Postcolonial Configurations: Dictatorship, the Racial Cold War, and Filipino America

What do the Marcos dictatorship, the Cold War, and Filipino American subjectivity have in common? In Postcolonial Configurations, Josen Masangkay Diaz argues that these historical phenomena are all rooted in a postcolonial liberal order that remains deeply racialized, extractive, and complicit with authoritarianism. How we remember and recount them, she suggests, implicates us in the ongoing making and unmaking of US geopolitical domination in the transpacific. Bridging these scales of analysis—the geopolitical and the subjective—is a heavy lift both theoretically and empirically. Yet, with precise language, incisive theory, and an impressive range of sources, Diaz succeeds in developing a novel approach to transpacific history.Postcolonial Configurations begins with the memorialization of the bayani (heroes or martyrs) who lost their lives resisting the Marcos regime. Of particular concern are two Filipino American labor activists, Silme Domingo and Gene Viernes, whose 1982 assassination in Seattle involved a conspiracy among US labor leaders, Marcos's infamous cronies, and the regime itself. In the Philippines, Domingo and Viernes were the only Filipino Americans honored on the Bantayog ng mga Bayani (Wall of the Martyrs). In the United States, meanwhile, their lives and deaths have largely been remembered as a turning point in the emergence of a distinctive Filipino American movement for recognition. Even though both of these narratives recognize the transnational nature of Filipino American activism, they obscure a deeper “condition” connecting these contexts and events: that of “living under both Philippine authoritarianism and US liberalism” (6). This condition, Diaz argues, comes into view when we reconceptualize it as a “postcolonial configuration” within the “racial cold war.”Let's deal first with the racial cold war. Rather than a historical period, this is an analytic for grasping the coevolution of racial liberalism in the United States, a global Cold War, and dictatorship in the Philippines (and elsewhere). In Diaz's words, the racial cold war describes “a multistate governmentality in which authoritarianism and its paradigms of order, sovereignty, development, and modernization align with republicanism and its operations for progressivism, reform, and militarism to resolve and organize the colonial problem of raciality, where raciality also operates through gender and sexuality” (22). In other words, Diaz wants us to see the racial cold war as a wider, more pervasive struggle to (un)make racialized postcolonial subjectivities and (re)order the management of life.Which brings us to configuration. This is Diaz's term for the interlocking forms of difference that coalesced amid the racial cold war. Her approach has analytical purchase anywhere such geopolitical forces collide, but here she homes in on the distinctively postcolonial configuration that emerged across the transpacific in the second half of the twenty-first century. As Filipinos in the archipelago endured a US-backed anti-communist dictatorship, Filipino America was configured as part of a racial minority population within the US nation-state. “A subjectivity that claims ownership over [racial] difference to access promises of recognition” (23)—this is where Diaz bridges the geopolitical scale of analysis to the subjective. Subjectivity, Diaz writes, is “the critical avenue for identifying and comprehending” the synergetic relationship between authoritarianism, liberalism, and (post)colonial raciality (8). This sharp focus on subjectivity distinguishes configuration from other influential attempts to theorize transimperial geopolitics—namely, assemblage, alignment, and entanglement.1Above all, Postcolonial Configurations aims to “unmake” Filipino America as an uncomplicated, “whole” subjectivity yoked to the racial logics of the United States. “I propose,” Diaz writes, “that we risk losing Filipino America as an object of recognition or recuperation, or as the center of intellectual work, in order to catalyze other points of political possibility” (9). In search of such possibilities, Diaz reexamines salient efforts by the Marcos regime to configure a Filipino national subjectivity in service both to its interests and to those of the United States. These efforts come (back) to life across four distinct but cohesive chapters, as Diaz meticulously takes them apart in dialogue with critical perspectives from fiction, activism, and scholarship.Chapter 1, for example, skillfully links the history of Johnson's Great Society to that of Marcos's New Society, unma(s)king their entangled efforts to configure a modern “national culture” around the demands of the capitalist bloc. Diaz revisits some of the First Couples’ most infamous spectacles—Barrio Fiesta, the Tadhana series, the Cultural Center of the Philippines—for new insight into the counterrevolutionary nationalism that the regime sought to inculcate. This culminates in a lucid reading of Eric Gamalinda's 1992 novel Empire of Memory, which “[destabilizes] the historical archive of fabricated facts and figures” to reveal “memory as anti-history” (57). Memory, Diaz suggests, breaks open the national enclosures with which collusive regimes have divided Philippine historical consciousness.The book's three remaining chapters build on this theme, each tracing how critical memory work undoes the Marcoses’ attempts at cultural engineering. We learn, in chapter 2, how the regime pitted the figure of the patriotic balikbayan (return migrant) against that of the parasitic urban “squatter” in its designs for a flagship airline, a world-class airport, tourist attractions, and other infrastructure. Diaz contrasts lofty elocutions from the state-run Balikbayan Magazine with blunt testimony from impoverished residents, showing how the latter questioned the capital-oriented “formations of personhood and well-being” that were deployed to criminalize and dispossess them (81).In chapter 3, Diaz takes on the First Lady's New Filipina campaign by reinterpreting Lino Brocka's classic 1976 film Insiang alongside contemporaneous women-led resistance to authoritarianism. Chapter 4 turns to the Philippine Refugee Processing Center, which the president established to house people displaced by the US war in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Against Marcos's efforts to position himself as the epitome of the Filipino humanitarian, Diaz reads a moving epistolary essay by Center instructor Ruby Ibañez, who wrote in the name of a Cambodian boy struggling to express himself in English. Like the first two, chapters 3 and 4 weave threads from political history, ethnic studies, and cultural theory into a new understanding of how normative Filipino/American subjectivities were propagated and contested.A useful complement to recent work by Simeon Man and Moon-Ho Jung, Postcolonial Configurations joins a lively interdisciplinary conversation on the transpacific politics of race, gender, and empire in the twentieth century. While large parts of the book may prove inaccessible to nonspecialist readers, those with prerequisite training will find it well worth the effort. By revealing how the racial cold war configured conventional narratives of Filipino and Filipino American history, Diaz models a transpacific Philippine history that can help unmake those stifling old configurations and create space for empowering new ones.