How do parents and children care for each other when they are separated because of migration? The way in which transnational families maintain long-distance relationships has been revolutionised by ...the emergence of new media such as email, instant messaging, social networking sites, webcam and texting. A migrant mother can now call and text her left-behind children several times a day, peruse social networking sites and leave the webcam for 12 hours achieving a sense of co-presence.
Drawing on a long-term ethnographic study of prolonged separation between migrant mothers and their children who remain in the Philippines, this book develops groundbreaking theory for understanding both new media and the nature of mediated relationships. It brings together the perspectives of both the mothers and children and shows how the very nature of family relationships is changing. New media, understood as an emerging environment of polymedia, have become integral to the way family relationships are enacted and experienced. The theory of polymedia extends beyond the poignant case study and is developed as a major contribution for understanding the interconnections between digital media and interpersonal relationships.
"A compelling read about the ‘connected transnational family’ … The most compelling aspect of this book, this reader would argue, is its simultaneous engagement with a broad range of entangled issues. It convincingly puts mothers/children, migration/communication, mediation/relationship, past/present/future as well as theory/research practice into close encounter throughout." - Nicole Shephard, LSE Review of Books
"Mirca Madianou and Daniel Miller seem to have formed a dream team when they embarked on their mutual research project on transnational families and the role of ICTs ... In my view, the book succeeds in what many authors fruitlessly pursue: deriving convincing theory from an abundance of vast qualitative data. It is a highly engaging book that is rich in detail without drowning the reader in it. Its empirical and theoretical innovations make it a highly recommended book for any scholar working on media and migration, long-distance communication and the increasingly complex media environments that enfold us." - Kevin Smets, Communications
"An exemplary and groundbreaking study, with contributions to theory and our understanding of polymedia in everyday life, this stands out as an extraordinary read on the technology of relationships." - Zizi Papacharissi, University of Illinois-Chicago, USA
"This fascinating, richly detailed book investigates the role that fluency across multiple digital platforms plays in enabling mothering and caring to be sustained at a distance. A genuine breakthrough." - Nick Couldry , Goldmiths, University of London, UK
"With deft weaving of interview material and theorization...Mirca Madianou and Daniel Miller have produced an important and useful theoretical intervention that advances our understanding of the social life of transnational communities." - Radha S. Hegde, Media, Culture, & Society
Mirca Madianou is Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Leicester, UK. She is the author of Mediating the Nation and several articles on the social consequences of the media.
Daniel Miller is Professor of Material Culture at the Department of Anthropology, University College London, UK. His most recent books include Tales from Facebook and Digital Anthropology (edited with Heather Horst).
1. Introduction 2. Philippines at the Forefront of Globalisation 3. The Hidden Motivations of Migration 4. Crafting Love: Letters and Cassettes 5. The Cultural Contradictions of Transnational Motherhood: The Mothers’ Perspective 6. The Children’s Perspective 7. Technologies of Relationships 8. Polymedia 9. A Theory of Mediated Relationships 10. Appendix: A Note on Method
The Philippine Revolution of 1896-1905, which began against Spain and continued against the United States, took place in the context of imperial subjugation and local resistance across Southeast ...Asia. Yet scholarship on the revolution and the turn of the twentieth century in Asia more broadly has largely approached this pivotal moment in terms of relations with the West, at the expense of understanding the East-East and Global South connections that knit together the region's experience. Asian Place, Filipino Nation reconnects the Philippine Revolution to the histories of Southeast and East Asia through an innovative consideration of its transnational political setting and regional intellectual foundations. Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz charts turn-of-the-twentieth-century Filipino thinkers' and revolutionaries' Asianist political organizing and proto-national thought, scrutinizing how their constructions of the place of Asia connected them to their regional neighbors. She details their material and affective engagement with Pan-Asianism, tracing how colonized peoples in the "periphery" of this imagined Asia-focusing on Filipinos, but with comparison to the Vietnamese-reformulated a political and intellectual project that envisioned anticolonial Asian solidarity with the Asian "center" of Japan. CuUnjieng Aboitiz argues that the revolutionary First Philippine Republic's harnessing of transnational networks of support, activism, and association represents the crucial first instance of Pan-Asianists lending material aid toward anticolonial revolution against a Western power. Uncovering the Pan-Asianism of the periphery and its critical role in shaping modern Asia, Asian Place, Filipino Nation offers a vital new perspective on the Philippine Revolution's global context and content.
Communal Intimacy and the Violence of Politics explores the notoriously brutal Philippine war on drugs from below. Steffen Bo Jensen and Karl Hapal examine how the war on drugs folded itself into ...communal and intimate spheres in one Manila neighborhood, Bagong Silang. Police killings have been regular occurrences since the birth of Bagong Silang. Communal Intimacy and the Violence of Politics shows that although the drug war was introduced from the outside, it fit into and perpetuated already existing gendered and generational structures. In Bagong Silang, the war on drugs implicated local structures of authority, including a justice system that had always been deeply integrated into communal relations. The ways in which the war on drugs transformed these intimate relations between the state and its citizens, and between neighbors, may turn out to be the most lasting impact of Duterte's infamously violent policies.
