"Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America" A Conversation with Adrian De Leon

 

In Bundok, Adrian De Leon follows the people of Northern Luzon across space and time, advancing a new vision of the United States's Pacific empire that begins with the natives and migrants who were at the heart of colonialism and its everyday undoing. From the emergence of Luzon's eighteenth-century tobacco industry and the Hawaii Sugar Planters' Association’s documentation of workers to the movement of people and ideas across the Suez Canal and the stories of Filipino farmworkers in the American West, De Leon traces "the Filipino" as a racial category emerging from the labor, subjugation, archiving, and resistance of native people.

 

 

 

Adrian De Leon is the Farley Distinguished Visiting Scholar in History at Simon Fraser University, and an Assistant Professor of US History at NYU.is a writer, critic, and public historian. He is an expert in the histories of the Philippines and global Filipino migration, U.S. imperialism across the Pacific, and Asian American politics, and has also written on the study of food, popular culture, and migrant music.

 

He is completing a triptych of works on the Filipino diaspora. The first barangay: an offshore poem (2021), is a lyrical meditation on diaspora, seafaring, and the violence of global modernity. The second, Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America (2023), is a global history of the co-production of Philippine indigeneity and Filipino diaspora through the imperial plantation. The third, Balikbayan: The Invention of the FIlipino Homeland (under contract), is a history of the Philippine nation-state from its constitutive outsides: overseas migrants, diasporic capital, and settler colonialism.

 

De Leon is a 2014 graduate of the University of Toronto, Scarborough, where he studied English (BA, Honors), Mathematics, and Biology. In 2019, he received his PhD in History at the University of Toronto. His research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Fulbright Canada, and Massey College. In 2020, he was awarded the Governor General’s Gold Medal, the highest honor for a dissertation written at a Canadian university.

 

 

Takashi Fujitani is a Professor of History the Dr. David Chu Chair in Asia Pacific Studies at the Asian Institute, University of Toronto. A graduate of UC Berkeley, Professor  comes to the University of Toronto from the University of California, San Diego, where he was a professor of modern Japanese history for two decades. Professor Fujitani’s books include Splendid Monarchy: Power and Pageantry in Modern Japan (University of California Press, 1996), Perilous Memories: The Asia Pacific War(s) (Duke University Press, 2001), and Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Americans in WWII (University of California Press, 2011). He has held numerous grants and fellowships, including from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, Stanford Humanities Center, and Social Science Research Council. He is also editor of the series Asia Pacific Modern (UC Press).

 

Kevin P. Coleman is an Associate Professor of Historical Studies at the University of Toronto, Mississauga. Kevin Coleman's research examines the intersection between capitalism and photography, primarily in Latin America. He is the author of A Camera in the Garden of Eden (2016), a number of book chapters and journal articles, as well as the Principal Investigator of Visualizing the Americas, a major digital humanities project. His research has been funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation / American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and the United States Department of Education’s Fulbright-Hayes Fellowship. With support from a SSHRC grant, he led three major collaborative inquiries into the relations between capitalism and photography: Capitalism and the Camera (2021), Photography and Culture (2020), and Radical History Review (2018). He is currently working on a documentary film, The Photos We Don’t Get to See, that attempts to make visible how physical violence gets repeated at the level of the archive.