Things Fall Away

“Things Fall Away is a remarkable achievement. It is as ambitious as it is careful in its attempt to address the phenomenon of globalization from the point of view of those who produce its conditions of possibility: living labor.” - Vicente L. Rafael, Philippine Studies

“Things Fall Away is a tour de force of a book . . . . Written in elegant, erudite, and impassioned prose, it offers a sophisticated, insightful and compelling re-working of the classical Marxist theory of labour/value primarily inflected through a post-colonial and transnational feminist standpoint as played out on Filipino women’s bodies and Filipino landscape under the powerful and alluring sway of capitalist globalization.” - Yeoh Sang Guan, Sojourn

“Things Fall Away is ambitious in both the scope of its theorizing and in the theorists and authors integrated into the arguments. It should become a touchstone for Filipino and feminist accounts of the Philippine nation’s remaking within a changing global political economy defined by the global migration of its citizens.” - Deirdre McKay, Signs

“[An] erudite and passionate study. . . . Neferti Tadiar tirelessly and patiently rewrites the critique of postcolonial reason through the rescue and delivery of historical experience and the anticipation of a community that knows what to do with it.” - Jody Blanco, Comparative Literature

“The complexity and skill with which Tadiar weaves together a multitude of strands of both literary and Marxist analysis demonstrates great skill and dedication from her as a writer; reading Things Fall Away demands nothing less of the reader. For the persistent and engaged reader, however, the payoff is well worth the effort. . . . Social movement literatures are, Tadiar argues, a kind of ‘cultural software’ for the transformation of dominant social relations’ (p. 16). Things Fall Away itself shares this transformative potential, helping us find our feet in the maelstrom.” - May Farrales Alyssa Stryker Soni Thindal and Ben Thorpe, Gender, Place & Culture

“This book is a celebration of Tadiar’s brilliant capacity to weave a poetic narrative that expands the limits of theoretic explanation with historiographic elucidation. . . . The book is eloquently about the Philippines, but it is at the same time a narrative of the globalized experience of various parts of the world.” - Francis A. Gealogo, Pacific Affairs

“Things Fall Away is a major theoretical statement about contemporary forms of world making. In this brilliant and poetic book, Neferti Tadiar works through the dilemmas of our time—transnational labor flows, urban disorder, lost hopes for progressive change, new hopes for self-expression—to return feminist theory to center stage in our understanding of the global political economy.” - Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, author of Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection

“Things Fall Away is a remarkable achievement. It is a work of considerable scope, full of penetrating insights and urgent critiques. It brings to the surface an entire literary history that very few know about in the West: a literary history that speaks volumes about the conditions of modernity in various parts of the world.” - Vicente L. Rafael, author of The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines

“The study of the Philippines, one of Europe’s earliest and the US’s first colonies, obliges the rethinking of colonial histories. In the growing body of crucial work on the Philippines, Neferti X. M. Tadiar’s Things Fall Away is indispensable reading, a compelling rethinking of both postcolonial theory and transnational feminism. A richly poetic lament for the things that fall away, it dares still to descry in cast-aside affect and in occluded practices resources for the difficult labor of living otherwise.” - David Lloyd, author of Irish Times: Temporalities of Modernity