism and imperialism that connect the Philippines and its peoples with the United States and the rest of the world, conventional studies on Filipino immigration are all scholastic games, at best disingenuous[34] exercises in chauvinist[35] or white-supremacist apologetics.[36] This is because they rely on concepts and methodologies that conceal unequal power relations – that is, relations of subordination and domination, racial exclusion, marginalization, sexism. Gender inferiorization, as well as national subalternity[37], and other forms of discrimination. I want to stress in particular unequal power relations among nation-states. I am not proposing here an economistic or deterministic approach, nor a historicist one with a monolithic Enlightenment narrative, teleology[38], and essentialist or ethnocentric agenda. Far from it. What is intriguing are the dynamics of symbolic violence and the naturalization of social constructs and beliefs which are dramatized in the plot and figures of diasporic happenings.
Constellations in the Distance
As a point of departure for future inquiry, we might situate the Filipino diaspora within a larger global and historical configuration. Like the words “hybridity,” border crossing, ambivalence, subaltern, transculturation, ethnocide, and so on, the term “diaspora” has now become chic in polite conversations and genteel[39] colloquia. One indeed dreads to encounter in this context such buzzwords as “post-nation,” “alterity,” or ludic[40] “difference” now overshadowed by “globalization” and everything prefixed with “trans-“ and assorted postalities[41]. In the rebarbative[42] lexicon of postcolonialism, diaspora has become oxymoronic[43]: a particularizing universal narrative which subsumes all experiences within its fold. Diaspora enacts a mimicry of itself, dispersing its members around in a kaleidoscope of simulations and simulacras[44] borne by the flow of goods, money, labor, and so on, in the international commodity chain.
First, a definition of “diaspora.” According to Milton Esman, the term refers to a “minority ethnic group of migrant origin which maintains sentimental or material links with its land of origin”. Either because of social exclusion, internal cohesion, and other geopolitical factors, these communities are never assimilated into the host society; but they develop in time a diasporic consciousness which carries out a collective sharing of space with others, purged of any exclusivist ethos or proprietary design. These communities will embody a peculiar sensibility enacting a caring and compassionate agenda for the whole species that thrives on cultural difference.
Unlike peoples who have been conquered, annexed, enslaved or coerced in some other way, diasporas are voluntary movements of people from place to place, although such migrations may also betray symptoms of compulsion if analyzed within a global political economy of labor and interstate political rivalries. Immanuel Wallerstein [1995] feels that these labor migrants can challenge transitional corporations by overloading the system with “free movement” at the same time that they try to retain for themselves more of the surplus value they produce. But are such movements really free? And if they are cheap labor totally contingent on the unpredictable fortunes of business, isn’t the expectation of their rebelliousness exorbitant? Like ethnicity, a process of diaspora is shaped by determinate historical causes. But in time it tends to take on ‘the natural’ appearance of an autonomous force, a ‘principle’ capable of determining the course of social action” [Coaroff 1992]. Like racism and nationalism, diaspora presents multiform physiognomies open to various interpretations and articulations. Historical precedents may provide clues of what’s to come.
Deracination Trauma
By consensus, Filipinos have become the newest diasporatic community in the whole world. United Nations statistics indicate that Filipinos make up the newest migrant assemblage in the world: nine million Filipino migrant workers (out of eighty million citizens) mostly female domestic help and semiskilled labor. They endure poorly paid employment under substandard conditions, with few or null rights, in the Middle East, Asia or Europe, North America, and elsewhere. It might be noted here that, historically, diasporic groups are defined not only by a homeland but also by a desire for eventual return and a collective identity centered on myths and memories of the homeland.
