This essay situates the recent rise of literature about Filipino call-center agents within the social, economic, and political shifts that are a result of the Philippine economy's waning reliance on ...Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) to support domestic social reproduction. While the Filipino business process outsourcing (BPO) industry positions itself as a domestic solution to the supposed diasporic fragmentation of home, family, and nation engendered by the Philippines' long dependence on its overseas workers, call-center fiction reveals how the disorienting temporal, affective, and spatial realities of call-center labor merely reconfigure and shift the terms of the Philippines' continued transnational subordination to global capitalist imperatives. Interrogating these domestic shifts, twenty-first-century Philippine call-center fiction reproduces a unique mode of peripheral realism made uncanny by the late-twentieth-century global dispersal of OFWs and the attendant crises of representation in both national identity and literary form that stem from this unparalleled labor exodus. Typified by experimental interruptions in both content and form, Philippine call-center fiction's uncanny reproduction of peripheral realism registers a self-reflexive awareness not only of the BPO industry's domestic-national contradictions but also of the Philippines' extraordinarily outsized and increasingly disorienting role in reproducing global capitalist modernity.
The idea of postcolonialism as signifying a break from the past, as the sign of the new, as a critical reappraisal in the context of imperialism and the rise of capital, and as a register of social ...and political assertiveness took shape as major geo-political changes were underway (the Iranian Revolution, the gradual decline of the Soviet Union, and so on). However, by 2006 when the word finally entered the OED, the citation and the definition embedded in it captured an important shift: “postcolonialism” as a proactive cultural logic aimed at the creation of an intentional object. The critical survey undertaken here suggests that the discourse of postcolonialism is now an intentional discourse with specific affects. These affects, as seen in the Anglophone bibliography on the subject of these past five years, may now be examined with reference to subjects and themes as varied as melancholia, shame, the horrors of poststructuralism, creolization, the vernacular, the cosmopolitan turn, the postcolonial “jew”, the subaltern challenge, global warming, world-literary systems, traumatized bodies, among others.
