Passionate Engagements, Intimate Entrapments: Love, War, and Those Caught Between EMPIRE and Nation

Abstract

This essay looks at the rise of the first-person documentary within the Filipino diaspora as a way of reflecting on their own situated knowledges while at the same time teasing out the intimacies of colonization and imperialism that they continue to feel in themselves and their families until today. Their films map out filmmakers' subjective spaces, situatedness, and hybridity within the Filipino diaspora, critically examining the role that Filipino migration played in the colonization, settlement, and domestication of imperial and national peripheries such as Hawaiʻi and Mindanao. I argue that these documentaries have the ability to talk back to the imperial imaginary by creating a diasporic, archipelagic imaginary that is mindful of the legacies of empire in the island peripheries of both America and the Philippines today. These films can hopefully help us reflect on how narratives of migration must be critically revisited and unsettled in order not to reproduce imperial legacies.