The Case for Unbelonging: Filipino Migration in Anarchist Spacetime
Talk by Adrian De Leon (This event is part of the George Sycip Distinguished Speaker Series for Filipinx Studies)
05.28.24 Tuesday 4pm-6pm Hart 3201
This talk will argue for a history of "Filipino America" against and beyond the nation-state, through a triptych of books: barangay: an offshore poem (2021), Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America(2023), and Balikbayan: The Invention of the Filipino Homeland (forthcoming). These works advance an Asian American Studies that refuses how nation-states organize spacetime, ecology, and the human. In response, this suite offers three spatio-temporal agonisms with which to reconsider the familiar ways that migrants tell stories about themselves under empire: outrigger/shoreline, mountain/plantation, home/homeland. In these pairs, De Leon makes the case for unbelonging to the inherited liberal logics of "community." Instead, he offers an alternative ethic for the anticolonial study of migration: anarchism.
Adrian De Leon is a multidisciplinary writer and public historian at New York University, where he is an Assistant Professor of U.S. History. His most recent books are barangay: an offshore poem (2021) and Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America (2023). His next book, Balikbayan: The Invention of the Filipino Homeland, is under review. He is working on two projects: Not Too Sweet: Essays on Eating (While) Filipino, an essay collection on food, race, and empire; and an untitled lyrical memoir that explores martial arts, colonization, and gender.
