Elmo Gonzaga | The Chinese University of Hong Kong (original) (raw)

Books by Elmo Gonzaga

'Monsoon Marketplace: Capitalism, Media, and Modernity in Manila and Singapore', 2023

Chapter 7 explores the changes to capitalism, modernity, consumerism, and spectatorship in Manila... more Chapter 7 explores the changes to capitalism, modernity, consumerism, and spectatorship in Manila and Singapore’s media cultures during the late 2000s and early 2010s. It contrasts the architectural typologies of shopping malls such as SM Megamall on EDSA and Ion Orchard on Orchard Road, whose outsourced axiomatic of previously separate commercial and leisure spaces incarnated the utopian normalcy of the world city in drawing overseas investors and migrant workers with the buzz of elite prestige. The chapter examines how the award-winning novel 'The Quiet Ones' (2017) depicts call center agents with increased purchasing power negotiating the 24-hour cyclical time of neoliberal capitalism. It analyzes the bestselling book 'Crazy Rich Asians' (2013) to uncover how the financial excess of the super-rich transpires beyond the bounds of public access and consequence.

'Monsoon Marketplace: Capitalism, Media, and Modernity in Manila and Singapore', 2023

'Monsoon Marketplace' uncovers the entangled vernacular cultures of capitalist modernity, mass co... more 'Monsoon Marketplace' uncovers the entangled vernacular cultures of capitalist modernity, mass consumption, and media spectatorship in two understudied postcolonial Asian cities across three crucial historical moments. Juxtaposing Manila and Singapore, it analyzes print and audiovisual representations of popular commercial and leisure spaces during the colonial occupation in the 1930s, national development in the 1960s, and neoliberal globalization in the 2000s. Engaging with the work of creators including Nick Joaquin, Kevin Kwan, and P. Ramlee, it discusses figures of female shoppers in 1930s Manila, languid expatriates in 1930s Singapore, street hawkers in 1960s Singapore, youthful activists in 1960s Manila, call center agents in 2000s Manila, and super-rich investors in 2000s Singapore. Looking at the historical transformation of Calle Escolta, Avenida Rizal, Raffles Place, and Orchard Road, it focuses on Crystal Arcade, the Manila Carnival, the Great World and New World Amusement Parks, and Change Alley, all of which had once captivated the public imagination but have since vanished from the cityscape. Instead of treating capitalism, media, and modernity as overarching systems or processes, the book examines how their configurations and experiences are contingent, variable, pluralistic, and archipelagic. Diverging from critical theories and cultural studies that see consumerism and spectatorship as sources of alienation, docility, and fantasy, it explores how they create new possibilities for agency, collectivity, and resistance.

Kritika Kultura, Aug 2016

An intervention into contemporary debates about nationalism and postcoloniality, this work attemp... more An intervention into contemporary debates about nationalism and postcoloniality, this work attempts to locate the role of literary studies and the humanities in the age of globalization. It is informed by Deleuze and Guattari and Hardt and Negri, which are the critical lens through which dominant conceptions of nation, subjectivity, resistance, and analysis are interrogated.

Through the book's analysis, subject and collective become sites in which multiple flows and forces interact and conflict, processes that are made legible in texts. Two acclaimed Filipino novels in English, Jessica Hagedorn's 'Dogeaters' and Charlson Ong's 'An Embarrassment of Riches,' are read as markers in the passage from the despotic national sovereignty of Martial Law to the flexible capitalist sovereignty of post-EDSA. Mapped by the trajectories of these texts, possibilities for resistance coalesce into a dynamic form of community that has yet to be imagined, the becoming-nation.

Papers by Elmo Gonzaga

Remapping the Cold War in Asian Cinemas, 2024

With a career spanning six decades, the iconic actor, director, and producer Fernando Poe Jr., or... more With a career spanning six decades, the iconic actor, director, and producer Fernando Poe Jr., or FPJ, derived his immense popularity from his mythic persona as a hero of the oppressed. This chapter examines how the changing aesthetics and politics of his understudied !lms from the 1960s and 1970s were shaped by a bipolar Cold War imaginary of integration and containment. Patterned after the Western genre, FPJ’s 1960s narratives feature a solitary, altruistic stranger who liberates a marginalized community from its victimization by politicians, bandits, and landlords. Looking at FPJ’s artistic collaborations with Lino Brocka, Eddie Romero, and Celso Ad. Castillo, this chapter analyzes how tropes of heroism and suspicion are reworked at the onset of Marcos’ Martial Law dictatorship, which persecuted its opponents as communist fronts.

