Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition

by Dylan Rodríguez

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.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Asian American, Asia

256 pages, Paperback

First published December 18, 2009

About the author

Dylan Rodríguez is a Professor at the University of California, Riverside in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies.

Reviews

[Ersula Ore · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chapters 1&2 are unnecessarily convoluted. But if you can get pass them, you're sure to enjoy the text. Theoretically dense (over complicated in many many ways) and intellectually stimulating. The trauma of double occupation and genocide explain the historical amnesia and cultural erasure constituting the Filipino Condition. At times I hear Rodriguez's anger over what he seems to consider a weak and empty people (who he at once disidentifies with and, at the same time, identifies with) and find myself frustrated. Other times I can suspend my anger to hear his larger critique. Still, what are the options for life and living--for surviving under such conditions? What are the psychological effects of genocide and what kind of coping mechanisms are available to a population of 10year olds? I could go on with my critique about the factors Rodriguez dismisses to sustain his argument but i think you all see where I'm going

[Gilbert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rodriguez book develops a promising critique of Filipino Americanism that ultimately questions and situates the Filipino American subject within a framework of settler colonial, genocidal, anti-Black analysis. I found the book useful in developing my own critique of contemporaneous culturalist movements within Filipino American circles that strive for re-indigenization and decolonization without paying close attention to the tension of Filipino Americans as settler colonial subjects and neocolonial subjects both here in the US and in the PH.

The major issue I have with this book is the writing style of Rodriguez. Often times the flowery and pedantic text made it difficult to follow exactly what the author was attempting to get at and required various close reads and an over-annotation of the book in order to better flesh out his arguments around arrested raciality and the concept of suspended apocalypse.

[PDG · Rating 5 out of 5]

revisit

[Lisa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was fine, a really in depth reflection on Filipino identity.

[Jenina · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I am not interested in offering a point of closure, prescriptive salve, or discrete political trajectory that 'makes sense' of white supremacy's global apparatus of terror through the Filipino condition. The closing pages of this book have no investment in remaking the Filipino as a body of authentically or reliably radical politicality. Instead, it is disaster's decomposition of the Filipino body into unfamiliar relationalities — that offers the political possibility with which I am most concerned."

Rarely a book will compel me to genuinely want to read more about what the author thinks about the given matter, so I know that when I get this feeling, sooooooooooooolid ang natutunan ko.

A required reading especially for those involved and engaged in cultural and knowledge production.

[Mostly on Storygraph · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very brave and complicated book. Will have to re-read.