The Filipino diaspora, however, is different. Since the homeland has long been colonized by Western powers (Spain, United States) and remains neocolonized despite formal or nominal independence, the Filipino identification is not with a fully defined nation but with regions, localities, and communities of languages and traditions. Perceived as Others, they are lumped with familiar aliens: Chinese, Mexicans, Japanese, Indonesians, and so on. Newspaper reports have cited the Philippines as the next target of the US government’s global “crusade” against terrorism. Where is the nation alluded to in passports and other identification papers? How do we conceive of this “Filipino” nation or nationality, given the preemptive impact of US domination and now, on top of the persistent neocolonizing pressure, the usurping force if abstractive, quantifying capital? According to orthodox immigration theory, “push” and “pull” factors combine to explain the phenomenon of contractual migrant labor. Do we resign ourselves to this easy schematic formulation? Poverty and injustice, to be sure, have driven most Filipinos to seek work abroad, sublimating the desire to return by regular remittances to their families; occasional visits and other means of communication defer the eventual homecoming. Alienation and isolation, brutal and racist treatment, and other dehumanized conditions prevent their permanent settlement in the “receiving” countries, except where they have been given legal access to obtaining citizenship status. If the return is postponed, are modes of adaptation and temporary domicile in non-native grounds the feasible alternatives for these expatriates (as they are fondly called by their compatriots in Manila)? The reality of “foreignness” in the country of employment cannot be eluded. Alienation, insulting treatment and racist violence prevent their permanent re-settlement in the “receiving societies,: except where Filipino communities (as in the US and Canada for example) have been goiven legal access to citizenship rights. Individuals, however, hve to go through abrasive screening and tests --- more stringent now in this repressive neofascist ethos.
During political crisis in the Philippines, Filipino overseas workers mobilize themselves for support of local and nationwide resistance against imperial domination and tyranny. Because the putative[45] “Filipino” nation is in the process of formation in the neocolony and abroad, overseas Filipio workers have been considered transnationals or transmigrants – a paradoxical turn since the existence of the nation is problematic, and the ‘trans’ label a chimera[46]. This diaspora then faces the ineluctable[47] hurdles of racism, ethnic exclusion, inferiorization via racial profiling, and physical attacks. Can Filipino migrant labor mount a collective resistance against globalized exploitation? Can the Filipino diaspora expose also the limits of genetic and/or procedural notions of citizenship? In what way can the Filipino diaspora serve as a paradigm for analyzing and critically unsettling the corporate globalization of labor and the reification[48] of identities in the new millennium?
Look Homeward, New Heroines
In summary, I venture the following theses for further discussion. My first thesis on the phenomenon of the Filipino dismemberment is this: Given that the Philippine habitat has never cohered as a genuinely independent nation –-- national autonomy continues to escape the nation-people in a neocolonial set-up --- Filipinos are dispersed from family or kinship webs in villages, towns or provincial regions first, and loosely from an inchoate[49], even “refeudalized,” nation-state. This dispersal is primarily due to economic coercion and disenfranchisement under the retrogressive regime of comprador-bureaucratic (not welfare-state) capitalism; migration is seen as freedom to seek one’s fortune, experience the pleasure of adventure, libidinal[50] games of resistance, and other illusions of transcendence. So the origin to which one returns is not properly a nation-state but a village, a quasi-primordial community, kinship network, or even a ritual family/clan. In this context, the state is viewed in fact as a corrupt exploiter, not an institutional representative of the masses, a comprador agent of transnational corporations and Western (specifically US) powers. Second thesis: What are the myths enabling a cathexis[51] of the homeland? They derive from assorted childhood memories and folklore together with customary practices surrounding municipal and religious celebrations; at best, there may be signs of a residual affective tie to national heroes like Rizal, Bonifacio, and latter day celebrities like singers, movie stars, athletes, and so on. Indigenous food, dances, and music can be acquired as commodities whose presence temporarily heals the trauma of renewal; family reunification can resolve the psychic damage of loss of status or alienation. In short, rootedness in autochthonous[52] habitat does not exert a commanding sway, experienced only as a nostalgic mood. Meanwhile, language, religion, kinship, the aura of family rituals, and common experiences in school, hometown, or workplace functions invariably as the organic bonds of community. Such bonds not only demarcate the boundaries of the imagination but also release energies and affects that mutate into actions that may serve national-popular emancipatory[53] projects. Third thesis: Alienation and racist violence experienced in the host country is what unite violence, a shared history of colonial and racial subordination, marginalization, and struggles for cultural survival through hybrid forms of resistance and political rebellion. This is what may replace the non-existent nation/homeland, absent the liberation of the Filipino nation-state.