At the dawn of the twentieth century, the U.S. Army swiftly occupied Manila and then plunged into a decade-long pacification campaign with striking parallels to today’s war in Iraq. Armed with ...cutting-edge technology from America’s first information revolution, the U.S. colonial regime created the most modern police and intelligence units anywhere under the American flag. In Policing America’s Empire Alfred W. McCoy shows how this imperial panopticon slowly crushed the Filipino revolutionary movement with a lethal mix of firepower, surveillance, and incriminating information. Even after Washington freed its colony and won global power in 1945, it would intervene in the Philippines periodically for the next half-century—using the country as a laboratory for counterinsurgency and rearming local security forces for repression. In trying to create a democracy in the Philippines, the United States unleashed profoundly undemocratic forces that persist to the present day.     But security techniques bred in the tropical hothouse of colonial rule were not contained, McCoy shows, at this remote periphery of American power. Migrating homeward through both personnel and policies, these innovations helped shape a new federal security apparatus during World War I. Once established under the pressures of wartime mobilization, this distinctively American system of public-private surveillance persisted in various forms for the next fifty years, as an omnipresent, sub rosa matrix that honeycombed U.S. society with active informers, secretive civilian organizations, and government counterintelligence agencies. In each succeeding global crisis, this covert nexus expanded its domestic operations, producing new contraventions of civil liberties—from the harassment of labor activists and ethnic communities during World War I, to the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, all the way to the secret blacklisting of suspected communists during the Cold War. “With a breathtaking sweep of archival research, McCoy shows how repressive techniques developed in the colonial Philippines migrated back to the United States for use against people of color, aliens, and really any heterodox challenge to American power. This book proves Mark Twain’s adage that you cannot have an empire abroad and a republic at home.”—Bruce Cumings, University of Chicago  “This book lays the Philippine body politic on the examination table to reveal the disease that lies within—crime, clandestine policing, and political scandal. But McCoy also draws the line from Manila to Baghdad, arguing that the seeds of controversial counterinsurgency tactics used in Iraq were sown in the anti-guerrilla operations in the Philippines. His arguments are forceful.”—Sheila S. Coronel, Columbia University   Winner, George McT. Kahin Prize of the Southeast Asian Council of the Association for Asian Studies
In 1904, renowned architect Daniel Burnham, the Progressive Era urban planner who famously "Made No Little Plans, " set off for the Philippines, the new US colonial acquisition. Charged with ...designing environments for the occupation government, Burnham set out to convey the ambitions and the dominance of the regime, drawing on neo-classical formalism for the Pacific colony. The spaces he created, most notably in the summer capital of Baguio, gave physical form to American rule and its contradictions.In American Imperial Pastoral, Rebecca Tinio McKenna examines the design, construction, and use of Baguio, making visible the physical shape, labor, and sustaining practices of the US's new empire—especially the dispossessions that underwrote market expansion. In the process, she demonstrates how colonialists conducted market-making through state-building and vice-versa. Where much has been made of the racial dynamics of US colonialism in the region, McKenna emphasizes capitalist practices and design ideals—giving us a fresh and nuanced understanding of the American occupation of the Philippines.
Puro Arte Burns, Lucy Mae San Pablo
12/2012, Volume:
9
eBook
Winner of the 2012 Outstanding Book Award in Cultural Studies, Association for Asian American Studies
Puro Arte explores the emergence of Filipino American theater and performance from the early 20th ...century to the present. It stresses the Filipino performing body's location as it conjoins colonial histories of the Philippines with U.S. race relations and discourses of globalization.
Puro arte, translated from Spanish into English, simply means "pure art." In Filipino, puro arte however performs a much more ironic function, gesturing rather to the labor of over-acting, histrionics, playfulness, and purely over-the-top dramatics. In this book, puro arte functions as an episteme, a way of approaching the Filipino/a performing body at key moments in U.S.-Philippine imperial relations, from the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, early American plays about the Philippines, Filipino patrons in U.S. taxi dance halls to the phenomenon of Filipino/a actors inMiss Saigon. Using this varied archive, Puro Arte turns to performance as an object of study and as a way of understanding complex historical processes of racialization in relation to empire and colonialism.
Robyn Magalit Rodriguez investigates how and why the Philippine government transformed itself into what she calls a labor brokerage state, which actively prepares, mobilizes, and regulates its ...citizens for migrant work abroad. Drawing on ethnographic research of the Philippine government’s migration bureaucracy, interviews, and archival work, Rodriguez presents a new analysis of neoliberal globalization and its consequences for nation-state formation.
Filipino Studies Manalansan, Martin F; Espiritu, Augusto
05/2016
eBook
After years of occupying a vexed position in the American academy, Philippine studies has come into its own, emerging as a trenchant and dynamic space of inquiry.Filipino Studiesis a field-defining ...collection of vibrant voices, critical perspectives, and provocative ideas about the cultural, political, and economic state of the Philippines and its diaspora. Traversing issues of colonialism, neoliberalism, globalization, and nationalism, this volume examines not only the past and present position of the Philippines and its people, but also advances new frameworks for re-conceptualizing this growing field.
Written by a prestigious lineup of international scholars grappling with the legacies of colonialism and imperial power, the essays examine both the genealogy of the Philippines' hyphenated identity as well as the future trajectory of the field. Hailing from multiple disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, the contributors revisit and contest traditional renditions of Philippine colonial histories, from racial formations and the Japanese occupation to the Cold War and "independence" from the United States. Whether addressing the contested memories of World War II, the "voyage" of Filipino men and women into the U.S. metropole, or migrant labor and the notion of home, the assembled essays tease out the links between the past and present, with a hopeful longing for various futures.Filipino Studiesmakes bold declarations about the productive frameworks that open up new archives and innovative landscapes of knowledge for Filipino and Filipino American Studies.
Taking a micro-historical approach to the study of ethnic identities in the Philippines, this book offers a fascinating portrait of how Chinese merchant families in Manila negotiated the meanings of ..."Chinese," "Chinese mestizo," "Catholic," and "Filipino" from 1860s to 1930s.
In a developing nation like the Philippines, many mothers provide for their families by traveling to a foreign country to care for someone else’s. Families Apart focuses on Filipino overseas workers ...in Canada to reveal what such arrangements mean for families, documenting the difficulties of family separation and the problems that children have when reuniting with their mothers in Vancouver.
