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ABSTRACT
This essay pays tribute to Arif Dirlik’s critical approach to the Asia-Pacific in the 1990s and to China today. It uses the example of Dirlik’s writing as a model for reflecting on transformations that the region has undergone in the last thirty years, with a focus on the historical experience of the Philippines. It draws on Dirlik’s analysis of the continuing role of colonialism and anti-colonial nationalism and the legacy of the socialist revolution in China to understand the key features of the Duterte regime in the Philippines, which are both comparable and directly related to developments in China in the context of global capitalism. Finally, the essay follows Dirlik’s own moves in seeking what is overlooked and remains politically significant within these various hegemonic geopolitical projects, that is, older organizational systems and kinship networks understood as subaltern forces of both the global metropolitanist economy and authoritarian populism.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
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Notes on contributors
Neferti Tadiar
Neferti X. M. Tadiar is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of the books, Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization (2009) and Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (2004), and co-editor (with Angela Y. Davis) of Beyond the Frame: Women of Color and Visual Representation (2005). Her new book, Remaindered Life, a meditation on the disposability and surplus of life-making under contemporary conditions of global empire, will be published in Spring 2022 by Duke University Press.