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E P I L O G U E Decolonizing Filipino Masculinities It is a cold (20°F) and clear early February morning when I begin writing this epilogue. After several days of light snowfall, the South Minneapolis cityscape is covered again by white powder. Is this poetic in/justice that my task is to put closure on this book as I am literally situated in the middle of the North American continent, far removed from the sea? (This is a first reading of place, location, and water; my second reading comes shortly.) The sea has been speaking to me since childhood (see preface) and still it reaches and finds me across great expanses of terrain, touching me through dreams. One night in Minneapolis, I dream of brown and black islandpeople living on a seashore. A glassy sea-green sea, probably warm, rolls gently near their beach. This is not a sea of storms or baguios (typhoons), but rather the calm, no whitecaps for miles kind of sea. A lake-like sea. The dream/water scene changes, and the sea now flows like a river, running horizontally across and away from me as I stand on a different shore. The water rushes by quickly, but its force is not scary because although moving rapidly at first, the waters eventually slow down, freezing and finally stopping, frozen in their tracks, resulting in what looks like a frozen Minnehaha Waterfalls turned on its side. (Minnehaha Falls is a famous water feature [fifty-three feet in height] located in South Minneapolis that freezes solid during our cold and usually long winters.) And so it would seem that a frozen sea suggests a momentary stopping point, an apt metaphor for this epilogue. For while the sea freezes in my dreams and while areas of Minnesota’s great inland sea, Lake Superior (part of the Great Lakes [water-based] border between Canada and the United States), as well as the Mississippi River (which runs through Minneapolis and St. Paul) also freeze in winter, seas generally move freely in non-subarctic or arctic latitudes, flowing, churning , and traveling, creating the various marine currents and weather systems of the world.1 And although it seems unlikely on a cold February morning in Minnesota that the Superior [inland] Sea and “Big 178 EPI LO G U E River” (Mississippi’s nickname) will eventually thaw and move again, I know in time, ice will melt. I, therefore, offer this epilogue as a way to update readers on the current status of neoliberal globalization, maritime migration, and masculinities in Philippine, diasporic, and postcolonial contexts. Equally important, this epilogue is not intended as an academic exercise to conclude or foreclose future conversations, scholarly debate, or activist work, but rather my hope is that in this concluding chapter, space is opened up further for other lines of inquiry and dialogue about these intertwined economic and cultural phenomena (seafaring, masculinities, and globalization). On January 1, 2010, the China-ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) (CAFTA) took effect, creating a regional duty-free zone (for 7,000 products) between China and six founding ASEAN countries (Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, and Brunei). By 2015, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Myanmar are expected to also join CAFTA. With China’s “major (economic) engine,” importing ASEAN commodities and products, CAFTA’s promoters say it will pull ASEAN out of the economic “doldrums” resulting from the global economic recession that started in 2008.2 In an op-ed, Walden Bello uses a railroad metaphor to describe CAFTA’s neoliberal and “free trade” capitalist logics advanced by politicians and economists in Beijing and Manila. He writes, “[Beijing and Malacañang Palace/President Macapagal Arroyo] suggest that it is like “a Chinese locomotive pulling the rest of East [and Southeast] Asia along with it on a fast track to economic nirvana.”3 This trope of transportation resonates with past boating, sailing, and shipping metaphors and imaginaries deployed in Manila a decade earlier, discourses used, for example, to justify the privatization of a maritime port and free trade zone at the Manila Harbour Centre (see chapter 1). However, instead of sailing on a neoliberal yacht in Manila Bay with the hopes that Manila develop into a “global city” in an era of expanding free trade and economic globalization , building on Bello’s observation and economic critique, I suggest that CAFTA relies on what I would call China’s “tugboat diplomacy” or its economic (as well as military) power and potentials to drag...

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