This book examines how a variety of immaterial labor performed by Filipinos in the Philippines and around the world generate and explore vital affects, multiple networks, and other worlds. These forms of living capture life-making capacities within the capitalist world of disruptions and circulations of bodies and time.
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
Works Cited | 147
This book examines how a variety of immaterial labor performed by Filipinos in the Philippines and around the world generate and explore vital affects, multiple networks, and other worlds. These forms of living capture life-making capacities within the capitalist world of disruptions and circulations of bodies and time.
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.
Allan Punzalan Isaac is a professor of American studies and English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is the author of American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America, which received the Association for Asian American Studies Cultural Studies Book Award, and Filipino Time: Affective Worlds and Contracted Labor. He has taught at LaSalle University in Manila as a Senior Fulbright Scholar.
