Capital, Development, and Belonging in the Philippine Postcolony

CAPITAL, DEVELOPMENT, AND BELONGING IN THE PHILIPPINE POSTCOLONY A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI'I IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN POLITICAL SCIENCE AUGUST 2004 By Melisa S.L. Casumbal Thesis Committee: Michael Shapiro, Chairperson Kathy Ferguson S. Charusheela ©2004 Melisa S.L. Casumbal All rights reserved. 111 Carmelita San Luis Casumbal Roberto Reyes Casumbal IV ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Sa aking mga ninuno - ako ay nagpupugay at nagpapasalamat. My deep admiration, respect and gratitude extend foremost to the professors on my thesis committee whose pedagogies, scholarship, mentoring, good humor, and radical politics have inspired me to continue pursuit ofa career in the academy, despite my better judgement. I am especially grateful to my committee chair, Michael Shapiro, for not only apprehending, but modeling, my weirdly discipline-transgressing interests, and for the consistency and generosity ofhis support. I am also deeply grateful to the more officially transdisciplinary (double-burdened) Women's Studies scholars on my committee, Kathy Ferguson and S. Charusheela. I thank them both for modeling feminist women kicking ass in what remain intensely masculinist fields (political science and economics, respectively). I owe a special debt to Cham, who pushed me in exactly the direction I needed to go at exactly the right time. Thank you, also, to the other professors whose formidable intellect and charm I have so greatly benefited from during my time at UH: Noenoe Silva, Nevi Soguk, Sankaran Krishna, Jon Goldberg-Hiller, Barbara Andaya, Ric Trimillos, Lindy Aquino, Ruth Mabanglo, Imelda Gasmen, and Sheila Zamar. Sincere appreciation, love, and laughter go to my officemates and sister students, Diane Letoto and Lynn Anne Mulrooney, from whom I have learned the challenges and joys oflearning how to teach, and much else. Thank you, too, to the many graduate students (and former students) whose collegiality, cuisine, tsismis, inappropriate humor, rage, creativity, athleticism, and yes, scholarship, have sustained and inspired me as I completed my M.A.: Kalawaia Moore, Bianca Kai Isaki, Himanee Gupta, Melly Wilson, Sidney Iaukea, Thad Oliver, George Fernandes, Konrad Ng, Jenny Garmendia, Ikaika Hussey, and Keanu Sai. Maraming salamat sa mga kababaihan ng Urban Babaylan, sina Grace Caligtan, Darlene Rodrigues, Sonya Zabala, Gigi Miranda, Cindy Ramirez, Maile Labasan, Ellen Rae Cachola, at Yvonne T. Reyes at Geri Aglipay (honorary members). Mga kapatid ko - ang aking thesis ay isang pakikibaka sa laban ng marami. Napakalaki ng utang na loob ko sa inyo. I would also like to acknowledge the O'ahu-based community ofmusicians, artists, and activists who have taught me so much during these times ofwar and occupation, especially Kyle Kajihiro, the Ohana Koa hui (Aunty Teri, Aunty Gwen, Kalama, Bill, Welo), and Pete Shimazaki Doktor. Isang taos-pusong pasasalamat sa aking mga minamahal- kay 'Iokepa Salazar, kay Koa, at sa aking magulang at kapatid na sina Carmelita, Roberto, Robert, at Jacqueline Casumbal. Kay Nanay at Tatay - salamat po sa napakarami at napakahabang pagsasakripisyo ninyo. To you I owe the greatest utang na loob. To Bob and Jacky, my best friends, mahal na mahal ko kayo. Joey, aking sinta, aking mahal, you remain the bass in my funk and the wet in my ocean. Harinawang ng buhay ko maging pagdiriwang ng lahat ng sumasamba sa mga ninuno namin. v ABSTRACT This thesis explores "the new imperialism ofexploitation as development" (Spivak 1999) in the post-independent Philippines. In examining the Philippines' positioning in specific circuits ofglobal capital, economic development is considered as industry, cultural practice, desiring-machine, and spatio-temporal imaginary. Focusing on state, social science, and activist problematizations ofagricultural biotechnology, migrant Filipina domestic work, and the peripheralization ofindigenous peoples and Moros, the thesis examines how land, gendering labor, and the "unassimilable" native or Muslim are constituted in discourses in which economic development is celebrated or contested as a reason ofstate (Nandy 1988). The staging ofcapital in the Philippines since formal independence requires analysis that simultaneously considers neocolonial relations, efforts at decolonization, and conditions ofpostcoloniality. Such an entangled analysis (Mbembe 2001) might render intelligible the political transformations and economic difference overcoded through development spatio-temporality, and help to re-write economic development as propitious change (Zein-Elabdin 1998). VI TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements , v Abstract vi Table ofContents vii INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE - Agbiotech, Objects ofEthics, and the "Third World:" Thinking Beyond Development. 