South East Asia Research, 2024

This article responds to debates about the complicity or outdatedness of regionalism in Area Stud... more This article responds to debates about the complicity or outdatedness of regionalism in Area Studies by analyzing creative works by local artists that reimagine South East Asia as ‘area’: Ho Tzu Nyen’s interactive database 'The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia' ('CDOSEA') (2012–present); and two omnibus films – the Asian Film Archive’s 'Fragment' (2015) and the former Luang Prabang Film Festival’s 'Mekong 2030' (2020), which feature acclaimed South East Asian filmmakers such as Lav Diaz, U-Wei Haji Saari, Anocha Suwichakornpong, Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit and Tan Chui Mui. Diverging from Caroline Ha Thuc’s earlier 'South East Asia Research' article by revisiting vernacular concepts of sovereignty and collectivity such as 'mandala' and 'zomia' in subaltern historical and anthropological writings, it examines how these works highlight the commonality of motifs of ecology, performance, mobility and spirituality. While the digital artwork 'CDOSEA' algorithmically rearranges constellations of images, words and sounds commonly associated with the region, the omnibus films 'Mekong 2030' and 'Fragment' combine diverse, fragmentary narratives from different locations within a single anthology. Transforming ‘area’ from an object of neocolonial knowledge production to a source of autonomous collective agency, the article explores how these works visualize a provisional community defined by its plurality, fluidity and inclusiveness.

Asian Cities

Background: An increasing number of patients with previously repaired congenital heart disease (C... more Background: An increasing number of patients with previously repaired congenital heart disease (CHD) present with pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH). This can occur immediately after repair (residual PAH) or years later. Case presentation: We present the case of a young woman who underwent repair of a ventricular septal defect in later childhood. Three years after repair, she was found to have significant residual PAH. She remained stable on PAH therapies, but a decade later decided to become pregnant against medical advice. She deteriorated during pregnancy and required escalation of PAH therapies and eventual admission to the intensive care unit, with an uneventful delivery at 32 weeks. Despite successful delivery, she remained symptomatic post-partum, with evidence of disease progression at right heart catheterisation. Conclusions: All patients with repaired CHD should undergo routine screening for PAH. Early diagnosis and expert management, including the use of PAH therapies, is recommended to optimise outcome. Pregnancy is contraindicated in PAH patients, including patients with CHD, and requires an expert multidisciplinary approach to reduce morbidity and mortality when patients opt to proceed.

Asian Cities

Background: An increasing number of patients with previously repaired congenital heart disease (C... more Background: An increasing number of patients with previously repaired congenital heart disease (CHD) present with pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH). This can occur immediately after repair (residual PAH) or years later. Case presentation: We present the case of a young woman who underwent repair of a ventricular septal defect in later childhood. Three years after repair, she was found to have significant residual PAH. She remained stable on PAH therapies, but a decade later decided to become pregnant against medical advice. She deteriorated during pregnancy and required escalation of PAH therapies and eventual admission to the intensive care unit, with an uneventful delivery at 32 weeks. Despite successful delivery, she remained symptomatic post-partum, with evidence of disease progression at right heart catheterisation. Conclusions: All patients with repaired CHD should undergo routine screening for PAH. Early diagnosis and expert management, including the use of PAH therapies, is recommended to optimise outcome. Pregnancy is contraindicated in PAH patients, including patients with CHD, and requires an expert multidisciplinary approach to reduce morbidity and mortality when patients opt to proceed.

