International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS)

THINGS FALL AWAY illuminates the power of contemporary Filipino subaltern experience to shape social realities, in particular the worldwide transformation known as globalization, and the book explores the critical role of the nation's writers and poets in furthering this shaping process. Through close readings of poems, short stories, and novels brought into conversation with scholarly works of anthropology, sociology, politics, and economics, Neferti Tadiar demonstrates how the devalued and marginal experiences of the Philippines' vast subaltern populations—experiences that "fall away" from the attention of more mainstream histories of the global capitalist present—give form to the material conditions of social life that feminists, urban activists, and revolutionaries depend on yet eschew. Focusing on these marginal experiences, Tadiar is able to offer new and provocative interpretations of universal, global trends such as the growth of migrant domestic labor, the emergence of postcolonial "civil society," and the post-communist democratization of authoritarian third-world nations.

Tadiar concentrates on the feminist, urban protest, and revolutionary literatures from the 1960s through the 1990s, and illustrates the value of reading these literatures as "cultural software" for the transformation of dominant social relations, as efforts to create new social subjects with historical transformative agency, and not simply as representations of historical experiences. She divides her attention into three areas. In Part I she addresses the feminization of the labor industry in the 1970s, when it was estimated that between 300,000 and 500,000 prostitutes were working in the areas around U.S. military bases thus fostering the images of the prostitute as the paradigmatic figure in the crisis of Philippine culture and of the nation itself as a hostess nation, a nation of prostitutes. These images were modified in the 1980s through the mid 90s with the rise of the domestic labor export industry, when more than 5 million Filipinas were working overseas as maids, nannies, nurses, entertainers, and sex workers. In Part II Tadiar looks at urbanization, particularly at metropolitan Manila, which Spaulding Gray notably described as a "hell pit." She examines the authoritarian modernization and the crony capitalism that characterized the Marcos regime, giving special attention to the destruction of urban spaces by the construction of highways and overpasses. Finally, in Part III she critiques the literature of revolution, the construction of the heroic revolutionary subject whose hetero-masculinity is defined by the feminized identification of the land over which he develops mastery, and the monotheistic Christian aspect of the revolutionary literature which reads the masses as a Messiah and the experience of the movement as Holy Communion. THINGS FALL AWAY demonstrates the value that the literature of the Philippine subaltern has for understanding globalization in a variety of postcolonial settings.