Filipino Time examines how a variety of immaterial labor performed by Filipinos in the Philippines and around the world, while producing bodily and affective disciplines and dislocations, also generate and explore vital affects, multiple networks, and other worlds. Whether in representations of death in a musical or keeping work time at bay in a call center, these forms of living emerge from and even work alongside capitalist exploitation of affective labor. Affective labor involves human intersubjective interaction and creative capacities. Thus, through creative labor, subjects make communal ... More

Filipino Time examines how a variety of immaterial labor performed by Filipinos in the Philippines and around the world, while producing bodily and affective disciplines and dislocations, also generate and explore vital affects, multiple networks, and other worlds. Whether in representations of death in a musical or keeping work time at bay in a call center, these forms of living emerge from and even work alongside capitalist exploitation of affective labor. Affective labor involves human intersubjective interaction and creative capacities. Thus, through creative labor, subjects make communal worlds out of one colonized by capital time. In reading these cultural productions, the book traces concurrent chronicities, ways of sensing and making sense of time alongside capital’s dominant narrative. From the hostile but habitable textures of labor-time, migratory subjects live and weave narratives of place and belonging, produce new modes of connections and ways to feel time with others.The book explores how these chronicities are re-articulated in a capacious archive of storytelling about the Filipino labor diaspora in fiction, in a musical, in an ethnography, and in a documentary film. Each of the genres demonstrates how time and space are manifest in deformations by narrative and genre. These cultural expressions capture life-making capacities within the capitalist world of disruptions and circulations of bodies and time. Thus, they index how selves go out of bounds beyond the economic contract to transform, even momentarily, self, others, time, and their surroundings.