https://englishkyoto-seas.org/<Book Review>
Vincent Pacheco

Josen Masangkay Diaz. Postcolonial Configurations: Dictatorship, theRacial Cold War, and Filipino America. Durham and London: Duke
University Press, 2023.
Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 13, No. 2, August 2024, pp. 413-416.

How to Cite: Pacheco, Vincent. Review of Postcolonial Configurations: Dictatorship,
the Racial Cold War, and Filipino America by Josen Masangkay Diaz. Southeast
Asian Studies, Vol. 13, No. 2, August 2024, pp. 413-416. DOI:
10.20495/seas.13.2_413.
Link to this book review:https://englishkyoto-seas.org/2024/08/vol-13-no-2-book-reviews-vincent-pacheco/

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Postcolonial Configurations: Dictatorship, the Racial Cold War,and Filipino America
Josen Masangkay Diaz
Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2023.
Josen Masangkay Diaz’s book is a timely intervention on issues of Filipino identity vis-à-vis thePhilippine diaspora, postcolonial specificity, and authoritarian history. Indeed, Bongbong Marcos’svictory in the 2022 elections necessitates cutting-edge scholarship on the New Society’s aesthetic
regime and its legacies of violence. Postcolonial Configurations emphasizes the centrality ofFilipino American history in Philippine studies by juxtaposing representative cultural texts alongside the discourses of Marcos’s New Society and the US empire. In each of the four chapters, Diazuses what she calls “postcolonial configuration” as a lens to unravel the cultural, racial, and political
relationship between the Philippines and the United States (p. 8). She uses an interdisciplinary
approach in mapping out this configuration through an eclectic examination of policy reports,
newspapers, and magazines. These include documents from the National Commission on theRole of Filipino Women, the National Housing Authority, and the World Bank.
Diaz also interrogates how the conjugal dictatorship’s discourse fits within the broader geopolitical configuration that resulted from the Cold War. Thus, the author proposes unravelingpostcolonial configurations by analyzing works such as Empire of Memory (1990, Eric Gamalinda),
Insiang (1976, dir. Lino Brocka), and “Teacher, It’s Nice to Meet You, Too” (1985, Ruby Ibañez).
For Diaz, the simultaneous location and dislocation of these configurations can potentially “forge
other critiques and imaginations” (p. 26) that extend the subjectivity of Filipino America. These
postcolonial configurations reveal how the Marcos regime was inextricably entangled with thehypocrisy of US liberalism, which enabled authoritarianism in Asia in order to contain Communismin the region.
The first chapter, “The Fictions of National Culture,” explores the “underlying politicalinvestments of the Cold War cultural exchange” between the United States and the Philippines(p. 29). Diaz begins by contextualizing Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society campaign, which
envisioned a United States built on freedom, multiculturalism, and racial justice. The fabricationof this “national culture” allowed the US empire to “supply a discourse for employing racial pluralism
and national progress” (p. 32). Diaz reads the 1966 Manila Summit (centered on the Vietnam War)as a place that enabled the transnational exchange of national cultures in service to foreign policy.
In the summit, First Lady Imelda Marcos and the Bayanihan dance troupe employed “nationalculture” to integrate “state fictions . . . within cohesive narratives of global cooperation” (p. 35).
Diaz argues that Marcos similarly constructed a national culture that reconfigured the Philippine
postcolonial condition, which in turn helped legitimize the use of martial law as a way to “manage
economic and political crises” (p. 38). Thus, the construction of the US-funded Cultural Center of414Book Reviews

the Philippines allowed the regime to rehabilitate national culture in its image. Diaz then reads
Eric Gamalinda’s Empire of Memory, a novel centered on two officers from Marcos’s censorship
department (Agency for the Scientific Investigation of the Absurd). The protagonists of the novel
are tasked to create a new history for the Marcoses. Diaz uses this novel “to reconsider nationalculture as a configuration of empire and authoritarian statecraft” (p. 29). She argues that thenovel’s distortion of history unmakes the fictional constructs of national culture in the New Society.
By challenging the “historical coherence of Filipino subjectivity” (p. 56), the novel “defamiliarize[s]any one configuration of Filipino America” (p. 57).
The second chapter focuses on another postcolonial configuration, this one made up of thebalikbayan (returnee), squatter communities, and the state policies of the Marcos dictatorship.
The author examines Floy Quintos’s article in Balikbayan Magazine to unmake the “strangelyinnocent” figure of the balikbayan, arguing that the figure is intertwined with a “Cold War discourseof postcolonial raciality” as embodied by US immigration law (p. 64). Diaz makes the case that theMarcos regime created an economic and masculine configuration of the balikbayan that renderedinvisible the role of women in that very configuration (p. 68). Diaz also analyzes how Ferdinand
Marcos’s management of Philippine Airlines and the reconstruction of Manila International Airport(MIA) regulated the mobility of the Philippine diaspora. The regime was able to harness thereturnees’ economic potential while limiting their exposure to the dismal urban conditions ofManila. While MIA allowed the regime to isolate new arrivals from the urban squalor of Manila,
its construction necessitated the displacement of squatter communities. The regime’s rhetoricand policies deemed these communities as a hurdle in the goal to transform Manila into the Cityof Man. Thus, as Diaz writes, the “mandates that governed both the balikbayan and the squatter
used transnational mobility to define the structure of the Filipino polity” (p. 78). Diaz makes thecase that the squatter communities during the Marcos dictatorship “point to the historical andpolitical circumstances” that “made legible the configuration of the balikbayan” (p. 83). Toward
the end, she contends that the present historical moment in both the US and the Philippines speaks“to the incapacity” of the balikbayan configuration to “address the multiple forms of marginalizationand subjugation enabled by Cold War conflict and its attendant transnational alliances” (p. 84).
Chapter 3 focuses on the New Filipina, a configuration constructed by the dictatorship. This
figure is an “important compromise” between Western and Filipino feminism that simultaneously
valorizes agency and the natural role of women as homemakers (p. 85). This configuration sought
to integrate women into the New Society’s narrative of progress and development. What it created
was a culture of labor export built on a narrative of “Life giving labor” as valorized by Imelda Marcos(p. 92). The figure of the New Filipina is also a configuration shaped by the wider Cold War andits ensuing politics. The Marcos regime drew from a wider transnational discourse on human rights
to simultaneously contain the subjectivity of Filipino women in the name of global capital. Thus,
Diaz closely analyzes Lino Brocka’s Insiang, a social realist film that articulates the universality ofBook Reviews

