This is a creative-critical discussion of my expatriate arts practice (literature and performance) using re/conceptualisations of the border as the underpinning framework. The Tahao Road (“Middle/Border Road”) is a very busy road in my original home, Legazpi. The road cuts across the heart of the city. It was built in the late 90s (long after I left home) to relocate and ease the congested traffic from the old road. Using this as a metaphor for my “border practice” away from home and the national/ist imaginary, I will trace how the expatriate writer relocates “the traffic” of the imaginary from the nation to the transnation in order to help it survive between its new and old home. This survival strategy de-territorialises the sensibility but also renders it “suspect,” in terms of loyalty and currency, to both sides of the border: Australia and the Philippines. More dangerously, it cuts/fragments the heart of the artist; the only way to “make whole” is to embody the border. To live the “Tahao Road,” thus find a way back home.

This article offers a brief historical and theoretical overview of found footage films and their contribution to the horror genre, and focuses in more detail on four Southeast Asian productions of the kind made between 2009-2012: Keramat/Sacred (Servia & Tiwa, 2009), Seru/Resurrection (Asraff, Pillai, Andre & Jin 2011), Haunted Changi (Kern, Woo & Lau, 2010), and Darkest Night (Tan, 2012), all of which can be viewed as an alternative to the mainstream local horror cinema. The paper argues that the two most common strategies used by found footage horror films (including the four films in question) are the techniques that effectively authenticate the horror experience: inducing a heightened perception of realism in the audience and a contradictory to it feeling of perceptive subjectivity.

Radical youth movements today are viewed as a chimera of a bygone era inspired by a now-defunct ideology. Many youth scholars believe that the birth of Web 2.0 technology, together with the continued influence of/emphasis on state-sponsored civic education, has drastically reconfigured the youth subculture and the youth’s political engagement. This paper, though, argues that this reconfiguration is but a reflection of neoliberal capitalism still at work in our modern society. While conscious of the changing landscape of a youth culture that is now saturated by various forms of media, this paper, toward the end, reaffirms Jose Ma. Sison’s call for the Filipino youth to be the vanguards of social change.

This paper attempts to open the discussion on the changing notion of news among Filipino broadcast audiences and the broadcast media gatekeepers through the use of user-generated content. Several versions of singular events are allowed to be told, thus subverting the news media’s monopoly of the telling of events. This paper looks at some of the web videos that made the jump from sites like YouTube and Facebook, and assesses their newsworthiness according to those set by the mass media. Are audiences and producers influencing a change in the criteria of newsworthiness? Through a rhetorical analysis, this paper proposes a switch to the “little narratives” often regarded as novelty by corporate media, and argues for the quotidian that exist as story fragments; the private lives of individuals contribute to the conceptualization of news from the others’ perspective.

The paper proposes a postmodernist framework that can be used to analyze the development not only of care work films that emerged from the Filipinos’ role in the global care work chain and their increasing power to sustain the Philippine film industry but also of other social phenomena that arise from mass production and mass consumption dynamics. The framework derives from theories of Bakhtinian “dialogism,” Foucauldian “discourse,” Gramscian “hegemony,” and Gladwellian “tipping point” and an assertion that care work films, taken as a “new” film genre, is a valid starting point in the study of contemporary Filipino history shaped by globalization.

The Philippines’s experience with its last foreign occupant, the US, resulted in an entire package of fraught “special relations” that, coupled with the country’s problematic responses to the challenges of self-government, ultimately led to a global dispersal of the population, effectively turning the Philippines into the major Asian nation arguably most reliant on its citizens’ overseas remittances. This paper takes the position that diasporic Filipinos, for a variety of reasons starting with the effectiveness of maintaining unintrusive presences in alien cultures (including the acceptance of menial positions), have possibly developed and have enabled others to perceive them as silent and discreet figures once they step into the circuits of globalized labor exchanges. Just as overseas Filipino characters have started being acknowledged in non-Philippine overseas film productions, their presences therein partake of this self-effacing configuration of global citizenship.

This study focuses on the representation of male protagonists in several selected films of Ronald Allan Poe Kelly, or more famously known as Fernando Poe Jr. (FPJ). New categories of the representation of male protagonists in action films were arrived at after a thorough reading of the main heroes. The infantilized, trigger-happy, and sadist protagonists that FPJ’s films created were identified. This research, which uses dialogue exchanges and movie scenes to create a representation of masculinity, can be regarded as part of cultural studies. In order to give meaning to the categories created by this study, these need to be projected onto a wider context of social issues that take the form of visual culture. The produced categories became the basis with which to analyze the Metro Guwapo project of the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA) during the term of Bayani Fernando. In addition, these categories were also used to analyze the matrimony of the state and the military during the tenure of former President Gloria Macapagal-Aarroyo as a political and cultural text. Lastly, the created representation of masculinity was used as the basis with which to analyze a photo of former U.S. Ambassador to the Philippines Kristie Kenny as she was delivering the guest of honor’s speech urging Mindanaoans to take care of Lake Lanao.