Upcoming Event: The Filipino Subjunctive
Wednesday, September 28th | 2:30-4:00 PM
The Filipino Subjunctive: History & Nation in a Provisional Mood
A Talk with Dr. Adrian De Leon
Location: School of Theology, Room B19, 745 Commonwealth Avenue
Adrian De Leon is a historian and poet in Los Angeles, where he is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. His first academic book is Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America (University of North Carolina Press, Fall 2023). It will be followed by The Philippines for Filipinos: A Conditional History of a Commonwealth (under contract with the University of Washington Press). In addition to his writing, he is the co-host of two programs on PBS Digital Studios: A People’s History of Asian America (2021), and Historian’s Take (2022).
In the Philippines, the United States’ first overseas colony, direct occupation had supposedly come to an end with Filipinization: the appropriation of native leadership into colonial governance. But Filipinization also informed the everyday conduct and political imaginations of those outside of structures of power, namely, migrant workers across the Pacific. In this talk, I suggest that American counterinsurgency informed how people across the Pacific imagined how the future citizens of an independent Philippines might behave. This provisional subject—the Filipino subjunctive—emerges from these transnational imaginaries, and the creative labors of everyday life. Together, this fledgling community asked: What would it look like to become Filipino, and who would pay the price to make this nation yet-to-come?
View Poster here!
