Unfamiliar Waters: Representations of Resource Extraction in the Philippines, 1970s to Present

Unfamiliar Waters, a media and cultural studies dissertation about water, fishing, and extractive capitalism in the Philippines and the Pacific, asserts that modern extractive projects in the Philippines have altered water’s composition in material and cultural contexts. By examining representations of water in contemporary Anglophone Filipino poetry, national cinema, archives, and online media, this project argues that late 20th and 21st century extractive water projects increasingly focus on managing renewable resources and regulating the movement of animate beings (such as human bodies and fish), to the detriment of local communities and surrounding aquatic life. In three chapters—Saltwater, Freshwater, and Storms—the dissertation addresses how water sites changed through new forms of extractive industrialization (such as the mobilization of transpacific care work during the Marcos regime, the nationalization of aquaculture in freshwater spaces, and post-typhoon disaster capitalism), which are reflected in written and visual literature. Saltwater analyzes the racialized and gendered valences of oceans that appear in diasporic Filipino poetry and theorizes saltwater poetics as an aesthetic which interrupts how humans and fish are treated as Pacific resources. Freshwater tracks the Philippine state's turn to aquaculture over lakes and ponds in the 1970s, centering how cultural producers and fishers voiced their opposition through visual art and film. Finally, Storms discusses how government responses to typhoons accelerate trajectories of difference-making. This chapter analyzes videos and news coverage of Typhoon Haiyan and Ninotchka Rosca's 1988 novel State of War and Lav Diaz' 2014 documentary Anak ng mga Unos, Unang Aklat (Storm Children Book 1).The dissertation makes significant contributions to Critical Filipino Studies, environmental humanities, and animal studies by exposing the logics of race and gender that are used to keep extraction ongoing in South East Asia. The dissertation identifies tropes of flow and birds-eye views as aesthetic forms arising from resource extraction, but also locates an oppositional aesthetics against extractive capital through interspecies fish perspectives and poetics of disruption. In so doing, artists and cultural producers in this study alter water's cultural and material makeup as well.