| This thesis explores "the new imperialism of exploitation as development" (Spivak 1999) in the post-independent Philippines. In examining the Philippines' positioning in specific circuits of global capital, economic development is considered as industry, cultural practice, desiring-machine, and spatio-temporal imaginary. Focusing on state, social science, and activist problematizations of agricultural biotechnology, migrant Filipina domestic work, and the peripheralization of indigenous 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 of state (Handy 1988).; The staging of capital in the Philippines since formal independence requires analysis that simultaneously considers neocolonial relations, efforts at decolonization, and conditions of postcoloniality. 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). |
