UCLA

This dissertation explores the circulation of emotion and affect in contemporary Asian American and Pacific Rim transnational literature and film. It reveals how the nation-state appropriates emotive regimes as a way to exert power upon laboring bodies engaged in feminized forms of labor and locates possibilities for resistance against the legacy of colonization and capitalist through multiple upheavals led by "the people." These people's movements are made possible by the circulation of affect--what I call the affect of imminence--that is marked by the sensation of impending possibility and is disseminated through informal networks that stand in outside capitalist trajectories.

This project achieves two objectives. First, it shows how regimes of feeling, especially suffering, become the apparatus through which bodies are made docile as a way to commodify transmigrant laborers, exemplified by the Filipina overseas contract worker (OCW). Building on theorizations of biopolitics from Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, I examine the construction of the suffering Filipina OCW as a disciplined body whose labor feeds the nation-state's desire to participate in the global economy. The second objective is to disclose points of resistance against the exploitive institutions seeking to discipline the laboring body. By considering the Spinozist -Deleuzian model of the body as one marked by its ability to renew and be affected by other bodies alongside Frantz Fanon's figuration of the revolutionary body in constant flux, this project reveals possibilities for resistance by similarly affected bodies within the liminal spaces of the global city.