Allan Punzalan Isaac offers us a temporal framework to understand the lives and labour of Filipinos, in the Philippines and abroad, in relation to and beyond the scope of capital: ‘Filipino Time’. The introduction reviews the concepts that support his argument, including affect, affective labour, queer relationality and Filipino Time, which he uses to interpret the lives of Filipinos in various industries of care and contracted labour. While the labour of Filipinos produces a commonly circulated narrative of dislocation and disjuncture, it also produces incommensurable life-making socialities and creative capacities when time is viewed as multivalent and multidirectional. The argument is exemplified through a wide range of material, including interviews, novels, plays, documentary films, and other media. In doing so, Isaac draws out Filipinos’ relations and proximity to capital, but also how they create new worlds and imagine new futures despite their assigned capitalist labour-time locations. Isaac allows interdisciplinary scholars and writers of Filipino/a/x labour a way to acknowledge the determinism of capitalist relations, while holding in tension the life-affirming practices of Filipino Time.
In chapter 1 Isaac turns to Ramona Diaz's documentary, The Learning, about Filipina migrant teachers of Black American students in Baltimore, Maryland. He notes that the conjoined histories and trajectories of both groups—Filipina migrants and Black youth—are bound up in the reverberations of slavery in the United States and colonialism in the Philippines, linked by white settler imperialism. He introduces the concept of ‘datíng’, which is defined in two ways: first, it refers to the impact of a person's bearing in a social setting and multiple ways in which observers are affected by this person's presence, their ‘social potency’. He uses datíng in discussing the life stories in The Learning through the song and dance performed by the migrant teachers featured in the film. The appeal or impact of one's datíng can be interruptive of the normative time and space that often overly define these underpaid Filipino teachers in under-resourced Black school districts. Yet, the teacher Angel teaches her students with datíng in recognition of their shared humanity, creating a new vision of a future where both she and her students can be the authors of their own transformation.
Second, Isaac also uses datíng in the sense of ‘arrival’, by resisting the triumphalist and normative arc of a migrant's return from the diaspora. Through a discussion of arrivals, he conjures multiple temporalities in which migrants resist redemption and grapple with Filipino Time as a displacement of belonging in the past or their homeland. Another teacher, Dorotea, returns to her hometown and the school where she was a veteran teacher, with the song, ‘I've Never Been to Me’ layered over the images of her return, as she holds in tension her past (as a teacher in the Philippines), present (as a temporary summer visitor), and the future (as a migrant who will leave again).
Presenting datíng in both these senses offers a way to think about Filipinas’ lives in the disruptive logics of the Philippine nation-state that rely on a narrative of docile migrant care-workers as self-sacrificing remitters of money back home. Instead, Filipina migrants face racial inequality and precarity in the United States, coupled with family demands. Still, ‘a creative capacity [is] wrested from labour-time’ (p. 38) by Filipinas through their relationships, their lives, and multiple selves that emerge beyond the commodity they are defined by.
Next, Isaac examines short stories by Michelle Cruz Skinner, Mia Alvar and Nathan Go to interrogate the nuances and contradictions between the capitalist time that drives the experiences of Filipino migrant workers. I identify four aspects of capitalist-driven time in this chapter: speculation, rhythm, race management, and debt accrual. The protagonists include a domestic worker in Israel, a special education teacher in Bahrain, and a fortune-teller and masseur whose life spans 400 years of Philippine history. Isaac argues that migrant lives develop all types of affective connections and exchanges outside the domain of capital. Speculating on things like currency exchange and maximising opportunities for ‘days off’, and developing a workday rhythm in community with other domestics, were common practices among the Filipina domestic workers I interviewed for my own research. In Skinner's story, the tempos organised by capital can also have ‘apposition’—‘impl[ying] a positioning towards or a placement in relationship or proximity to another’ (p. 53)—that is not in opposition to and yet, not a submission to capitalist systems. Skinner's story is filled with affective communing between past and current domestic workers and the possibilities of agency and power even within hierarchical relationships.