In the thirties, Carlos Bulosan once observed that “it is a crime to be a Filipino in America.” Years of union struggle and political organizing in interethnic coalitions have blurred if not erased that stigma. Accomplishments in the civil rihts of the sixties in the US have provided nourishment for ethnic pride. And on the other side, the impulses of assimilationism via the “model minority” umbrella have aroused a passion for multiculturalism divorced from any urge to disinvest in the “possessive investment in whiteness”. But compared to the Japanese or Indian Americans, Filipino Americans as a whole have not made it, sorry to say; the exceptions prove the rule. Andrew Cunanan (the serial killer who slew the famous Versace is the specter that continues to haunt “melting pot” brown Americanists who continue to blabber about the “forgotten Filipino” in the hope of being awarded a share of the obsolescent welfare-state pie. Dispossession of sovereignty leads to shipwreck, physical and metaphorical --- natives drifting rudderless or marooned in islands all over the planet. Via strategies of community preservation and other schemes of defining the locality of the community in historical contexts of displacements, the Filipino diaspora defers its return --- unless and until there is a genuine, organic, Filipino nation that they can identify with. This will continue in places where there is no hope of permanent resettlement or bonafide residents (as in Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and elsewhere). This is the disavowed terror of globalization.
Fourth thesis: Some Filipinos in their old age may desire eventual return only when they are economically secure. As noted earlier, the unprecedented hemorrhage of labor-power, the massive export of educated citizens whose skills have been downgraded to quasi-slavish domestic help, issues from a diseased body-politic. The marks of the disease are impoverishment of 75% of the population, widespread corruption by the minuscule oligarchy[54], criminality, military/police atrocities, and the intensifying insurgency of peasant, women, youth, workers, and indigenous communities. The network of the patriarchal family and semifeudal civil society unravels when women from all sectors (except the rich minority) alienate their “free labor” in the world market.
While the prime commodity remains the labor-power (singularly measured here in both time and space especially for lived-in help), OFWs find themselves frozen in a tributary status between serfhood and colonizing petty bourgeois households. Except for the carceral[55] condition of “hospitality” women in Japan and elsewhere overseen by gangsters, most Filipinas function as indentured[56] servants akin to those in colonial settler societies in seventeenth century Virginia, Australia, Jamaica, and elsewhere. But unlike those societies, the Middle East, Canada, Hongkong, Singapore and other receiving countries operate as part of the transnationalized political economy of global capitalism. These indentures cohorts are witnesses to the dismemberment of the emergent Filipino nation and the scattering of its traumatized elements to state-governed territories around the planet.
In general, Filipinos will not return to the site of misery and oppression --- to poverty, exploitation, humiliated status, despair, hunger, and lack of dignity. Of course, some are forcibly returned: damaged, deported, or dead. But OFWs would rather move their kins and parents to their place of employment, preferably in places where family reunifications is allowed, as in the United States, Italy, Canada, and so on. Or even in places of suffering and humiliation, provided there is some hope or illusion of future improvement. Utopian longing can mislead but also reconfigure and redirect wayward adventures.
Reinventing Filipino Identity
Fifth thesis: Ongoing support for nationalist struggles at home is sporadic and intermittent during times of retrenchment and revitalized apartheid. Do we see any mass protests and collective indignation here in the United States at the Visiting Forces Agreement, for example, and the recent invasion (circa 1998-20030 of the country by several thousand US Marines in joint US-Philippines military exercises? Especially after September 11 and the Arroyo sycophancy to the Bush regime, the Philippines --- considered by the US government as the harbor of homegrown “terrorists” like the Abu Sayyaf --- will soon be transformed into the next “killing field” after Afghanistan and Iraq.