Kritika Kultura, Aug 1, 2016

Cultural Studies, 2021

ABSTRACT At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, essays and memes likened its social and temporal ... more ABSTRACT At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, essays and memes likened its social and temporal conditions to the zombie apocalypse visualized in popular media. Circulating through Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, dystopian photos and videos of abandoned streets, plazas, and malls resonated with harrowing scenes of attacking hordes of zombies in the Netflix series Kingdeom (2019-2020), whose second season premiered when most Southeast Asian cities experienced lockdowns. Global news agencies reported on the unsettling anxiety about contagion from foreign migrants and tourists, from which, despite intensifying social tensions, many ‘developing’ or ‘emerging’ economies in Southeast Asia derive their vitality. If the scholarship about zombie narratives tends to focus on the docile, subjugated bodies of mass labour, critiques of neoliberal capitalism highlight their insatiable, irrational consumerism. In contrast, this article explores how the steep downturns from travel restrictions and citywide lockdowns to fight the outbreak have exposed the dependency of developmental state capitalism for its rapid pace of material growth not only on the flexibility of migrant labour but also on the contingency of speculative investment from overseas. Whereas state capitalism is typically understood to deploy its resources in protected industries and state-owned enterprises to consolidate its political rule, its use of authority now appears to centre on reducing market risk. The resilient temporality of the novel coronavirus has led to a new cyclical capitalist normalcy of surging, declining, and resurging infections, which governments have struggled to manage through varied forms of lockdown and quarantine such as Circuit Breakers (CB) in Singapore, Movement Control Orders (MCO) in Kuala Lumpur, and Enhanced Community Quarantines (ECQ) in Manila, with the failed aspiration of economic stability.

Kritika Kultura, 2016

This introduction to a special forum on intermediality in Southeast Asia starts with an overview ... more This introduction to a special forum on intermediality in Southeast Asia starts with an overview of prominent theories about interchanges between different media modalities. While the majority of these ideas conceive of intermediality as a seamless hybridization or convergence, the essay explores how such an understanding might be complicated by the Southeast Asian milieu, which is archipelagic and multicultural. It inquires if the indeterminate form of a mandala, whose conjunction is contingent and provisional, might be a more suitable framework for visualizing diverse and horizontal networks of intercommunication and interconnectivity.

Verge: Studies in Global Asias, 2020

The Journal of Asian Studies, 2019

Tracing the entangled genealogies of spaces of media spectatorship, modes of visual perception, a... more Tracing the entangled genealogies of spaces of media spectatorship, modes of visual perception, and practices of capitalist consumption, this article explores how the shift in Manila's main commercial street from Calle Escolta in the 1930s to Avenida Rizal in the 1960s reveals changes in the imagination and experience of capitalism and modernity. Previously embodied in the infrastructure, architecture, and technology of the cityscape, which only government and business were perceived as having the capacity to produce, modernity became reconfigured as a dynamic force that ordinary residents came to believe they could harness. The article comparatively analyzes variations and dissonances in the print and audiovisual media of the two periods, particularly in the contrasting representations of awkward vaudeville comedians and youthful movie antiheroes. Instead of treating consumer and media culture as a source of docility and atomization, it sees the collective spectatorship of mass...

Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities Asia, 2011

confronted by mounting allegations of corruption, electoral fraud, and abuse of executive power, ... more confronted by mounting allegations of corruption, electoral fraud, and abuse of executive power, the government of Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (2001-2010) called on critics and demonstrators to cease their dissent and uphold the "rule of law." Amid this unsettling void in political authority, the Philippine supreme court used its judicial power to promulgate rules that would enforce the "human rights" of citizens. by analyzing the speeches of President Arroyo and supreme court chief Justice Reynato s. Puno (2006-2010), the paper will examine how this dynamic plays out on the terrain of signification, where large political bodies, which claim to speak for the multitude of Filipinos, struggle over the parameters of sovereign power or the idea of what the government "should do" and "cannot do."

Kritika Kultura, 2009

The Philippine People Power Revolution (EDSA) was remarkable for its non-aggressive overthrow of ... more The Philippine People Power Revolution (EDSA) was remarkable for its non-aggressive overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship. The spontaneity and creativity of the people to answer the summons to defend dissonant army troops contrasts with the administrative efficiency and armed might of the military army. The people acted as a collectivity, with its own collective power, opposing the military. This non-aggressive collective power was rooted in a distinctive Filipino culture and religiosity that hailed the EDSA Revolution as a miracle of divine justice.

