Filipino Studies

Palimpsests of Nation and Diaspora

Martin F. Manalansan, Augusto Espiritu

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781479838516
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria asiática

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 Studies is 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 Studies makes bold declarations about the productive frameworks that open up new archives and innovative landscapes of knowledge for Filipino and Filipino American Studies.

PART I

Where from? Where to? Filipino Studies

Fields and Agendas

1

Challenges for Cultural Studies under the Rule of Global War

NEFERTI TADIAR

Although it would appear that the times we live in, following the launching of the “war on terror” by the United States in October 2001, with the bombing of Afghanistan—that these current times are no different from the previous twelve to fifteen years under the undisputed global reign of the United States (whether you date it from the fall of the Berlin wall or the first Gulf War), we are, I believe, living in a changed and changing historical situation whose import for our shared futures we have yet to fully grasp.¹ I do not intend today to speculate on the future implications of the current global situation. After all, we have yet to adequately account for the specific features comprising this current situation, in which, I would argue, the economic globalization of capital is being reharnessed to the ends of political-military domination by means of war. My purpose rather is to think about the present implications of this situation for cultural studies.

Many parallelisms with past, well-known historical situations have been and continue to be made by both those who are critical of the global-US “war on terror” and those who openly advocate the rule of empire: early twentieth-century US colonization of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Hawaii, Samoa, and Guam; British conquest of Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq) and the division of the former Ottoman Empire between Britain and France; the First World War among the imperialist nations; the Second World War and the ascendance of US world hegemony and the onset of the Cold War; as well as the long, ignominious, and bloody track record of US foreign interventions in the last hundred years. These past wars are often invoked as the historical precedents of, if not the legitimate models for, the blatant political-military actions currently undertaken by the United States and its network of complicit states, including the Philippines, and thus also as guides for possible scenarios in the near future.

In the 1967 preface to Imperialism, Part Two of her three-volume work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt comments on the resemblance between contemporary events then—particularly the US war against Vietnam—and the events of imperialism during the period preceding the outbreak of World War I, about which she writes. As she concludes, however:

To stress the unhappy relevance of this half-forgotten period for contemporary events does not mean, of course, either that the die is cast and we are entering a new period of imperialist policies or that imperialism under all circumstances must end in the disasters of totalitarianism. No matter how much we may be capable of learning from the past, it will not enable us to know the future.²

The past will not enable us to know the future inasmuch as the future is the result not of an abstract logic, whose tendencies might be discerned across historical times, but rather of peoples’ liberatory social struggles and the efforts on the part of ruling elites to contain and defeat them.

Indeed, what ensued after 1967, when Arendt wrote this preface, was not totalitarianism, but instead tremendous social unrest and revolution, much of which was cut short and undermined by the installation of reactionary regimes the world over. We have only to look at our own historical experience here in the Philippines, with the social upheaval and nascent revolutionary movement during the late 1960s followed by the declaration of Martial Law by the authoritarian Marcos regime, to ascertain this fact. The liberatory struggle of the Vietnamese people was itself a material testimony to the powerful force of the Third World that challenged US world domination, and the anti-Vietnam War movement in the United States, with which the broad Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s was importantly aligned, only served to strengthen this challenge and the sense of international solidarity that grew around it. Decolonizing nationalist movements worldwide, marked by the triumph of Vietnam against the United States and the victory of the Nicaraguan revolution against the US-backed Somoza regime, were met with fierce and relentless counterinsurgency campaigns, funded and equipped by the US military-industrial complex. These counterinsurgency campaigns were coupled with an equally fierce and relentless program of financial capitalist expansion to stave off the world economic crisis of the early 1970s, produced precisely as a consequence of the struggles of labor worldwide and the challenge of Third World nation-states to First World hegemony.³ And neoliberalist restructuring processes during the last two decades, which have often been referred to as globalization, comprised an effort to capitalize upon this long cultural revolution of minoritized populations in the Third and First Worlds alike.

In some ways, then, the global-US “war on terror” now being waged on diverse fronts can be understood as a retaliatory measure on the part of a right-wing faction of the global elite bent on rebuilding its hegemony in the face both of rival powers (notably the European Union and the tiger economies of the Asia-Pacific, including China) and of the gains of people’s struggles against global corporate and state powers (institutionally expressed for example in the Kyoto Protocols, the World Conference on Racism, the International Criminal Court, and so on). The formation of the new “security” state in the United States, with repressive policies such as the Patriot Act and the Domestic Security Enhancement Act (or Patriot Act II), points to the visible tendencies of fascism that are in evidence there, domestically, as well as in “coalitional” states, such as the Philippine state, which currently embrace the “war on terror” as an alibi for continued and new forms of political repression and cronyist war profiteering. The execution of human rights activists in Mindoro several months ago, the mounting cases of harassment and “disappearances” of individuals linked to radical political organizations, and the egregious military abuses and atrocities in Southern Mindanao since the Philippine government joined forces with the United States only show the ambition and retaliatory political and military opportunism driving the Philippines’ part in this global crusade. In the meantime, while offspring and beneficiaries of the previous fascist regime propose refurbished antisubversion decrees (in the guise of antiterrorism measures), economic opportunism goes hand in hand with rising authoritarianism. Besides the US$356 million security-related assistance granted by the United States to the Philippine government, plenty of opportunities for economic gain are to be had with the proliferation of sites of state “war.” The recent quarrel on the front pages of Philippine news over departmental jurisdiction in the antidrug campaign, expressed by some journalists as a “turf war” taking over the “drug war,” reveals the underlying motivation of the ostensibly moral campaign, which is precisely cronyist war profiteering. Today the close links between the military police and the underworld of drug trafficking, illegal gambling, and the kidnapping business have all but been formalized into state rule, creating an ascendant cronyist class power ready to take charge of the national war economy.

