The Work of Mothering: Globalization and the Filipino Diaspora (Asian American Experience)

Literature and film on Filipina women working overseas Women make up a majority of the Filipino workforce laboring overseas. Their frequent employment in nurturing, maternal jobs--nanny, maid, caretaker, nurse--has found expression in a significant but understudied body of Filipino and Filipino American literature and cinema. Harrod J. Suarez's innovative readings of this cultural production explores issues of diaspora, gender, and labor. He details the ways literature and cinema play critical roles in encountering, addressing, and problematizing what we think we know about overseas Filipina workers. Though often seen as compliant subjects, the Filipina mother can also destabilize knowledge production that serves the interests of global empire, capitalism, and Philippine nationalism. Suarez examines canonical writers like Nick Joaquín, Carlos Bulosan, and Jessica Hagedorn to explore this disruption and understand the maternal specificity of the construction of overseas Filipina workers. The result is a series of readings that develop new ways of thinking through diasporic maternal labor that engages with the sociological imaginary. "With cogent observations on contemporary fiction, poetry, film, migration, domestic labor, and politics, Harrod Suarez illuminates the fraught ways in which the Philippines is imagined as Inang Bayan, 'mother country.' The Work of Mothering beautifully captures the nuances of language, gesture, and emotion, demonstrating how the practice of careful reading can help us look beyond the oppressive structures of nation, gender, and capital and rethink the most foundational of human relationships."--Josephine Lee, coeditor of Asian American Plays for a New Generation "The Work of Mothering brilliantly shows how the figure of the Filipina mother as a national symbol and transnational worker becomes a gateway to engaging and challenging nationalist and globalist projects. As an analysis of the racial, gendered and cultural aesthetics of nationalism and diaspora, Suarez’s book intervenes into questions that live at the center of many fields."—Roderick Ferguson, author of The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference Women make up a majority of the Filipino workforce laboring overseas. Their frequent employment in nurturing, maternal jobs—nanny, maid, caretaker, nurse—has found expression in a significant but understudied body of Filipino and Filipino American literature and cinema. Harrod J. Suarez's innovative readings of this cultural production explores issues of diaspora, gender, and labor. He details the ways literature and cinema play critical roles in encountering, addressing, and problematizing what we think we know about overseas Filipina workers. Though often seen as compliant subjects, the Filipina mother can also destabilize knowledge production that serves the interests of global empire, capitalism, and Philippine nationalism. Suarez examines canonical writers like Nick Joaquín, Carlos Bulosan, and Jessica Hagedorn to explore this disruption and understand the maternal specificity of the construction of overseas Filipina workers. The result is a series of readings that develop new ways of thinking through diasporic maternal labor that engages with the sociological imaginary. | Cover Title Contents Acknowledgments Prologue Introduction 1. Excessive Writing and Filipina Time 2. Filming the Dream Nevertheless 3. Listening to Cinematic Orphans 4. Multicultural Belonging and a Potent Silence Conclusion Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index |" The Work of Mothering offers an innovative reading into the margins of texts, thus questioning knowledge production and interrogating our epistemological systems." — Literary Research "With cogent observations on contemporary fiction, poetry, film, migration, domestic labor, and politics, Harrod Suarez illuminates the fraught ways in which the Philippines is imagined as Inang Bayan , 'mother country.' The Work of Mothering beautifully captures the nuances of language, gesture, and emotion, demonstrating how the practice of careful reading can help us look beyond the oppressive structures of nation, gender, and capital and rethink the most foundational of human relationships."—Josephine Lee, coeditor of Asian American Plays for a New Generation "Suarez uses literature to envision alternative ways of being, of inhabiting the world, unfettered from limits proscribed by the ideology of the national and contemporary globalization. The Work of Mothering successfully harnesses the literary imagination to envision a different political and cultural future." — MELUS | Harrod J. Suarez is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative American Studies at Oberlin College. __The Work of Mothering: Globalization and the Filipino Diaspora__ argues for a strict relationship between the world-historical situation of the Philippines under empire, nationalism, and globalization and the phenomenon of overseas domestic labor, drawing on the contours that inform the latter but arguing that it is part of a much larger framework of nurture, care, and service structuring the relationship between the postcolonial Philippines and the world. It analyzes maternal figures in novels by Carlos Bulosan, Jessica Hagedorn, and Brian Ascalon Roley; short stories by Nick Joaquin and Mia Alvar; poems by Luisa Igloria; and a film by Kidlat Tahimik. By developing incisive readings of subtle, passing moments in these texts, __The Work of Mothering__ opens up narratives within which the cultural, political, and economic logics of overseas Filipina/o migration, especially but not only domestic labor, emerges. It does so by advancing an archipelagic reading practice that addresses diasporic literatures and cultures without reinscribing them either within nationalist or global paradigms. In doing so, it draws crucially on debates within the sociology of globalization and cultural studies, offering a critical and innovative vantage point that identifies alternative practices of the maternal, pushing up against the historical and political conditions that manage Filipina/o identity for nationalism and globalization. "Women make up a majority of the Filipino workforce laboring overseas. Their frequent employment in nurturing, maternal jobs - nanny, maid, caretaker, nurse - has found expression in a significant but understudied body of Filipino and Filipino American literature and cinema. Harrod J. Suarez's innovative readings of this cultural production explores issues of diaspora, gender, and labor. He details the ways literature and cinema play critical roles in encountering, addressing, and problematizing what we think we know about overseas Filipina workers. Though often seen as compliant subjects, the Filipina mother can also destabilize knowledge production that serves the interests of global empire, capitalism, and Philippine nationalism. Suarez examines canonical writers like Nick Joaquin, Carlos Bulosan, and Jessica Hagedorn to explore this disruption and understand the maternal specificity of the construction of overseas Filipina workers. The result is readings that develop new ways of thinking through diasporic maternal labor that engages with the sociological imaginary."--Provided by publisher Women make up a majority of the Filipino workforce laboring overseas. Their frequent employment in nurturing, maternal jobs - nanny, maid, caretaker, nurse - has found expression in a significant but understudied body of Filipino and Filipino American literature and cinema. Harrod J. Suarez's innovative readings of this cultural production explores issues of diaspora, gender, and labor. He details the ways literature and cinema play critical roles in encountering, addressing, and problematizing what we think we know about overseas Filipina workers. Though often seen as compliant subjects, the Filipina mother can also destabilize knowledge production that serves the interests of global empire, capitalism, and Philippine nationalism. Suarez examines canonical writers like Nick JoaquA-n, Carlos Bulosan, and Jessica Hagedorn to explore this disruption and understand the maternal specificity of the construction of overseas Filipina workers. The result is readings that develop new ways of thinking through diasporic maternal labor that engages with the sociological imaginary