Organizer: The Center for Southeast Asian Studies at University of Michigan

Description:

After wars of counterinsurgency are waged on the colonial front, they march into the colonized self. Few places exemplify this more than the Philippines, the United States’ first overseas colony, a plentiful source of American migrant labor, and the site of one of America’s most brutal but unacknowledged 20th-century genocidal campaigns. Direct American occupation had supposedly come to an end under the aegis of Filipinization: the systematic appropriation of native leadership into American colonial occupation and counterinsurgency. De Leon argues, Filipinization also informed the everyday conduct and political imaginations of those outside of structures of power, namely, migrant workers across the Pacific. In this talk, de Leon suggests that American counterinsurgency did not end after direct colonial rule, but informed how people across the Pacific imagined how the future citizens of a soon-to-be independent Philippine nation might behave. This provisional subject—what he calls the Filipino subjunctive—emerges from these transnational imaginaries, in and out of the purview of elite projects of state-formation. Through the creative labors of everyday life, these thinkers asked: What would it look like to be Filipino, subjects of a nation yet-to-come? And who would pay the price for such a national community to come into existence?

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