In his discussion of a short story by Alvar, Isaac focuses on the racialised and gendered experience of a professional Filipina migrant in Bahrain, suggesting that class differences between migrants are often invisible as Filipina bodies are codified and conflated with servitude. While the protagonist, Sally, is of equal class status as her employer, her race overdetermines her labour time and thus is exchanged for wages. Still, the story highlights the luxurious gifts given to Sally, or the smiles exchanged between Sally and her charges, affective exchanges that exist alongside normative capitalist exchanges (such as wages for labour). And yet the racial codification of Sally's body is obscured by the affective exchanges that provide evidence of a qualitatively different way to sense race within managed labour-time. In sum, the race and class of Filipina migrants in the diaspora might be shaped by their labour, but the communicative and affective exchanges between their employers and themselves can contain both pleasure and pain.
The last story discussed in chapter 2 concerns a heartbroken oracle who has a gambling habit, the story lending itself to a discussion about debt. Isaac offers an analysis around debt in Filipino Time that conjures Tagalog words like utang ng loob, ‘an internal and relational debt’. Here debt is seen beyond the capitalist profit accumulation, to repaying in relational terms through communality and kinship.
As an ethnographer, chapter 3, ‘I Understand Where You're Coming From’, was exciting, as Isaac combines a reading of visual texts (a magazine cover and call centre advertisements) with ethnographic notes, interviews and focus groups of call centre workers. Here he examines the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry in the Philippines as its workers ‘negotiate uneven futures and disruptions to daily and communal life’ (p. 69). Serving customers in the Global North, the work necessitated behavioural and temporal shifts in the workers’ lives. Moreover, BPO workers are still seen as offshore subjects of a nationalist trope of Filipinos as innately caring, or what Isaac calls ‘affective exceptionalism’. While he argues that the main difference between the non-mobile BPO workers and migrant workers is the lure of staying in the Philippines with the possibility of class mobility, he also asserts that the vampirish BPO work schedule disrupts their aspirations to live a middle-class life in their own time zone and with their own families.
Chapter 4 centres around the lives of queer Filipinos in Palestine (Israel), as represented in the play Care Divas and the documentary, Paper Dolls. These show the lives of queer Filipinos who work as caregivers to elderly Jews during the day and perform as drag queens at night. In opposition to the Philippine national narrative, Isaac recognises the queer migrants’ communal efforts to refuse the tropes of filial obligation and rather imagine an alternative kinship. The migrants confront the deaths of one of their peers and of their charges, respectively. Isaac builds on an interview with the playwright of Care Divas, a play that resists ‘wallowing’, defined as indulging and accepting the romanticised Philippine narrative of death. Rather, the community practices not wallowing, a refusal to accept a timeline that pushes back on the logic of individuation preferred by the narratives of Filipino migranthood. This form of disaffection, to borrow from Martin Manalansan, gives way to the multiple and alternative temporalities wherein queer migrants reimagine their obligation and position in the normative heterosexual family, both their own and their employer(s). Isaac argues that the Filipino migrant drag queens who are narrated and treated as ‘serviceable bodies’ create pleasure and reimagine new futures.
The final chapter provides us with a profound example of Filipino Time through e-burol, the ritual of digital mourning that has been a phenomenon in the Philippines since 2009. Through participant observation of an e-burol for ‘George’, Isaac demonstrates the sociality that comes with grief across time zones, through live-streaming, the e-burol chat board, and text messages between family in the Philippines and abroad, using the Tagalog terms pakiramdam as ‘affective exchange without immediate proximity at all’, and kapiling as ‘be[ing] in someone's proximity or vicinity but does not necessarily include or demand any interaction between the two parties’ (p. 117). Both pakiramdam and kapiling are used to describe the process in which Filipino migrants can be felt without being seen or present, regardless of their time zone, while also attending to their lives. In researching Filipina domestic workers in New York I reflected that Skype had changed the relationality between separated family members. With what Isaac offers, I am able to reflect back and agree that the digital interactions were not just about real-time communication, but so much about the affective exchange of ‘being with’ one another through technology. As scholars of the Filipino diaspora consider the changing ways in which migrants make meanings of their lives while abroad and with their families, we can all take from the multiple sites and examples in Filipino Time to build on Isaac's aim: ‘to name and make legible possibilities for meaning making and lifeways generated alongside capital relations’.
