curate: Perpetual Peace is feature-length video about contemporary globalization in the Philippines. It explores the nexus between the legacy of colonialism, the extraction of resources from the third world, the biopolitics of migrant labor, the US remilitarization of its former colonies, the postcolonial diaspora, and the human cost of empire. The video traces my return to the Philippines after having been born in the United States to parents who left the country thirty-five years ago, amidst the US-backed Marcos dictatorship. What processes have caused the tremendous migration of Filipinos globally? How is the third world central to processes of globalization? What are the living conditions that people in the Philippines endure? How do the children of the diaspora understand themselves within a global political history? I partnered with leftist activists working within the Philippines and filmed sites shaped by the terms of global capital such as special economic zones, multinational mining ventures, the export of resources, and the hearts and minds campaigns of the US remilitarization of the region. The Philippines was a colony of Spain for 350 years and a colony of the US for about 50 years. Despite the Philippines’ supposed sovereign status, they went from colony to neocolony, and their economic and political fate was still determined by the United States. Perpetual Peace traces the passage from first world to third world, from imperial center to neocolonial periphery, and stages an encounter with an ‘America’ about which people know very little. It is an ‘America’ that exists at the neocolonial margins through processes of militarization, corporate liberalization, and labor exploitation. (via About Perpetual Peace : MICHELLE DIZON) Definitely a needed examination. I haven’t watched the video yet; I will when my headspace (and my time) can handle it. Just a note, though — not a criticism, let me just point out: ‘Was still determined by the US’? I’d say, more accurate would be a qualified ‘is’. To be entirely frank about it, the entire Philippines — not just special economic zones, not just Subic or Clark or Olongapo, not just areas of conflict in Mindanao, not just our mines, etc — is still to a large extent shaped by the forces of global capital and the remaining weight of the country’s colonial legacy. We did not gain our freedom in 1946. The struggle for and the movement towards freedom is an ongoing process, and there is little peace in it.

curate:

Perpetual Peace is feature-length video about contemporary globalization in the Philippines. It explores the nexus between the legacy of colonialism, the extraction of resources from the third world, the biopolitics of migrant labor, the US remilitarization of its former colonies, the postcolonial diaspora, and the human cost of empire. The video traces my return to the Philippines after having been born in the United States to parents who left the country thirty-five years ago, amidst the US-backed Marcos dictatorship. What processes have caused the tremendous migration of Filipinos globally? How is the third world central to processes of globalization? What are the living conditions that people in the Philippines endure? How do the children of the diaspora understand themselves within a global political history? I partnered with leftist activists working within the Philippines and filmed sites shaped by the terms of global capital such as special economic zones, multinational mining ventures, the export of resources, and the hearts and minds campaigns of the US remilitarization of the region. The Philippines was a colony of Spain for 350 years and a colony of the US for about 50 years. Despite the Philippines’ supposed sovereign status, they went from colony to neocolony, and their economic and political fate was still determined by the United States. Perpetual Peace traces the passage from first world to third world, from imperial center to neocolonial periphery, and stages an encounter with an ‘America’ about which people know very little. It is an ‘America’ that exists at the neocolonial margins through processes of militarization, corporate liberalization, and labor exploitation.

(via About Perpetual Peace : MICHELLE DIZON)

Definitely a needed examination. I haven’t watched the video yet; I will when my headspace (and my time) can handle it.

Just a note, though — not a criticism, let me just point out:

‘Was still determined by the US’? I’d say, more accurate would be a qualified ‘is’.

To be entirely frank about it, the entire Philippines — not just special economic zones, not just Subic or Clark or Olongapo, not just areas of conflict in Mindanao, not just our mines, etc — is still to a large extent shaped by the forces of global capital and the remaining weight of the country’s colonial legacy. We did not gain our freedom in 1946. The struggle for and the movement towards freedom is an ongoing process, and there is little peace in it.

(via fyseasia)