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I N T R O D U C T I O N Filipino Crosscurrents In 1995, scholar-artist Allan Sekula argued that the “sea has been forgotten”1 in dominant U.S.-based scholarly debates about globalization . Here, globalization broadly refers to the flows of capital, people, goods, images, and ideologies in a capitalist world system, significantly implemented through neoliberal economics and policies.2 By extension, Sekula is suggesting that related maritime spaces and places3 in the global economy have also been forgotten, for example, ports, port cities, ships, shipping routes, and maritime trade and, just as importantly, the people who work, live, and move in or through these oceanic/maritime spaces, such as the Filipino seamen who work on ships that transport goods and commodities around the world and with whom I conducted components of my ethnographic fieldwork. With this forgetting of the sea and maritime space, Sekula further suggests that imaginaries of elite air travel, airports, air cargo, and digital communication networks proliferated in the early to mid-1990s, emerging as the dominant tropes, imaginaries, spaces, and industries of economic and cultural globalization. Three years after Sekula’s observations (in 1998), these kinds of airbased or digital-based imaginaries and understandings of globalization were expanded in a Southeast Asian context as the image of “capital flight” hit the front pages of newspapers, television screens, and computer monitors. This was big news in the United States and certainly in Southeast Asia where I was living in 1997 to 1998. This flight and fright of capital came about as wealthy Global North financial speculators and investors (connected to “the markets” by digital computer networks) withdrew their capital investments in large numbers as they learned of the financial troubles in Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, the 2 I N T R O D U CT I O N Philippines, and other countries. The region’s economy was clearly in a capitalist crisis.4 As the twenty-first century opened, Sekula’s once forgotten sea was quickly remembered as oceanic waters spectacularly splashed onto the pages and screens of U.S.-based media. This “hungry sea”5 raged, drowned, and swallowed people, beaches, villages, islands, and cities through catastrophes such as the Indian Ocean tsunami, Hurricane Katrina, “perfect storms,”6 and “inconvenient truths”7 (i.e., accelerated global climate change). Images of flooded islands, port cities, waterfronts—Aceh, Phuket, Sri Lanka, New Orleans, and the Eastern U.S. seaboard—saturated newscasts, Hollywood blockbusters, and independent films, reminding U.S. Americans of the sea’s liquid power to powerfully change local, regional , and global contexts. In 2008, as I rewrote this introduction, the sea, shipping, piracy, and globalization emerged as important news stories when Somali pirates boarded and seized ships transporting goods and commodities near and around Somalia and the Gulf of Aden, a key “choke-point” and shipping lane, demanding ransom(s) in the millions of dollars and holding seamen from around the world hostage.8 As oceans and seas flowed in everyday life and popular culture and as ships, shipping, and port cities became more visible and were remembered again, a lesser-known metaphorical sea, lesser known in mainstream United States, that is, but well known in the Philippines, also began grabbing headlines in the United States: the millions of hard-working global migrants (and the Filipino/a diaspora) who send oceanic-sized remittances back home to the Global South. On April 22, 2007, The New York Times reported on the epic proportions of global migration and the social and economic challenges migrants face. While global migrants were finally getting some mainstream media coverage in the United States, in countries such as the Philippines, migrants have been on the minds of Filipino/as (or locals) because approximately 11 million Filipino/as live and work overseas, significantly affecting the national economy and individual lives.9 The Times magazine cover included a photograph of an Overseas Filipino/a Worker (OFW), a Filipina nurse, posed and photographed as abandoned, forlorn, and castaway, wearing medical scrubs, white shoes in hand, barefoot on a distant shore, aquamarine waters (the ocean) in the background, while inside the magazine a lengthy article discussed the steady flow of migrants from the Global South to North, specifically focusing on several Filipino/a migrants as miniature case studies. So on the one hand, the sea reemerged (particularly U.S. American contexts ), as an important space through which to understand “the global” (but not necessarily the global economy), and on the other hand (especially...

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