Coming Full Circle and Spiralling: Fissures Through Essentialism, English, and Empire

ABSTRACT

In this performative autoethnography, I broadly question the communication discipline’s investments in empire. Specifically, by tracing how my body – as a Pinay – has not fit within the united states, academia, and the field, I map the fissures created by my body’s contact with essentialism, english, and empire. Through stories offered, I call for a more liberatory knowledge production – one that goes beyond identity politics and toward abolition, one that encourages the pluriversality of knowledges and languages beyond the white and Eurocentric canon, and one that lays siege to the empire and moves toward liberation.

KEYWORDS:

• Performative autoethnography
• empire
• Filipino
• postcolonialism
• identity

Acknowledgments

I want to express deep gratitude to Dr. Amy Heuman, who first believed in what I had to say in the field of communication. I also want to say thanks to all the reviewers who offered their insights as I continued to develop this essay. Lastly, I dedicate this to my late nanay, Dolores. Mahal ko po kayo.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Spelling united states, english, and western with lowercase letters is an intentional, political choice, made in solidarity with how Assata Shakur and other Black revolutionary writers spelled amerika. See Shakur (2020).

2. Walsh (2018) directly cited SupGaleano, Comisión de la Sexta del EZLN, Pensamiento crítico frente a la hidra capitalista I (Chiapas, Mexico: EZLN, 2015).

3. This statement by Anzaldúa is lifted directly from Walsh (2018, p. 82).

4. There is a wealth of scholarship that engage the Filipino identity. Of notable mentions are the autoethnographies I have read, such as Alvarez (2022) and Batac (2022).

5. I want to acknowledge the late Dr. Daniel C. Brouwer for including David and Cruz (2018) in our very last class of public sphere. Thank you, and I miss you.

6. As a politic, I call the Philippines, not as a modern and neocolonial nation-state, but as an archipelago, recognizing “the ‘archipelago’ as an alternative imaginary to the centralizing, homogenizing, and essentialising schema of nation-state or ‘island’ space” (Cuevas-Hewitt, 2020, p. 25).

7. Beyond Mendoza and Alvarez’ work, Filipino literature in communication has been rare.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Angela Labador

Angela Labador (PhD, Arizona State University) is an interdisciplinary scholar and critical pedagogue who studies the intersections between critical intercultural communication, critical organizational communication, and performance studies. In particular, Angela is interested in how historically minoritized groups discursively, materially, and creatively navigate and resist structures of power. Exemplifying a critical and coalitional approach, Angela's scholarship locates itself within the Filipino/a/x tradition of knowledge production and strives to bridge theory and praxis in service of anti-imperialism. Angela's pronouns are siya/she.