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From spectacular deaths in a drag musical to competing futures in a call center, Filipino Time examines how contracted service labor performed by Filipinos in the Philippines, Europe, the Middle East, and the United States generates vital affects, multiple networks, and other lifeworlds as much as it disrupts and dislocates human relations. Affective labor and time are re-articulated in a capacious archive of storytelling about the Filipino labor diaspora in fiction, musical performance, ethnography, and documentary film. Exploring these cultural practices, Filipino Time traces other ways of sensing, making sense of, and feeling time with others, by weaving narratives of place and belonging out of the hostile but habitable textures of labortime. Migrant subjects harness time and the imagination in their creative, life making capacities to make communal worlds out of one steeped in the temporalities and logics of capital.
Filipino Time is at once immensely prescient and supremely timely. With deeply erudite insight and fierce eloquence, Allan Isaac brings to light the intimate and irresolvable entanglement of time and vitality. This book trenchantly reminds us that the seemingly very contemporary experience of distance, isolation, and separation associated with the globalized present, as well as the exigencies and modalities for offering care across distance, are longstanding conditions for diasporic -- specifically Filipina and Filipino -- subjects. This book provides luminous understanding of Philippine labor migrations and migrants as it crucially helps us historicize the present.—Kandice Chuh, author of The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “after Man”
Allan Punzalan Isaac is Professor of American Studies and English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ. His book American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America (Minnesota, 2006) is the recipient of the Association for Asian American Studies Cultural Studies Book Award.