During the Marcos dictatorship, the conscienticized[57] generation of Filipino American youth here was able to mobilize a large segment of the community to support popular-democratic mass struggles against US-supported authoritarian rule. Filipino nationalism blossomed in the late sixties and seventies, but suffered attenuation[58] when it got rechanneled to support the populist elitism of Aquino and Ramos, the lumpen[59] populism of Estrada, and now the mendacious[60] Arroyo regime. This precarious balance of class forces at this conjecture[61] is subject to the shifts in political mobilization and calculation, hence the intervention of Filipino agencies with emancipator goals and nationalist, progressive principles is crucial and strategically necessary.
Sixth thesis: In this time of emergency, the Filipino collective identity is in crisis, undergoing a protracted ordeal of formation and elaboration. The Filipino diasporic consciousness is an odd species, a singular genre: it is not obsesses with a physical return to roots or to land where common sacrifices are remembered and celebrated. It is tied more to a symbolic homeland indexed by kinship or particularistic traditions and communal practices which it tries to transplant abroad in diverse localities.
And so, in the moment of Babylonian captivity, dwelling in “Egypt” or its modern surrogates, building public spheres of solidarity to sustain identities outside the national time and space “in order to lie inside, with a difference” may be the most viable route (or root) of Filipinos in motion --- the collectivity in transit, although this is, given the ineluctability[62] of differences becoming contradictions, subject to the revolutionary transformations emerging in the Philippine countryside and cities. It is susceptible also to other radical changes in the geopolitical rivalry of metropolitan powers based on nation-states. There is indeed deferral, postponement or waiting --- but history moves on in the battlefields of Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao where a people’s war rooted in a durable revolutionary tradition rages on. This drama of a national liberation struggle will not allow the Filipino diaspora and its progeny to slumber in the consumerist paradises of Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, or Seattle. It will certainly disturb the peace of those benefitting from the labor and sacrifices of OFWs who experience the repetition-compulsion of globalized trade and endure the recursive[63] traumas of displacement and dispossession.
Strategy of Return
Caught in the cross-currents of global upheavals, I can only conclude with a very provisional and indeed temporizing epilogue --- if I may beg leave from those Filipina bodies in coffins heading home: Filipinos in the United States (and elsewhere, given the still hegemonic western dispensation amid allegations of its disappearance) are neither “oriental” nor “hispanic”, despite their looks and names. They might be syncretic[64] or hybrid subjects with suspect loyalties. They cannot be called fashionable “transnationals” or flexible transmigrants because of radicalized, ascribed markers (physical appearance, accent, peculiar non-white folkways, and other group idiosyncracies) that are needed to sustain and reproduce white supremacy in this racial polity. Bridget Anderson has coge[65]ntly demonstrated how the international labor market consistently racializes the selling of Filipina selfhood; thus, not only gender and class but, more decisively, “racial identities” conditioned by immigrant status, inferiorized nationality, and so on, are reproduced through combined exploitation and oppression taking place in the employer’s household. Slavery has become redomesticated in the age of reconfigured mercantilism – the vampires of the past continue to haunt the cyberprecinct of finance capital and its futurist hallucinations.
The trajectory of the Filipino diaspora remains unpredictable. Ultimately, the rebirth of Filipino agency in the era of globalised terror depends not only on the vicissitudes of social transformation in the US but, in a dialectical sense, on the fate of the struggle for autonomy and popular-democratic sovereignty in the Philippines where balikbayans (returnees) still practice, though with increasing trepidation[66] interrupted by fits of amnesia, the speech-acts and durable performances of pakikibaka (common struggle), pakikiramay (collective sharing), and pakikipagkapwa-tao (reciprocal esteem). Left untranslated, those phrases from the “Filipino” vernacular address a gradually vanishing audience.
