Suspended Apocalypse

White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition

2009
Author:

Dylan Rodríguez

Examines the Filipino American as a product of conquest, white supremacy, and racial empire

Suspended Apocalypse is a provocative meditation on the Filipino American as a subject of history. Culling from historical, popular, and ethnographic archives, Dylan Rodríguez provides a sophisticated analysis of the Filipino presence in the American imaginary. Radically critiquing current conceptions of Filipino American identity, he puts forth a genealogy of Filipino genocide, rooted in the early twentieth-century subjugation of the Philippines by the United States.

Culling from historical, popular cultural, ethnographic, and other archives, Dylan Rodríguez provides a smart and incisive polemic and sophisticated analysis of the ‘Filipino presence’ in the American imaginary. . . .With powerful and robust tone, Rodríguez unravels the various contradictions within the very construction of Filipino American. . . .This is not a book that simply exposes but more importantly exhorts.

Martin F. Manalansan IV, author of Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora

Suspended Apocalypse is a rich and provocative meditation on the emergence of the Filipino American as a subject of history. Culling from historical, popular, and ethnographic archives, Dylan Rodríguez provides a sophisticated analysis of the Filipino presence in the American imaginary. Radically critiquing current conceptions of Filipino American identity, community, and history, he puts forth a genealogy of Filipino genocide, rooted in the early twentieth-century military, political, and cultural subjugation of the Philippines by the United States.

Suspended Apocalypse critically addresses what Rodríguez calls “Filipino American communion,” interrogating redemptive and romantic notions of Filipino migration and settlement in the United States in relation to larger histories of race, colonial conquest, and white supremacy. Contemporary popular and scholarly discussions of the Filipino American are, he asserts, inseparable from their origins in the violent racist regimes of the United States and its historical successor, liberal multiculturalism.

Rodríguez deftly contrasts the colonization of the Philippines with present-day disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and Mount Pinatubo to show how the global subjection of Philippine, black, and indigenous peoples create a linked history of genocide. But in these juxtapositions, Rodríguez finds moments and spaces of radical opportunity. Engaging the violence and disruption of the Filipino condition sets the stage, he argues, for the possibility of a transformation of the political lens through which contemporary empire might be analyzed, understood, and perhaps even overcome.

Dylan Rodríguez is associate professor of ethnic studies at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Forced Passages: Imprisoned Radical Intellectuals and the U.S. Prison Regime (Minnesota, 2006).

Culling from historical, popular cultural, ethnographic, and other archives, Dylan Rodríguez provides a smart and incisive polemic and sophisticated analysis of the ‘Filipino presence’ in the American imaginary. . . .With powerful and robust tone, Rodríguez unravels the various contradictions within the very construction of Filipino American. . . .This is not a book that simply exposes but more importantly exhorts.

Martin F. Manalansan IV, author of Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora

Suspended Apocalypse offers to cut through contemporary discussions within different strata of U.S. ethnic studies with sharp precision by offering a theorization of Filipino American cultural politics. . . .it is interesting, and even riveting.

Min Song, author of Strange Future: Pessimism and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots

From the book’s title, through to its conclusion, there is little doubt that the author courts controversy and intends to do so. The book usefully requires the reader to question the idea and construction of the ‘Filipino American’ through its intriguing case studies and provocative contentions.

Journal of American Studies

Rodríguez’s book makes compelling interventions in Asian American, Critical Race, and Postcolonial Studies. Rodríguez persuasively and creatively argues that a productive confrontation with the “white supremacist racial analytic of Filipino subjectivity” is necessary.

Amerasia Journal