On Negotiated Archipelagic Southeast Asian Identities: Patterns of Colonial Resistance and Nationalist Identity Formation in Pramoedya’s This Earth of Mankind and Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere in The International Journal on Critical Cultural Studies (October 2025). You can access the article here.

ABSTRACT: Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s This Earth of Mankind and Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere are landmark texts about the colonial past of Indonesia and the Philippines. Published more than nine decades apart, these novels highlight significant issues in the post-colonial histories of the two countries. They illustrate recurring patterns of resistance relevant to the formation of nationalist identities as well as access to capital, education, social relations, religion, and ethno-linguistic affiliations during and after the colonial occupation, which provided a liminal space for negotiating nationalist identities between the coloniser and the colonised. This paper will employ an intertextual reading to locate the negotiated liminal spaces ‘within’ and ‘between’ the two novels, drawing on Homi Bhabha’s theoretical model of negotiated identities and cultural differences in postcolonial discourse, as well as the theories of nationalism by Benedict Anderson and Anthony D. Smith. An intertextual reading of This Earth of Mankind and Noli Me Tangere demonstrates the convergences and divergences in colonial resistance that shaped the negotiated national/ist identities of the two archipelagic Southeast Asian nation-states. The liminal spaces ‘between’ and ‘within’ these texts reveal the ambivalent positions in colonial systems, as well as the privileging of certain ethno-linguistic groups that can best serve as ‘translators’ for a monolithic and homogenised national project of postcoloniality in an archipelagic context. Furthermore, the roles of capital, knowledge, and religion will be examined as important factors in the formation of negotiated postcolonial identities. At the same time, it is essential to recognise the asymmetrical power dynamics between the coloniser and the colonised.

Capital-as-presence and Space-as-absence: The Language of Neoliberalism and the Narrative of Capital in Glenn Diaz’s The Quiet Ones in Kritike: Online Journal of Philosophy (September 2024). You can access the journal here.

ABSTRACT. Glenn Diaz’s The Quiet Ones explores people’s lives in the labour force created by a global market system. Work, public services, geography, identities, production, and consumption are generally shaped and directed by the flow of boundary-less foreign capital investments from developed countries. The novel presents characters as workers in the business process outsourcing industry in the Philippines, expatriates as highly skilled workers who migrated to the country to look for better economic and social capital opportunities, and the various relationships with people surrounding these workers. This paper charts the terrain, nature, and the systemic movements of capital through (1) capital-as-presence in the text, framing or creating work patterns, human relationships, consumption behaviour, and (2) space-as-absence that mediates relationships between states, citizens, and the State (represented by the law and state authorities), between citizens as workers, between citizens as workers and their cities. The paper concludes that the neoliberal economic agenda in/of globalisation created a language where capital is deeply embedded in a textual negotiation of/in meanings that legitimises the power structure that perpetuates, supports, enables, and reinforces an oppressive elite, imperialist, and capitalist economic market system as the only alternative in rendering a concrete, liveable world.