Unfamiliar Waters: Filipinx Aesthetics against Extractive Capitalism

Trisha Remetir
Comparative Literatures and Languages
UC Riverside

“Unfamiliar Waters,” a literary and cultural studies project about water, fishing, and extractive capitalism in the Philippines and the Pacific, asserts that modern extractive projects like industrial fishing and oil drilling in the Philippines have impacted cultural representations of water. By examining representations of water in contemporary diasporic Filipinx poetry, national cinema, online media, and archival documents, this interdisciplinary humanities project reveals how late 20th- and 21st-century extractions increasingly rely on strategies of management and regulation as an attempt to control Southeast Asian communities and aquatic life. The book names these strategies of management and regulation through concepts such as controlled flow, aesthetics of enclosure, and disaster timelines, all of which attempt to write Southeast Asians out of their environmental homes and contexts. However, this book also contends that Filipinx poets, writers, and filmmakers question how natural resources come to be gathered, managed, and shipped outside the archipelago by experimenting at and near oceans, rivers, and ponds. In so doing, these artists also shape the material and cultural weight of water themselves.

Image credit: Bernard Spragg.