Indeed this essay itself may just be a wayward apostrophe to a vanished dreamworld --- a liberated homeland, a phantasmagoric[67] refuge – evoking the promised land and the archaic golden ages of myths and legends. But wherever it is, this locus of memories, hopes and dreams will surely be inhabited by a new collectivity as befits a new objective reality to which Susan Buck-Morss, in her elegiac[68] paean[69] to the catastrophe that overtook mass utopia, alludes to: “the geographical mixing of people and things, global webs that disseminate meanings, electronic prostheses of the human body, new arrangements of the human sensorium. Such imaginings, freed from the constraints of bounded spaces and from the dictates of unilinear time, might dream of becoming, in Lenin’s words, “as radical as reality itself”.
…..end
[1] Trajectory [noun] . route, course, flight, path, line, track, trail, trace
[2] San Juan, Epifanio. From Globalization to National Liberation: Essays of three Decades. Chapter 8. Quezon City: The UP Press, 2008. ISBN 978-971-542-551-3
[3] Incipient [adjective] just beginning, in the early stages; early, developing, initial
[4] Pachydermous [adjective] like any of certain thick skinned hoofed mammas as an elephant, hippopotamus or rhinocerus
[5] Epigone [noun] mediocre disciple; a mediocre imitator of somebody else, especially of an important artist or philosopher
[6] Apologist [noun] defender, supporter, ally, protector, champion
[7] Postmodernist [adjective] ideas, attitudes developed after modernism often as a reaction against it
[8] Corporeal [adjective] bodily, physical, animal, corporal
[9] Diaspora is the movement of a large group of people from their home country to other countries in the world. A large group of people who come from a particular place and are now living in many different parts of the world. Any dispersion of a people having a common heritage.
[10] Disparate [adjective] dissimilar, unlike, unequal, different, incongruent, unrelated, contrasting, distinct
[11] Trope [noun] the figurative use of a word or phrase; a writer’s unusual use of a word or expression in an unusual way to help a writer to achieve an effect.
[12] Ontological [adjective] relating to the study of existence
[13] Infinitude boundlessness; a very large number of something; a very great degree, or extent of something
[14] Plenitude [noun] a large amount of something; the quality of being full or complete; abounding.
[15] Euphemize [verb] to avoid saying or writing something direct, harsh, unpleasant, or offensive by using milder or more indirect language.
[16] Stoic [adjective] enduring, tolerant, patient, indifferent, apathetic, resigned, passive; as a noun = fatalist, ascetic
[17] Metaphysics – the part of philosophy that studies non-physical things; involves the study of ideas about life, existence, and other things that are not part of the physical world
[18] Hermeneutics [noun] the science and methodology of interpreting texts, especially the books of the bible; theology of religious concepts – the branch of theology that is concerned with explaining or interpreting religious concepts, theories, and principles.
[19] Comprador a shopper, customer, purchaser
[20] Vortex [noun] eddy, whirlpool, current
[21] Depredation [noun] negative effects, ravages, damage, devastation, havoc, destruction, ruin
[22] Liminal [adjective] of conscious awareness; belonging to the pint of conscious awareness below which something cannot be experienced or felt.