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gendered suffering. She argues that the “cinematic juxtaposition between beauty and violence inthe film illustrates the extent” to which the regime “structured Filipina women’s suitability fortransnational circulation and labor” (p. 105). Thus, the film shows that the “New Filipina is not apromise of empowerment but an overdetermination of Filipina women’s being” (p. 109).
In the next chapter, Diaz analyzes a configuration that consists of Filipino “raciality” (p. 114),
US Cold War liberal discourse, and international humanitarianism. She argues that the dictatorship“cultivated a discourse of race and gender grounded in the ‘ultimate ideology’ of humanism” thatfurther enabled “the regime’s state of exception” (p. 114). Diaz examines the role of the Philippine
Refugee Processing Center (PRPC) in allowing the Marcos regime to “better position itself
within the demands of Cold War politics” (p. 119). The PRPC became a transit point that allowed
the US to justify its liberal agenda through refugee rehabilitation. The Marcos regime, informedby its own conceptualization of “human potential,” employed Filipino English teachers to takepart in humanitarian work that would help Vietnamese refugees (pp. 125–126). The postcolonialsubject thus became a tool for the US empire to “facilitate the refugee’s transition into modernity”(p. 133). The author then presents a letter written by Rudy Ibañez as a manifestation of how theUS empire “overdetermined” the figure of the refugee. The letter is written from the point ofview of a refugee named Sombath and is addressed to a teacher. Diaz argues that the text tries toundo the “overdetermination of liberal rehabilitation and postcolonial subjectivity pronounced bythe PRPC” (p. 136). Diaz concludes her book with a reading of R. Zamora Linmark’s poem titled“What Some Are Saying about the Body” (p. 145). She writes that the poem articulates the “theparadox of Marcosian logic,” which demands “that the balance of power must be suspended topreserve the sanctity of liberal governance” (p. 145). The poem’s multiple narrators (or masses)“gestures toward another kind of people power” that draws from a force that is “not predetermined”(p. 153).
Postcolonial Configurations sets out to unmake dominant perceptions of Filipino America andmakes an invaluable theoretical contribution toward that goal. The book is driven by the spirit ofHannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, and Giorgio Agamben, who have collectivelycritiqued the paradoxes of democratic state power and the biopolitical and aesthetic regimes it
has engendered in the West. Diaz follows a similar line of thought in her inquiry that allows areconfiguration of the Philippine postcolonial condition within the wider ambit of Cold War geopolitics,
the global diaspora, and US liberal hypocrisy. The urgency of such forays cannot be understatedas vestiges of the New Society continue to endure in the present. Diaz provides an astute analysisof archival, theoretical, cultural, and literary material that becomes a configuration in itself; theinterdisciplinary approach she utilizes allows an engagement that is not possible if one is methodologically bound. Her seamless analysis allows her to propose ways to potentially unmake theconfigurations she writes about. Of note are the second and fourth chapters, which convincingly
highlight the role of the oft-ignored displaced communities in the legitimization of Marcos’s regime.

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Book Reviews

Thinking in terms of configurations is indeed an insightful way to confront the Marcos dictatorship.
However, the author’s engagement with Filipino texts would benefit from further contextualization.
It might be useful to indicate in the first chapter that Reynaldo Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution:
Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840–1910 focuses on the Tagalog regions of the Philippines
rather than the entire country. While empirical and economic concerns are outside the main scopeof the book being reviewed here, the use of economic concepts and terms such as “transnationalfinance” (p. 38) would benefit from further elaboration. Regardless, Diaz’s incisive work will be
invaluable to scholars working on the Marcos regime and its political, social, and aesthetic legacies.
Scholars working on postcolonialism and cultural studies will also find Diaz’s theoretical contribution
very rewarding.
Vincent Pacheco
Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of California-Berkeley
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1812-5528