Alon: Journal for Filipinx American and Diasporic Studies

Alongside official policies and speeches declaring and steering official national identity, I turn to songs and dances as affective and performance archives that strategically rouse and structure our feelings of belonging to a cohesive and stable national culture. More broadly, I track the crafting of a Filipino/a national subject through state reliance on sedimented (and thus value-laden) forms such as ‘national traditions’ and ‘folk cultures’ to make possible the idea of a laboring and productive citizenry. I ask: How do traditional dances and songs sustain and indeed supplement the ambitions of government initiatives implemented during Ferdinand Marcos’s martial law, such as the rice production program Masagana 99? How do the timeless assemblages of performance shore up the edifice of an embattled and yet resilient nation-state? As we commemorate the afterlives of Martial Law, I return to such fragments of embodied memory with adjacent governmental policies of the time to underscore the complex scope and the scale of Marcos’s dictatorship, as well as relay these scenes as seeds of struggle, labor, and resistance.