Research

What can literature tell us about political economy and what can political economy tell us about literature?

I am an inter­disciplinary scholar working at the inter­section of literature and economy, with special interests in Global Anglophone, Philippine, and Asian American literature. I read across literary and economic history and bring archival research to the study of narrative, language, and aesthetics. My method is defined by a reading practice that elucidates historical meaning contextually and in the form of the works themselves. 

I develop this method in my first book, forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press, entitled Remittances, Literary and Economic, a study of novels and remittances in the Philippine diaspora. Remittances, the book argues, are not merely money but a social form—the necessary form of appearance of both value and the nation in the peripheries of the world-system, what I call the deterritorialization of socially necessary labor time. The book traces this process to the historical alignment of capital and empire, which entangles circulations of labor and value with those of people, ideas, and texts. Taking remittances themselves as a heuristic for reading these circulations together, the book demonstrates that the dissemination of English-language literature—and the anglophone novels that U.S. colonial education inspired—were not merely ideological adjuncts but laid the objective conditions for the making of the Philippines into one of the largest exporters of labor in the world today.

I have presented work from this project at New York University, Harvard, Yale, the University of the Philippines, the American University of Beirut, and the Institute for Critical Theory at Duke.