UC San Diego

This dissertation traces the formation of Filipino subjectivity - the technology through which the Filipino and its labor could be better utilized by and incorporated within the global capitalist economy - as a mutual project of U.S. imperialism and Philippine authoritarianism in the late 1960s throughout the late 1980s. It explores the reconstitution of the Philippine political and economic structure under the administration of Ferdinand Marcos through and against the structural adjustment policies led by first world nations like the United States after World War II and throughout the cold war period. It argues that the U.S.-Philippine investment in a framework of rights and representation through civic reforms was integral to reinventing Filipino subjectivity along the contours of a universal humanity that would make it more easily integrated within and accessible to the global market. Disentangling Filipino America as a mode of representational belonging, this dissertation theorizes Filipino America as an epistemological paradigm that historicizes and interrogates the Filipino itself as a discourse and as the nexus of legacies of U.S. colonialism, imperialism, militarization, authoritarian state nationalism, and cold war geopolitical alliances. Through an exploration of cultural texts by Lino Brocka, Nick Joaquin, and Kim Komenich that ruminate upon and contest the solidity of Filipino social formations under modernity, this dissertation also charts alternative historiographies of the Philippines