Four Readers’ Favorite Issues

ADAM ARCA, YAMINA SAM, KIMBERLY F. MONROE, JULI REITHINGER

Adam Arca’s Pick
The Funambulist 6 (July-August 2016) Object Politics
(Cover Artwork by Léopold Lambert)

“What is inside does not matter; only that it flows.”

In The Funambulist 6 (July-August 2016) Object Politics, critical geographer Charmaine Chua precisely locates the shipping container both as an architectural and political object that has played a key role in the logistics revolution by spatially reorganizing the very conditions to which goods and people are valued, and to which the intimate connection to land and sea, to the very sources of the world’s resources are packed, sealed, and abstracted into oblivion. It is a sentiment that has radically remolded my analysis both as a researcher examining the ties between migrant health and labor and as an organizer with the anti-imperialist Filipino migrant rights organization Migrante BC in Vancouver, Canada.

Throughout the issue, as objects are gendered, monetized, contained, discarded and made
in/visible, displaced and mobilized, made public and private, I reflect on the ways that Filipino migrant bodies are subjected to similar manners as gendered caregiving labor, as a remittance economy and its symbolic and material balikbayan box, as disposable labor, as the displaced native and the upwardly mobile workforce. Today, it is not surprising to hear that one of the main exports of the Philippines is its people. The accelerating urbanization and aesthetics of the Global North have been reliant and upheld by the bodies and resources of the Philippines since the flagships of the Galleon trade to the erection of the temporary foreign work program in Canada. Even so, as the world is reorganized in accordance with a modern globalized economy, and as the means of production are stretched across place and time, the potentiality of intervention as well as solidarity across borders, are imminent. From the Wet’suwet’en First Nation pipe blockades in Canada to Indigenous Lumad land defenders in the Philippines to port shutdowns to rallies, the authors in this issue ask us: how can we identify and disrupt the flows of capitalist production? How can we expose the design of imperialist projects? How can we make what is inside, matter?