Postcolonial Configurations

“This compelling, generative reframing of US-Philippine relations during the Cold War illuminates how a transnational Filipino America emerged as a particular kind of Cold War racial assemblage during the Marcos era. Incisively and persuasively argued, Postcolonial Configurations grapples with the kinds of world-making possibilities this subjectivity engendered at a time that was simultaneously postcolonial and authoritarian.” - Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, author of Empire’s Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper

“Josen Masangkay Diaz offers us a beautiful, daring reimagining of Filipino America, unmaking its figurations for global recognition and the heroic, heteronormative politics upholding our dominant global order. She reads for other subjectivities that US imperial liberalism and Philippine authoritarian nationalism obscure through narratives of empowerment, emancipation, and liberation. Questioning the very bounds of Filipino America and refusing to resolve the tension between diaspora and homeland, Diaz demonstrates that what is most near and intimate to us might also be the consequence of what seems most far away. An illuminating interpretation of racial formation under empire, this is critical ethnic and postcolonial studies at its transnational best.” - Neferti X. M. Tadiar, author of Remaindered Life

"Postcolonial Configurations joins a lively interdisciplinary conversation on the transpacific politics of race, gender, and empire in the twentieth century. . . . By revealing how the racial cold war configured conventional narratives of Filipino and Filipino American history, Diaz models a transpacific Philippine history that can help unmake those stifling old configurations and create space for empowering new ones." - Noah Theriault, Journal of Asian Studies

"Diaz’s study advances a developing body of scholarship in Filipino studies that rearticulates and reimagines postcolonial and postmodern epistemological approaches Postcolonial Configurations is instructive for mapping theoretical directions in contemporary Filipino studies. It reveals how postcolonial/postmodern epistemological frameworks distance themselves from historical materialism." - Jeffrey Arellano Cabusao, MELUS

"Postcolonial Configurations is a remarkable scholarly achievement, and it deserves to radically reconfigure the tenor of the Philippine and Filipino American studies research that emerges in its wake. Both fields will be better for it, and perhaps even the inherited boundaries between these disciplines—also configurations of the racial cold war—can start to be unmade." - Alden Sajor Marte-Wood, Philippine Studies