My essay, “Passionate Engagements, Intimate Entrapments: Love, War, and Those Caught Between EMPIRE and Nation” has been published in Wasafiri Magazine as part of a special issue on Southeast Asia and the Littoral. Earlier, a version of this article was also conferred the 2023 Biography Prize by the Center for Biographical Research (CBR) at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Thank you Nazry Bahrawi, Joanne Leow, and the late Y-Dang Troeung, for your hard work in realizing this. Preorder your copy now!
My essay explores how war, colonialism, and generational trauma are recorded, processed, and worked through by autoethnographic filmmakers from the Philippines and the Filipino diaspora. This year marks 125 years since the Spanish American War and the onset of the Philippine American War, when Americans executed their own genocide of Filipinos. General Jacob H. Smith himself was notorious for ordering, on the island of Samar, to “kill everyone over the age of ten [and make the island] a howling wilderness.” Today, Empire continues to fuel such crimes against humanity; Palestine is only the latest example. In the coming decades, what stories, what films will we hear from the survivors? Will Empire continue to get away with it?
Adrian Alarilla 