Book Talk with Allan Isaac (Rutgers University)

Tuesday, November 8, 2022
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM (Pacific Time)
10383 Bunche Hall
Registration Required

In his new book Filipino Time: Affective Worlds and Contracted Labor, Allan Isaac examines how contracted service labor performed by Filipinos in the Philippines, Europe, the Middle East, and the United States generates vital affects, multiple networks, and other life-worlds as much as it disrupts and dislocates human relations. Affective labor and time are re-articulated in a capacious archive of storytelling about the Filipino labor diaspora in fiction, musical performance, ethnography, and documentary film. Exploring these cultural practices, Filipino Time traces other ways of sensing, making sense of, and feeling time with others, by weaving narratives of place and belonging out of the hostile but habitable textures of labor-time.

Signaling his current research project in this talk, Isaac explores live-streamed funeral vigils, a technological practice made necessary by Filipino diasporic life, to highlight two Tagalog concept-words that map other ways to generate ecologies of communality: pakiramdam (literally, to make oneself felt, or to feel a presence), affective engagement without immediate proximity; and kapiling, to be in someone's proximity or vicinity without interaction between two parties. Migrant subjects harness time and the imagination in their creative, life-making capacities to make communal worlds out of one steeped in the temporalities and logics of capital.

Allan Punzalan Isaac is Professor of American Studies and English and Associate Humanities Dean at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ. He specializes in Asian American and comparative race studies and examines issues around migration, postcoloniality, gender and sexuality, and the Philippines and its diaspora. His first book American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America was the recipient of the Association for Asian American Studies Cultural Studies Book Award. His second book is entitled, Filipino Time: Affective Worlds and Contracted Labor. He has taught at DeLaSalle University-Taft in Manila, Philippines as a Senior Fulbright Scholar. His current research focuses on death and dying in the Filipino diaspora.

Sponsored by UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies and Department of Asian American Studies. With support from the Asian American Studies Center, Office of Instructional Services, Center for the Study of Women/Barbara Streisand Center, UCLA Labor Center, and UCLA Labor Studies Program. 

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Following the talk, Professor Isaac will conduct a short workshop with graduate students. Students can sign up for the graduate workshop here and upload a 2-3 page project abstract.

Sponsor(s): Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Asian American Studies Department , Asian American Studies Center