This collection brings together essays on the Philippines written in the wake of the Cold War and the Marcos regime. Cross-disciplinary by vocation and affiliated by their common engagement with the intersections of power, representation, and agency, the contributors probe the discrepant histories that underlie the formation of the Philippine nation-state and translocal Filipino cultures: the mestizo social hierarchy, colonial medicine, penal colonies, nationalist desire, diasporic literatures, gay beauty pageants, ideas of everyday violence, and state bulimia in the age of global capitalism.

As Filipinos and non-Filipinos, these writers are alert to and intimate with the distance and difference of their own object of study; they intend their essays on the Philippines to translate, localize, and reassess the stakes in current debates around the study of colonial modernity, nationalism, and postcoloniality.