Drawing on the scholarship on how infrastructures facilitate the borderless mobility of transnati... more Drawing on the scholarship on how infrastructures facilitate the borderless mobility of transnational flows across commodity supply chains in a time of dispersed sovereignty, this article analyzes spatial depictions of interlinked nodes for finance, extraction, and logistics, which define the operations of a capitalist world system centered in metropolitan areas in the Asia-Pacific region. Looking at the emergent genre of the planetary network blockbuster, which comprises superhero, science-fiction, and spy narratives that transpire across an array of transpacific landscapes in the strenuous effort to confront a global threat, it examines its conventional audiovisual construction of setting based on variances of material progress. Diverging from normative critiques of techno-orientalist portrayals of excessive East Asian wealth, which tend to be concerned with racialized bodies, this article uncovers how the visualization of global inequalities rests on interreferential urban iconographies that juxtapose the order, prosperity, and dynamism of ‘industrialized’ Northeast Asian capitals Tokyo, Shanghai, Seoul, and Hong Kong with the illegality, vulnerability, and squalor of ‘emerging’ Southeast Asian megacities Bangkok, Jakarta, Manila, and Ho Chi Minh City. Focusing on recurrent fragmentary representations from sequels and spinoffs of the Bond, Bourne, Marvel, and Transformers franchises that map intraregional supply chains of monetized biomedical, robotic, and cybernetic technology, it explores how infrastructural imaginaries of skyscrapers, laboratories, mines, factories, powerplants, warehouses, roads, and ports can reorder hierarchies of speculative investment, urban development, scientific innovation, and military security.

This essay for the international Blu-ray release of Dwein Baltazar's 'Oda sa Wala' explores the r... more This essay for the international Blu-ray release of Dwein Baltazar's 'Oda sa Wala' explores the resonances of the film with Thai, Filipino, and Southeast Asian horror as well as Aureus Solito's music video for the Pinoy rock band Eraserheads' classic 'Ang Huling El Bimbo.'

THE UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES PRESS E. de los Santos St., UP Campus, Diliman, Quezon City 110... more THE UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES PRESS E. de los Santos St., UP Campus, Diliman, Quezon City 1101 Tel. Nos.: 9282558, 9253243 E-mail: press@up.edu.ph © 2009 by Elmo Gonzaga All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval ...

'Monsoon Marketplace: Capitalism, Media, and Modernity in Manila and Singapore', 2023

Chapter 7 explores the changes to capitalism, modernity, consumerism, and spectatorship in Manila... more Chapter 7 explores the changes to capitalism, modernity, consumerism, and spectatorship in Manila and Singapore’s media cultures during the late 2000s and early 2010s. It contrasts the architectural typologies of shopping malls such as SM Megamall on EDSA and Ion Orchard on Orchard Road, whose outsourced axiomatic of previously separate commercial and leisure spaces incarnated the utopian normalcy of the world city in drawing overseas investors and migrant workers with the buzz of elite prestige. The chapter examines how the award-winning novel 'The Quiet Ones' (2017) depicts call center agents with increased purchasing power negotiating the 24-hour cyclical time of neoliberal capitalism. It analyzes the bestselling book 'Crazy Rich Asians' (2013) to uncover how the financial excess of the super-rich transpires beyond the bounds of public access and consequence.

'Monsoon Marketplace: Capitalism, Media, and Modernity in Manila and Singapore', 2023

'Monsoon Marketplace' uncovers the entangled vernacular cultures of capitalist modernity, mass co... more 'Monsoon Marketplace' uncovers the entangled vernacular cultures of capitalist modernity, mass consumption, and media spectatorship in two understudied postcolonial Asian cities across three crucial historical moments. Juxtaposing Manila and Singapore, it analyzes print and audiovisual representations of popular commercial and leisure spaces during the colonial occupation in the 1930s, national development in the 1960s, and neoliberal globalization in the 2000s. Engaging with the work of creators including Nick Joaquin, Kevin Kwan, and P. Ramlee, it discusses figures of female shoppers in 1930s Manila, languid expatriates in 1930s Singapore, street hawkers in 1960s Singapore, youthful activists in 1960s Manila, call center agents in 2000s Manila, and super-rich investors in 2000s Singapore. Looking at the historical transformation of Calle Escolta, Avenida Rizal, Raffles Place, and Orchard Road, it focuses on Crystal Arcade, the Manila Carnival, the Great World and New World Amusement Parks, and Change Alley, all of which had once captivated the public imagination but have since vanished from the cityscape. Instead of treating capitalism, media, and modernity as overarching systems or processes, the book examines how their configurations and experiences are contingent, variable, pluralistic, and archipelagic. Diverging from critical theories and cultural studies that see consumerism and spectatorship as sources of alienation, docility, and fantasy, it explores how they create new possibilities for agency, collectivity, and resistance.

