Welcome to the Scholarship Bibliography

Scholarship about Filipinos produced in the U.S. academy has grown exponentially over the past couple of decades. This work has appeared in a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, critical theory, cultural studies, education, ethnic studies, history, literary studies, psychology, queer studies, sociology, and women’s studies. It has taken up an equally broad range of topics. Although one could point to a number of demographic and intellectual factors that have spurred this unprecedented proliferation, two academic trends in particular are worth highlighting: the “turn” to empire in a variety of humanities and social sciences fields, and the renewed attention on international (labor) migration. It is not a stretch to say that the focus on U.S. imperialism, which came to the fore in the early 1990s, was galvanized again by the U.S. wars begun in Afghanistan in 2001 and in Iraq in 2003. Similarly, the ever-increasing number of Filipino workers employed around the globe has given rise to scholarly concern. This is not to say, of course, that academics have not pursued or emphasized other topics, as the bibliography itself makes evident.

A few words about scope and disciplinarity. Philippine Studies has traditionally been understood as an “area study,” which implies U.S. (or U.S.-trained) scholars studying the Philippines. Emerging as a kind of subfield of Asian American and ethnic studies in the wake of the social and curricular upheavals of the late 1960s, Filipino American studies, by contrast, focuses on Filipinos in the U.S. As international migration continues apace, and scholarship no longer organizes its objects of study exclusively by national frames, these divisions are getting blurred. For what it’s worth, I prefer the term “Filipino Studies” to refer to work produced about Filipinos anywhere in the world. I am aware, however, that the politics of knowledge production takes on different meanings in different parts of the world and that how one names these bodies of knowledge matters depending on where one is located.

Finally, let me say at the outset that the scholarship produced by and about Filipinos in the Philippines is vast. Only a small fraction of that work makes its way into the U.S. academic world. My hope is that this evolving, collaborative bibliography will provide one avenue for making those of us working in dispersed parts of the globe aware of each other’s work and past intellectual traditions. (Given the way that the U.S. higher education system seems to think that one Filipino studies scholar per department, if not per institution, is quite sufficient, even those of us living in the U.S. often find ourselves separated from our Pinay and Pinoy colleagues.) Hopefully, an awareness of and greater engagement with this generative work, both past and present, will bring us to converse—in virtual space, face-to-face, or even just through critical dialogue—across those distances.