In a Precarious Time and Place: The Refusal to Wallow and Other Migratory Temporal Investments in Care Divas, the Musical

In July 2011, Care Divas, an exuberant, high-energy musical about Filipino migrants in Israel, enjoyed its third run of shows in six months to sold-out audiences in Manila. Highlighting the intimate spaces of contemporary global labor migration, the smash-hit musical reveals how multiple intimacies and histories rub up against each other and enable temporary collectivities and affinities in the timespace compression of globalization. I suggest that this precarious global time “in between” is nonidentical with national time effected by the negotiation with spaces and histories that do not necessarily belong to the migrant. From the migrant’s standpoint, precarious global time is nonidentical with any particular national time riven by the disruptions of multiple spaces and histories—a reframing that generates alternative socialities and temporalities outside of the national order.