Fantasy-Production

Taking an innovative, postcolonial, feminist perspective on transformations in the Philippine nation in the context of globalization, Fantasy-Production provides a theoretical framework for understanding the nationalist and postcolonial capitalist logics shaping the actions of the Philippines as a nation-state. Tadiar probes the consequences of dominant Philippine imaginations by examining a broad range of phenomena which characterize the contemporary Philippine nation, including the mass migration overseas of domestic workers, the ‘prostitution economy’, urban restructuring, the popular revolt toppling the Marcos dictatorship, as well as various works of art, poetry, historiography, and film. This will be one of the first books available widely in English that provides a sustained theoretical engagement with the cultural dimensions of contemporary socio-political and economic developments in the Philippines.

Neferti Tadiar is Associate Professor in the Department of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

“Fantasy-Production establishes Neferti Tadiar as an astute, imaginative and theoretically sophisticated cultural critic of the Philippines and the Pacific. The book ranges in coverage from issues of popular culture to issues in the historiography of the Philippines. Tadiar is sensitive throughout to the dialectic between the global and the local; analysing the impact of global forces on Philippine society, while enriching our understanding of how the local permutations of global forces at a variety of levels may be crucial to any understanding not just of the Philippines but also of issues in Pacific and global studies.” —Arif Dirlik, Knight Professor of Social Science, Professor of History and Anthropology, University of Oregon

“Fantasy-Production is an important and much needed intervention in the growing debates regarding globalization and its vicissitudes especially in the so-called third world. It is of great value to those with a stake in grafting feminist critiques of modernization theory with postcolonial theories regarding the fate of the nation-state amid emergent conditions of the international (and gendered) divisions of labor. And it is a welcome addition to the growing body of critical area studies, offering theoretically informed analysis of an important area of Southeast Asia.” —Vicente L. Rafael, Professor of Communication, University of California, San Diego, and author of White Love and Other Events in Filipino History

“Given the dearth of works in the field of cultural studies that offer sustained theoretical engagements with—and not just descriptions or case studies of─contemporary socio-political and economic ‘developments’ in the region, a book such as Fantasy-Production is not only timely and welcome, but exigent as well.” —Caroline Hau, Associate Professor, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, author of Necessary Fictions: Philippine Literature and the Nation 1946–1980