Legacies of Spanish Colonialism

In recent years, flesh has emerged as a rich and significant analytic for thinking about corporeality, especially concerning race, violence, and politics. It also becomes useful for illuminating the social and political consequences of violence in postcolonial states like the Philippines — the main focus of this paper. First, I delineate what I found helpful and compelling from various interpretations of flesh in black feminist thought. Then I examine how flesh emerges in Filipino peoples’ sense-making through the aswang concept in Philippine folklore. Lastly, I theorize how the aswang as flesh both furthers and complicates our understanding of state terror in the Philippines. By converging these points into a conversation about violence and its agentic role in Philippine political life, I contend for a postcolonial theory of flesh that invites new sense-makings of material, affective, and discursive encodings of violence and makes room for new iterations of politics to emerge.

Diasporic Filipino Americans, dwelling at the heart of the American settler colonial project, have gravitated toward constructions of identity that have used cultural nationalism as its primary resource. As a result, contemporary notions of Filipino cultural identity have tended toward myths of pure and essentialist self-understandings resulting in exclusionary, often depoliticized discourses due to an infatuation with what Gayatri Spivak terms a “nostalgia for origins.” This presentation attempts to recover consciousness of the hybridized figure of the Chinese Mestizo in Filipino society in the time of Spanish colonialism, and argues that this complex history which encompasses religious, economic, and racial processes, disrupts the allure of cultural nationalism for Filipino Americans today. Exploring notions of hybridity, migration, and diasporic subjectivity, this presentation explores theological critiques of nationalism that press Filipino American diasporic subjects to consider the limitations and possibilities of cultural nationalism in a settler colonial context.

My paper will show that in the situation of evolving and extended colonialism, the capacity to dispense and use violence is part of the process of recovering political subjectivity. The capacity, desire, and inspiration to inflict disruption to the quotidian processes can be ascribe to as political subjectivity. This is my paper’s claim following a constructivist grounded theory approach to the work of the politically underground movement in the Philippines called Christians for National Liberation (CNL).

I will focus on CNL’s sources and ways on drawing justification on the violence produced by the armed struggle they support. Violence, as a theological unit of analysis, took different shape when viewed from the discursive practices of decolonial movements experiencing the effects of evolving colonialism. From the ground, the CNL’s capacity to enact violence is an indication of their capacity to recover themselves as political subject that has the capacity to create a kind of future that they themselves imagined and will create.

This essay compares ideas of nature, divinity, and history in late sixteenth-century colonial New Spain. I reconstruct the ecological, religious, and political contexts of this period to compare the emergence of two related discourses: Christian Utopian and Apocalyptic institutions, as well as transformations in contemporaneous Nahua ecological, spiritual, and political thought. These developments occurred during a time of significant climate change known as the “Little Ice Age,” exacerbated by anthropogenic catastrophes wrought by colonization. The differences and occasional dialogues between Christian millenarianism and Nahua intellectual productions highlight how the former, ironically, understood human relationships to nature in relatively static and unchanging terms. Nahua texts, by contrast, demonstrated a critical sensitivity to the contingencies of climate change and catastrophe. These insights add critical dimension to recent studies of indigenous religious traditions in colonial Mexico. They also suggest that indigenous traditions themselves should be understood as context-specific, undergoing constant negotiation and adaptation.