[23] Egregious [very formal adjective] extremely bad
[24] Flagrant [adjective] blatant, barefaced, obvious, deliberate, brazen, open, unashamed, overt, patent, manifest
[25] Fatuities [formal noun] idiocies; something idiotic or stupid; self-satisfied unintelligence – a lack of intelligence or thought combined with complacency; an action or remark that shows a lack of intelligence or thought combined with complacency [complacency = satisfaction; smugness; contentment; self-satisfaction]
[26] Agency – group; society
[27] Ferret [verb] search, hunt, rummage, search out, furrow, dig out, scrabble, flush, force out
[28] Obfuscate [verb]. Confuse, disguise, conceal, complicate
[29] Functionalism [noun] the belief that things should be designed and built to be useful and practical rather than attractive
[30] Neopositivism [wiki] Logical positivism (also called logical empiricism and neo-positivism) is a school of philosophy that combines empiricism – the idea that observational evidence is indispensable for knowledge of the world – with a version of rationalism incorporating mathematical and logico-linguistic constructs and deductions in epistemology
[31] Demagogic – [adjective]. Like a demagogue. A demagogue is one who attempts to gain power by arousing the prejudices and passions of the people. Also rabble-rousing - making an appeal to people's emotions, instincts, and prejudices in a way that is considered to be politically manipulative and dangerous
[32] Spurious [adjective] false, bogus, fake, forged, counterfeit. Imitation, specious, unauthentic, sham, illegitimate, phoney.
[33] Vacuous [adjective] having no contents; empty. Lacking intelligence; blank. Empty headed, stupid, unintelligent, inane, dim
[34] Disingenuous [adjective] insincere, untruthful, hypocritical, deceitful, devious, dishonest
[35] Chauvinist [noun] bigot, sexist
[36] Apologetics [noun] a branch of theology that is concerned with proving the truth of Christianity
[37] Subaltern [noun] a subordinate person holding an inferior position
[38] Teleology [noun] study of ultimate causes in nature; an activity that tends toward the achievement of a goal. An approach to ethics that studies actions in relation to their ends or utility; The belief that natural phenomena can be explained in terms of an overall design as well as by mechanical causes. The study of evidence supporting this purpose.
[39] Genteel [adjective] refined. Proper, polite, courteous, discreet, well-mannered, mannerly.
[40] Ludic [adjective] playful in an aimless way. Ludic derives from Latin ludus, "play," and is an adjective meaning "playful." The term is used in philosophy to describe play as an act of self-definition; in literary studies, the term may apply to works written in the spirit of festival. The concept of the ludic self as fundamentally defining human beings can be expressed by the Latin phrase Homo ludens, "the human who plays" (compare Homo sapiens, the human being defined by its ability to think). The ludic fallacy is a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2007 book The Black Swan. "Ludic" is from the Latin ludus, meaning "play, game, sport, pastime." It is summarized as "the misuse of games to model real-life situations." Taleb explains the fallacy as "basing studies of chance on the narrow world of games and dice." Ludic philosophy has also influenced the study of literature. Works such as Don Quixote by Cervantes and Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Danesen are considered ludic texts because of their absurd nature.
[41] Postalities , no meaning or definition found yet
[42] Rebarbative [adjective] Tending to irritate; repellent: "He became rebarbative, prickly, spiteful" (Robert Craft). [French rébarbatif, from Old French, from (se) rebarber, to confront : re-, re- + barbe, beard (from Latin barba; see bhardh-- in Indo-European roots).] repellent, unattractive, forbidding, grim, unpleasant, annoying, etc.
[43] Oxymoron . expression with contradictory words. a phrase in which two words of contradictory meaning are used together for special effect, e.g. "wise fool" or "legal murder"
[44] Simulacra [1] representation or image of something; [2] something vaguely similar; something that has a vague, tentative, or shadowy resemblance to something else
[45] Putative – supposed; reported; reputed
[46] Chimera – fantasy, daydream, figment of your imagination
[47] Ineluctable – unavaoidable; impossible to avoid. Example: the ineluctable casualties of warfare.
[48] Reify (reification) – treat a concept as an object; to think of or treat something abstract as if it existed as a real and tangible object.
[49] Inchoate – unclear, unformed, undeveloped, tentative, embryonic, amorphous
[50] Libidinal – emotions theoretically linked to sexuality: in some psychoanalytical theories, the psychic and emotional energy in people’s psychological makeup that is related to the basic human instincts, especially the sex drive.
[51] Cathexis – investment of energy: the concentration of a great deal of psychological and emotional energy on one particular person, thing or idea.