Kritika Kultura, Aug 2016

An intervention into contemporary debates about nationalism and postcoloniality, this work attemp... more An intervention into contemporary debates about nationalism and postcoloniality, this work attempts to locate the role of literary studies and the humanities in the age of globalization. It is informed by Deleuze and Guattari and Hardt and Negri, which are the critical lens through which dominant conceptions of nation, subjectivity, resistance, and analysis are interrogated.

Through the book's analysis, subject and collective become sites in which multiple flows and forces interact and conflict, processes that are made legible in texts. Two acclaimed Filipino novels in English, Jessica Hagedorn's 'Dogeaters' and Charlson Ong's 'An Embarrassment of Riches,' are read as markers in the passage from the despotic national sovereignty of Martial Law to the flexible capitalist sovereignty of post-EDSA. Mapped by the trajectories of these texts, possibilities for resistance coalesce into a dynamic form of community that has yet to be imagined, the becoming-nation.

Remapping the Cold War in Asian Cinemas, 2024

With a career spanning six decades, the iconic actor, director, and producer Fernando Poe Jr., or... more With a career spanning six decades, the iconic actor, director, and producer Fernando Poe Jr., or FPJ, derived his immense popularity from his mythic persona as a hero of the oppressed. This chapter examines how the changing aesthetics and politics of his understudied !lms from the 1960s and 1970s were shaped by a bipolar Cold War imaginary of integration and containment. Patterned after the Western genre, FPJ’s 1960s narratives feature a solitary, altruistic stranger who liberates a marginalized community from its victimization by politicians, bandits, and landlords. Looking at FPJ’s artistic collaborations with Lino Brocka, Eddie Romero, and Celso Ad. Castillo, this chapter analyzes how tropes of heroism and suspicion are reworked at the onset of Marcos’ Martial Law dictatorship, which persecuted its opponents as communist fronts.

South East Asia Research, 2024

This article responds to debates about the complicity or outdatedness of regionalism in Area Stud... more This article responds to debates about the complicity or outdatedness of regionalism in Area Studies by analyzing creative works by local artists that reimagine South East Asia as ‘area’: Ho Tzu Nyen’s interactive database 'The Critical Dictionary of Southeast Asia' ('CDOSEA') (2012–present); and two omnibus films – the Asian Film Archive’s 'Fragment' (2015) and the former Luang Prabang Film Festival’s 'Mekong 2030' (2020), which feature acclaimed South East Asian filmmakers such as Lav Diaz, U-Wei Haji Saari, Anocha Suwichakornpong, Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit and Tan Chui Mui. Diverging from Caroline Ha Thuc’s earlier 'South East Asia Research' article by revisiting vernacular concepts of sovereignty and collectivity such as 'mandala' and 'zomia' in subaltern historical and anthropological writings, it examines how these works highlight the commonality of motifs of ecology, performance, mobility and spirituality. While the digital artwork 'CDOSEA' algorithmically rearranges constellations of images, words and sounds commonly associated with the region, the omnibus films 'Mekong 2030' and 'Fragment' combine diverse, fragmentary narratives from different locations within a single anthology. Transforming ‘area’ from an object of neocolonial knowledge production to a source of autonomous collective agency, the article explores how these works visualize a provisional community defined by its plurality, fluidity and inclusiveness.

