Suspended Apocalypse: White Supremacy, Genocide, and the Filipino Condition by Dylan Rodríguez (review)

Dylan Rodríguez theorizes the ways in which U.S. state-committed genocide against the Philippines in the early twentieth century continues to play out violently in the material conditions of Filipinos/Filipino Americans today, continuing a global U.S. white supremacist nation-building project. Rodríguez strives to understand how the extreme historical violence and trauma of this genocide are disastrously absent from Filipino bourgeois subjectivities. He calls out the discourse issuing from the Filipino national bourgeois—which has been affected by force, cultural erasure, and the promise of class mobility—as that which rationalizes the domination of Pacifica Americana. The author analyzes a series of case studies, powerfully tracing a genealogy of the erasure of genocide from Filipino memory.

The text is a global political call to retell the white-washed histories of American colonialism. Referring to the title, the term "apocalypse" is invoked through its etymological structure, "which reaches across Latin expression for 'revelation' and the Greek notion of an 'uncovering' (apocalypsis)" (188). "Suspended apocalypse" refers to the displacement of the real "technologies of [U.S.]

gendered white supremacist warfare, genocide, and human exploitation" from Filipino-dominant discourse. Through this displacement, the American colonial project becomes rationalized as blessing and savior. The disremembering of the American-Filipino encounter is enabled by the ways in which the often empty and individualistic American promise of class mobility has conditioned out of memory a more antagonistic orientation toward the United States while at the same time Filipinos are patronizingly racialized as the United States's "little brown brother." For Rodríguez, this loss of memory has proven disastrous for resistance and uprising against the United States's powerful and violent nation-building project.

In the first chapter, the author theorizes Filipino American communion. He recounts an event he witnessed at the University of California, Berkeley in 2000. A group of "anti-racist student activists initiated an audacious, nonviolent occupation of Barrows Hall" in an effort to protest disinvestment of the Ethnic Studies Department (12). As the campus police responded to the occupation, a group of students practicing heritage dances for a Pilipino Cultural Night (PCN) continued their practice, unencumbered by the clamoring of police violently removing the activist students adjacent to (and even moving right through) their group circle. Rodríguez writes, "The student-performers were simultaneously inventing, performing, and assimilating an eager (if stridently amateurish) production of the Filipino American real" (14). His detailed retelling of this event reveals for the reader the disdain the author feels toward how the subjectivities of elite Filipinos not only distort the historical reality and legacy of Filipino genocide but also leave the PCN students unable to make meaning of the antiracist activist students.

In the second chapter, Rodríguez further conceptualizes arrested raciality by analyzing the nominal liberalization of the 1965 immigration act and formation of a "global multiculturalist class" linked to the "post-civil rights discursive shifts in the national racial discourse of the United States" (159). Here, Rodríguez builds on his earlier criticisms of Filipino cultural media production's treatment of heritage as a gendered commodity. Rodríguez references the various pageant and awards competitions geared toward Filipinos and/or "Asians" as reported in the Philippine News. These awards inscribe a prefigured desire for upward class mobility as well as classed, gendered, and sexualized beauty. He also takes to task academic discourse that culturally pathologizes Filipino Americans while ignoring the legacy of U.S.-inflicted genocide or a broader incorporation of the racialized structures of material oppression. He rightly criticizes the participation of this cultural media and academic work in reifying historically sedimented ideas about Filipinos, thereby supporting and furthering the violent historical and continuing white U.S. nation-building project.

Using Fanon's national bourgeois analytic to build upon this framework, Rodríguez uses the third and fourth chapters to further understand how the violent genocidal...