[52] Autochthonous – present from the earliest times: used in Biology – descended from the original flora, fauna, or inhabitants of the region in which it is found. Formed where found: used in Geology - describes a rock, mineral deposit, or geologic feature that was formed in the area where it is found; produced where situated: used in Physiology - describes a physical function or disorder that originates in the part of the body where it is found.
[53] Emancipate – set somebody free: to free somebody from slavery, serfdom, or other such forms of bondage; free somebody from restrictions: to free somebody from restrictions or conventions.
[54] Oligarchy – small governing group. A group of people who together govern a nation or control an organization, often for their own purposes. Entity ruled by oligarchy – a nation governed or an organization controlled by an oligarchy. Government by small group – government or control by a small group of people.
[55] Carceral – belonging to a prison; [Latin carceralis, fr carcer prison]
[56] Indenture – contract with an apprentice – a contract committing an apprentice or servant to serve a master or employees for a specific period of time. A legal instrument for binding an apprentice or a servant to his master.
[57] Conscienticize – from the word conscience; professionally planned and administered rituals that have as their purpose the internalization of a religious or secular ideology. Conscientization consists of the colonization and standardization of vernacular probity and honor through some 'catholic' (that is universally human) set of institutional rules. It constituted, during the early Middle Ages, a perversion of the original Christian idea of reform. Reform as the attempt to bring about a renewal of the world by means of one's own personal conversion was conceived by early Christians as the vocation that set them apart." From Esteva et al vs Freire & Pedagogy.
[58] Attenuation – decrease, reduction, lessening, shrinking, dwindling.
[59] Lumpen - [1] Designating or of persons or groups regarded as belonging to a low or contemptible segment of their class or kind because of their unproductiveness, shiftlessness, alienation, degeneration, etc. [2] Of or relating to dispossessed, often displaced people who have been cut off from the socioeconomic class with which they would ordinarily be identified: lumpen intellectuals unable to find work in their fields. [3] Of or relating to the lumpenproletariat. [3] Vulgar or common; plebeian: "Popular novelists and their mass readership remain a despised lumpen minority" (Leslie Fiedler). As a noun, 1. (used with a pl. verb) The lumpenproletariat. 2. (used with a sing. verb) A member of the lumpenproletariat. Synonyms: baseborn, common, humble, inferior, low, lowborn, lower-class, low-life, lowly, ignoble, mean, plebeian, prole, proletarian, unwashed, vulgar. Origin: shortened < lumpenproletariat < Ger, lowest level of the proletariat: coined (1850) by Karl Marx < lumpen-, trashy (< lump, scoundrel, ragamuffin, lit., rag < MHG lumpe: see limp) + proletariat, proletariat
[60] Mendacious – false, untruthful, untrue, misleading, unreliable.
[61] Conjecture – guess, surmise, inference, speculation, ssumption, supposition.
[62] Ineluctability - impossible to avoid
[63] Recursive – self repeating; repeating itself, either indefinitely or until a specific point is reached. Repeatedly applying function to itself – involving the repeated application of a function to itself.
[64] Syncretic – to attempt to blend or reconcile (syncretize)
[65] Cogent (adjective) – compelling belief, assent or action; forcible; convincing; forceful; persuasive; weighty; compelling; trenchant
[66] Trepidation –agitation caused by fear; apprehension; unease; nervousness; apprehension; consternation; foreboding; concern; misgivings; disquiet; the creeps
[67] Phantasmagoric adjective of phantasmagoria; a fantastic, rapidly changing series of things actually seen or imagined. Bizarre images: a series or group of strange or bizarre images seen as if in a dream. Ever changing scene – a scene or view that encompasses many things and changes constantly.
[68] Elegiac – mournful, sad, melancholic, plaintive, nostalgic, lamenting
[69] Paean – expression of joy or praise: a written, spoken, or musical expression of enthusiastic praise or rapturous joy. A writing, song, etc. expressing praise, a piece of writing, a song, etc. that expresses enthusiasm and admiration.