Asian Cities

Background: An increasing number of patients with previously repaired congenital heart disease (C... more Background: An increasing number of patients with previously repaired congenital heart disease (CHD) present with pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH). This can occur immediately after repair (residual PAH) or years later. Case presentation: We present the case of a young woman who underwent repair of a ventricular septal defect in later childhood. Three years after repair, she was found to have significant residual PAH. She remained stable on PAH therapies, but a decade later decided to become pregnant against medical advice. She deteriorated during pregnancy and required escalation of PAH therapies and eventual admission to the intensive care unit, with an uneventful delivery at 32 weeks. Despite successful delivery, she remained symptomatic post-partum, with evidence of disease progression at right heart catheterisation. Conclusions: All patients with repaired CHD should undergo routine screening for PAH. Early diagnosis and expert management, including the use of PAH therapies, is recommended to optimise outcome. Pregnancy is contraindicated in PAH patients, including patients with CHD, and requires an expert multidisciplinary approach to reduce morbidity and mortality when patients opt to proceed.

Asian Cities

Background: An increasing number of patients with previously repaired congenital heart disease (C... more Background: An increasing number of patients with previously repaired congenital heart disease (CHD) present with pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH). This can occur immediately after repair (residual PAH) or years later. Case presentation: We present the case of a young woman who underwent repair of a ventricular septal defect in later childhood. Three years after repair, she was found to have significant residual PAH. She remained stable on PAH therapies, but a decade later decided to become pregnant against medical advice. She deteriorated during pregnancy and required escalation of PAH therapies and eventual admission to the intensive care unit, with an uneventful delivery at 32 weeks. Despite successful delivery, she remained symptomatic post-partum, with evidence of disease progression at right heart catheterisation. Conclusions: All patients with repaired CHD should undergo routine screening for PAH. Early diagnosis and expert management, including the use of PAH therapies, is recommended to optimise outcome. Pregnancy is contraindicated in PAH patients, including patients with CHD, and requires an expert multidisciplinary approach to reduce morbidity and mortality when patients opt to proceed.

Kritika Kultura, Aug 1, 2016

Cultural Studies, 2021

ABSTRACT At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, essays and memes likened its social and temporal ... more ABSTRACT At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, essays and memes likened its social and temporal conditions to the zombie apocalypse visualized in popular media. Circulating through Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, dystopian photos and videos of abandoned streets, plazas, and malls resonated with harrowing scenes of attacking hordes of zombies in the Netflix series Kingdeom (2019-2020), whose second season premiered when most Southeast Asian cities experienced lockdowns. Global news agencies reported on the unsettling anxiety about contagion from foreign migrants and tourists, from which, despite intensifying social tensions, many ‘developing’ or ‘emerging’ economies in Southeast Asia derive their vitality. If the scholarship about zombie narratives tends to focus on the docile, subjugated bodies of mass labour, critiques of neoliberal capitalism highlight their insatiable, irrational consumerism. In contrast, this article explores how the steep downturns from travel restrictions and citywide lockdowns to fight the outbreak have exposed the dependency of developmental state capitalism for its rapid pace of material growth not only on the flexibility of migrant labour but also on the contingency of speculative investment from overseas. Whereas state capitalism is typically understood to deploy its resources in protected industries and state-owned enterprises to consolidate its political rule, its use of authority now appears to centre on reducing market risk. The resilient temporality of the novel coronavirus has led to a new cyclical capitalist normalcy of surging, declining, and resurging infections, which governments have struggled to manage through varied forms of lockdown and quarantine such as Circuit Breakers (CB) in Singapore, Movement Control Orders (MCO) in Kuala Lumpur, and Enhanced Community Quarantines (ECQ) in Manila, with the failed aspiration of economic stability.

Kritika Kultura, 2016

This introduction to a special forum on intermediality in Southeast Asia starts with an overview ... more This introduction to a special forum on intermediality in Southeast Asia starts with an overview of prominent theories about interchanges between different media modalities. While the majority of these ideas conceive of intermediality as a seamless hybridization or convergence, the essay explores how such an understanding might be complicated by the Southeast Asian milieu, which is archipelagic and multicultural. It inquires if the indeterminate form of a mandala, whose conjunction is contingent and provisional, might be a more suitable framework for visualizing diverse and horizontal networks of intercommunication and interconnectivity.

