Manifest Technique

Abstract

Manifest Technique traces the ways in which Filipino American hip hop performances remember the racialized histories of the Filipino body. Mediated through what the book calls a Filipino American hip hop vernacular, Filipino Americans have been fashioning crucial forms of Filipino racial knowledge. Inspired by hip hop’s cultural resources that uplifts the dignity of African Americans, Filipino Americans’ immersion in hip hop has influenced ongoing Filipino racial self-construction, engaging a longer struggle of Filipino decolonization. Manifest Technique testifies to the labor required to bridge the gaps within the margins of official memory by outlining how Filipino Americans have been instrumental in contributing to the broader contours of hip hop and in providing a counter-memory to their historical erasure. In observing artists’ and participants’ narratives, music, embodiments, and visual expressions, this book is an impetus to understand race and ethnicity in the United States not simply in terms of liberal multiculturalism, which distributes power horizontally and ahistorically, but through the critical lens of structural domination, which recognizes power as vertically applied and historically rooted. In short, this book observes the intersections of memory and empire by focusing on hip hop cultural practices embedded within the ongoing racial project of Filipino postcolonial emergence.