Like the fascism of Germany and Italy in the earlier period, these trends toward fascism arise precisely out of a context of intensified imperialist competition and crisis, particularly for the United States, which has found itself increasingly marginalized by other national and regional economies and yet continues to be the greatest military superpower on earth. If the new period of imperialism that Arendt saw looming in 1967 did not immediately end in the disasters of totalitarianism, at least on the scale that they did in the middle of the century, perhaps now we are witnessing the beginnings of that conclusive end to US empire, that is, global fascism.

Some progressive scholars in the United States are in fact calling for a new analysis and at least recognition of the emergent conditions of fascism that confront not only the people in the United States, but also all the peoples in the paths of the global-US “war on terror.” The question of “culture” in this context is, as it was under European fascism in the midtwentieth century, once again paramount for politics. It is, I believe, an important challenge for cultural studies to provide an account of the role that culture plays in this present situation, which can be characterized by the ascendancy of the rule of war. The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war against crime, the war against poverty—these are all instantiations of the rule of war. War has become a bureaucratic matter, with the military turned into police (which we have seen before, under Martial Law) and constitutionality and law overturned for a government run by decree. Witness the Macapagal-Arroyo government’s willingness to sign on to decrees issued by the United States, such as the latter’s decree of refusal to participate in the International Criminal Court, which could very well try the United States as a war criminal for its preemptive war against Iraq. Despite the fact that the Philippines was among the signatories to the 1998 Rome Statue creating the ICC, the Macapagal-Arroyo government has signed on to what amounts to a unilateral decree of immunity from international criminal prosecution for the US and Philippine states.⁴ The rule of war is not only the rule of might, but also the rule of absolute and arbitrary power as the normal and legitimate state of affairs.

While now, perhaps more than ever, the exercise of naked power seems to reign over and above all ideological window-dressing (in contrast to the Marcos era, when the state invested heavily in cultural propaganda), “culture” as a realm of social action is no less crucial to power. But I think it is a challenge for cultural studies to figure out the ways that “culture” is crucial, that is, how cultural practices serve to maintain this power based on the rule of war and, furthermore, how cultural practices are reproducing and changing contemporary social relations of production or, more specifically, the social conditions of the exploited and the marginalized. In other words, it is a challenge for cultural studies today to interpret, articulate, and participate in the social struggles taking place in and through cultural practice.

This injunction is, of course, not new. In the Philippines we have heard it before in the words of Recto, Constantino, and Sison. And we have seen this injunction heeded in the vast amount of partisan cultural work carried out by writers, artists, and filmmakers since the political ferment of the 1960s. Feminists have been particularly attentive to the crucial importance of culture to social struggle. For feminists, such as Sr. Mary John Mananzan and Lilia Quindoza Santiago, culture refers to concrete, everyday habits historically embedded in women’s relations to others as well as to themselves, relations that are fundamental to present and past orders of social oppression. This Philippine tradition of anti-imperialist, nationalist, and feminist cultural critique has long emphasized the role of culture in securing and enabling prevailing forms of domination. What is new or changed today are the specific conditions under which cultural practice is converted into socioeconomic infrastructure supporting the rule of war. For example, the ways in which narco-culture supports the mutually dependent “war on drugs” and narco-trafficking; the ways in which global media culture supports the forced export of Western-style bourgeois democracy via preemptive war, with the war on Iraq setting the precedent; and the ways in which the entrepreneurial ethic governs virtually all major efforts to revitalize or strengthen Philippine “culture” at the expense of sustaineable relations of community and solidarity. Beyond merely securing the consent for the rule of war, these cultural practices comprise the “software” for social relations on which the rule of war, in both its political and economic aspects, depends.

Those of us engaged in cultural studies are thus confronted with a pressing question. What cultural practices enable the transformation in global social relations wrought, on the one hand, by the emergence of a global network of quasi-militarist states in tributary relations to the US super security state and, on the other hand, by the emergence of a global counterpublic or constituency, which found representation in the unprecedented worldwide protests against the US-UK-led war on Iraq? I am suggesting that these recent political developments—the rise of both global, imperial fascism and popular transnational opposition to it—depend on cultural shifts that have occurred as the combined result of the long, world cultural revolution since the late 1960s and of the political and economic counterrevolution staged by state, corporate, and financial powers, which sought to co-opt and capitalize upon the gains of the former (culminating in “globalization”). On this view, cultural histories of the last three and a half decades or more would be a vital component of any politicized account of the conditions that have led to, as well as that might lead beyond, the current world crisis.

While the global network of complicit states attempts to refurbish an older territorial world-system and its geopolitical categories by reconfiguring old territorial boundaries and drawing new ones (for example, the new boundaries along the so-called axis of evil, from North Korea to Iraq, or from East to West Asia, and along the line from Central Asia to Eastern Europe), the global counterconstituency or, if you will, “transnational-popular” depends on transformed and largely deterritorialized conditions of social and political identification.⁵ Witness one message on activist t-shirts: We are all Palestinians now. It is, of course, true that these deterritorialized conditions of social and political identification run both ways, politically speaking, so that a transnational imagined c...