Verge: Studies in Global Asias, 2020

The Journal of Asian Studies, 2019

Tracing the entangled genealogies of spaces of media spectatorship, modes of visual perception, a... more Tracing the entangled genealogies of spaces of media spectatorship, modes of visual perception, and practices of capitalist consumption, this article explores how the shift in Manila's main commercial street from Calle Escolta in the 1930s to Avenida Rizal in the 1960s reveals changes in the imagination and experience of capitalism and modernity. Previously embodied in the infrastructure, architecture, and technology of the cityscape, which only government and business were perceived as having the capacity to produce, modernity became reconfigured as a dynamic force that ordinary residents came to believe they could harness. The article comparatively analyzes variations and dissonances in the print and audiovisual media of the two periods, particularly in the contrasting representations of awkward vaudeville comedians and youthful movie antiheroes. Instead of treating consumer and media culture as a source of docility and atomization, it sees the collective spectatorship of mass...

Perspectives in the Arts and Humanities Asia, 2011

confronted by mounting allegations of corruption, electoral fraud, and abuse of executive power, ... more confronted by mounting allegations of corruption, electoral fraud, and abuse of executive power, the government of Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (2001-2010) called on critics and demonstrators to cease their dissent and uphold the "rule of law." Amid this unsettling void in political authority, the Philippine supreme court used its judicial power to promulgate rules that would enforce the "human rights" of citizens. by analyzing the speeches of President Arroyo and supreme court chief Justice Reynato s. Puno (2006-2010), the paper will examine how this dynamic plays out on the terrain of signification, where large political bodies, which claim to speak for the multitude of Filipinos, struggle over the parameters of sovereign power or the idea of what the government "should do" and "cannot do."

Kritika Kultura, 2009

The Philippine People Power Revolution (EDSA) was remarkable for its non-aggressive overthrow of ... more The Philippine People Power Revolution (EDSA) was remarkable for its non-aggressive overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship. The spontaneity and creativity of the people to answer the summons to defend dissonant army troops contrasts with the administrative efficiency and armed might of the military army. The people acted as a collectivity, with its own collective power, opposing the military. This non-aggressive collective power was rooted in a distinctive Filipino culture and religiosity that hailed the EDSA Revolution as a miracle of divine justice.

Drawing on the scholarship on how infrastructures facilitate the borderless mobility of transnati... more Drawing on the scholarship on how infrastructures facilitate the borderless mobility of transnational flows across commodity supply chains in a time of dispersed sovereignty, this article analyzes spatial depictions of interlinked nodes for finance, extraction, and logistics, which define the operations of a capitalist world system centered in metropolitan areas in the Asia-Pacific region. Looking at the emergent genre of the planetary network blockbuster, which comprises superhero, science-fiction, and spy narratives that transpire across an array of transpacific landscapes in the strenuous effort to confront a global threat, it examines its conventional audiovisual construction of setting based on variances of material progress. Diverging from normative critiques of techno-orientalist portrayals of excessive East Asian wealth, which tend to be concerned with racialized bodies, this article uncovers how the visualization of global inequalities rests on interreferential urban iconographies that juxtapose the order, prosperity, and dynamism of ‘industrialized’ Northeast Asian capitals Tokyo, Shanghai, Seoul, and Hong Kong with the illegality, vulnerability, and squalor of ‘emerging’ Southeast Asian megacities Bangkok, Jakarta, Manila, and Ho Chi Minh City. Focusing on recurrent fragmentary representations from sequels and spinoffs of the Bond, Bourne, Marvel, and Transformers franchises that map intraregional supply chains of monetized biomedical, robotic, and cybernetic technology, it explores how infrastructural imaginaries of skyscrapers, laboratories, mines, factories, powerplants, warehouses, roads, and ports can reorder hierarchies of speculative investment, urban development, scientific innovation, and military security.

This essay for the international Blu-ray release of Dwein Baltazar's 'Oda sa Wala' explores the r... more This essay for the international Blu-ray release of Dwein Baltazar's 'Oda sa Wala' explores the resonances of the film with Thai, Filipino, and Southeast Asian horror as well as Aureus Solito's music video for the Pinoy rock band Eraserheads' classic 'Ang Huling El Bimbo.'

