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.
Introduction: Accumulating Time 1 1 "I've Never Been to Me": Redirecting Arrivals and Returns 22 2 "Holding Out for Something Better": Timing and Other In-Between Times 43 3 "I Understand Where You're Coming From": Temporal Migration and Offshore Chronographies 67 4 "We Have No Time to Wallow": Death and Other Timely Diversions 91 Coda: Presence and Mourning to the Future 115 Acknowledgments 127 Notes 131 WorksCited 147
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.