10 Introduction: Agbiotech Environs the World? 10 Transnationalization ofAgricultural GMOs 14 Agbiotech and the "Third World" as Object ofEthical Action 17 Peddling Development 23 Imagining/Enacting Noncapitalism 33 Conclusion 46 CHAPTER TWO - Towards An Overdetermined Analysis ofthe OFW: 48 "National Development," Value, and Filipina Migrant "Care" Production 48 Introduction 48 What is Overdetermination? 53 Feminist Narratives ofthe Social Relations of.. 59 Domestic Work Production by Migrant Women 59 Overview 59 Domesticating the Domestic 71 National Bodies, Devalued Commodities 75 "Contradictory Class Mobility" and other Counter-Narratives 81 "National Development," Care Crises, and the Overseas Woman Worker 93 Conclusion 98 CHAPTER THREE - "Filipinizing" Culture, Militarizing Development: Music, Time, War, Mindanao 101 Introduction: Entanglement 101 Militarizing Development: War on Development Time 107 Philippine Biopolitics: The Uses ofEthnicity 114 "Filipinization," or How to Produce a National Aesthetic 121 On the Cultural Politics ofNew Nativeness 127 Ayala's Becomings 133 Nono's Maps 138 Conclusion 144 CONCLUSION - UNMAKING DEVELOPMENT? 147 Appendix A: Map ofthe Philippines 152 Appendix B: Details of2004 U.S. Aid Package to the R.P 153 Selected Bibliography 154 Online 171 Mutlimedia 172 vii INTRODUCTION The mid-1950s anglophone play "Sepang Loca" ("Mad Josefa") by Amelia Lapena-Bonifacio opens with masculine modernization arousal. Son has been "sent by the Government" from "the city" where he lives and works, back to his provincial birth village. Son's subjunctive focalization indicates it is a place on the cusp: "By the time my men get done with this part ofthe old hometown, it will be crusted clear through with a foot deep ofcement. Think on't - a highway..." In contrasting this image ofprogress with "the busy little village dustroad," Son signals what Achille Mbembe calls the moving and multiple temporalities, trajectories, and rationalities ofthe postcolony.l Son's focalization moves from an impending future to a present which is also a past: "And yet now, this you see was once the village dustroad." This route is not yet a highway, and no longer a dustroad, but a connecting ofthe two - a temporal multiplicity. Masculine, developmentalist landscape arousal, time moving in all directions, then a scopophilic flashback nine years to the village fool, Sepang Loca, dancing "shamefully" on the Feastday ofSanta Clara, a celebration offertility. Flashforward to the cusp-now narrative frame, and Sepang Loca's dead body lies just offstage, where it will remain until the recovered body ofher dead infant son is dredged from a well and 1 According to Mbembe, "the notion of 'postcolony' identifies specifically a given historical trajectory that ofsocieties recently emerging from the experience ofcolonization and the violence which the colonial relationship involves... [T]he postcolony is chaotically pluralistic; it has nonetheless an internal coherence. It is a specific system ofsigns, a particular way offabricating simulacra or re-forming stereotypes. It is not, however, just an economy ofsigns in which power is mirrored and imagined self-reflectively. The postcolony is characterized by a distinctive style ofpolitical improvisation, by a tendency to excess and lack ofproportion, as well as by distinctive ways identities are multiplied, transformed, and put into circulation. But the postcolony is also made up ofa series ofcorporate institutions and a political machinery that, once in place, constitute a distinctive regime ofviolence. In this sense, the postcolony is a particularly revealing, and rather dramatic, stage on which are played out the wider problems ofsubjection and its corollary, discipline" (Mbembe 2001:102-3). See Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, Berkeley: University ofCalifornia, 2001. placed on her chest. Onstage, the village men undertake the dredging while the women keep the fire stoked, the coffee warm, and the stories flowing. Sepang Loca's dead body, we discover, had been found slumped on the well wall shortly after giving birth to "yet another child" who will go unclaimed by his father. Mothers commiserate good- naturedly about raising the "monsters" that are their sons. Fathers perform morality as subterfuge for patriarchal alliance: Father decries the sin ofalcohol before Mother, she walks offstage, he rescinds his words before Son. This staging ofgendering in post- independence development makes uncanny the more familiar anti-colonial national allegory, which figures woman as violated nation. Sepang Loca is given no poiesis, and almost no diegesis. We are not invited to imagine her agency; rather, we are told that she is a bit crazy,

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