THE UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES PRESS E. de los Santos St., UP Campus, Diliman, Quezon City 110... more THE UNIVERSITY OF THE PHILIPPINES PRESS E. de los Santos St., UP Campus, Diliman, Quezon City 1101 Tel. Nos.: 9282558, 9253243 E-mail: press@up.edu.ph © 2009 by Elmo Gonzaga All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval ...

Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2021

Drawing on the scholarship on how infrastructures facilitate the borderless mobility of transnati... more Drawing on the scholarship on how infrastructures facilitate the borderless mobility of transnational flows across commodity supply chains in a time of dispersed sovereignty, this article analyzes spatial depictions of interlinked nodes for finance, extraction, and logistics, which define the operations of a capitalist world system centered in metropolitan areas in the Asia-Pacific region. Looking at the emergent genre of the planetary network blockbuster, which comprises superhero, science-fiction, and spy narratives that transpire across an array of transpacific landscapes in the strenuous effort to confront a global threat, it examines its conventional audiovisual construction of setting based on variances of material progress. Diverging from normative critiques of techno-orientalist portrayals of excessive East Asian wealth, which tend to be concerned with racialized bodies, this article uncovers how the visualization of global inequalities rests on interreferential urban iconographies that juxtapose the order, prosperity, and dynamism of ‘industrialized’ Northeast Asian capitals Tokyo, Shanghai, Seoul, and Hong Kong with the illegality, vulnerability, and squalor of ‘emerging’ Southeast Asian megacities Bangkok, Jakarta, Manila, and Ho Chi Minh City. Focusing on recurrent fragmentary representations from sequels and spinoffs of the Bond, Bourne, Marvel, and Transformers franchises that map intraregional supply chains of monetized biomedical, robotic, and cybernetic technology, it explores how infrastructural imaginaries of skyscrapers, laboratories, mines, factories, powerplants, warehouses, roads, and ports can reorder hierarchies of speculative investment, urban development, scientific innovation, and military security.

Cultural Studies, 2021

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, essays and memes likened its social and temporal condition... more At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, essays and memes likened its social and temporal conditions to the zombie apocalypse visualized in popular media. Circulating through Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, dystopian photos and videos of abandoned streets, plazas, and malls resonated with harrowing scenes of attacking hordes of zombies in the Netflix series 'Kingdeom' (2019-2020), whose second season premiered when most Southeast Asian cities experienced lockdowns. Global news agencies reported on the unsettling anxiety about contagion from foreign migrants and tourists, from which, despite intensifying social tensions, many ‘developing’ or ‘emerging’ economies in Southeast Asia derive their vitality. If the scholarship about zombie narratives tends to focus on the docile, subjugated bodies of mass labour, critiques of neoliberal capitalism highlight their insatiable, irrational consumerism. In contrast, this article explores how the steep downturns from travel restrictions and citywide lockdowns to fight the outbreak have exposed the dependency of developmental state capitalism for its rapid pace of material growth not only on the flexibility of migrant labour but also on the contingency of speculative investment from overseas. Whereas state capitalism is typically understood to deploy its resources in protected industries and state-owned enterprises to consolidate its political rule, its use of authority now appears to centre on reducing market risk. The resilient temporality of the novel coronavirus has led to a new cyclical capitalist normalcy of surging, declining, and resurging infections, which governments have struggled to manage through varied forms of lockdown and quarantine such as Circuit Breakers (CB) in Singapore, Movement Control Orders (MCO) in Kuala Lumpur, and Enhanced Community Quarantines (ECQ) in Manila, with the failed aspiration of economic stability.

In this research-based module, we will explore how urban spaces across Southeast Asia have been i... more In this research-based module, we will explore how urban spaces across Southeast Asia have been imagined through visual forms like cinema, painting, advertising, and digital media. Using historical, theoretical, and anthropological texts as models, we will inquire into the process by which images negotiate and redefine the contours and notions of the geographies they are made to replace. How do movies transform disregarded cityscapes into protagonists? How are photographs and postcards of abandoned or demolished structures incorporated into historical memory? How do territorial, tourist, and transit maps shape aspirations of citizens and migrants? Students can pursue one of several trajectories.

South East Asia Research, Sep 3, 2021