Overview

The U.S. military continues to be an overt presence in the Philippines, and a reminder of the country's colonial past. Using Subic Bay (a former U.S. military base, now a Freeport Zone) as a case study, Victoria Reyes argues that its defining feature is its ability to elicit multiple meanings. For some, it is a symbol of imperialism and inequality, while for others, it projects utopian visions of wealth and status. Drawing on archival and ethnographic data, Reyes describes the everyday experiences of people living and working in Subic Bay, and makes a case for critically examining similar spaces across the world. These foreign-controlled, semi-autonomous zones of international exchange are what she calls global borderlands. While they can take many forms, ranging from overseas military bases to tourist resorts, they all have key features in common. This new unit of globalization provides a window into broader economic and political relations, the consequences of legal ambiguity, and the continuously reimagined identities of the people living there. Rejecting colonialism as merely a historical backdrop, Reyes demonstrates how it is omnipresent in our modern world.

Full Product Details

Author:   Victoria Reyes
Publisher:   Stanford University Press
Imprint:   Stanford University Press
ISBN:  

9781503609419

ISBN 10:   1503609413
Pages:   312
Publication Date:   03 September 2019
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Contents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThis chapter introduces the concept of global borderlands, places controlled by foreigners where the rules that govern socioeconomic life differ from those that are outside its walls and places that elicit multiple meanings. Global borderlands are proliferating around the world. and in examining Subic Bay, Philippines—a former military base and now a Freeport Zone—this chapter highlights how they are sites of contestation and contradictions, where sovereignty is contingent, meanings and identities are continually remade, and inequality serves as their foundation. 1Money and Authority chapter abstractThis chapter examines the push and pull of political negotiations through an analysis of military agreements, tax law, and tax disputes. It focuses on how inequality is written into the foundation of these places through legal negotiations and the conflicts they spark on the ground. However, it also shows how Filipinos have increasingly found ways to exploit the language of these documents to assert sovereignty, though they do so with varying levels of success. The chapter shows how, in these negotiations, sovereignty is negotiated in the minutiae of who has control over territory versus who has control in the administration over people and facilities, or what Reyes calls administrative sovereignty, allowing Filipinos and foreigners alike to stake a claim and view these negotiations through a lens of success. 2Rape and Murder chapter abstractThis chapter lays out the stakes involved in global borderlands by examining two high-profile crimes: a rape and a murder, both of which were committed by U.S. servicemen against Filipinas. In these two cases, activists, judges, lawyers, and reporters use sexual violence as a vehicle and a proxy for making broader sociopolitical critiques about the relationship between the United States and the Philippines, and the effect that relationship has on the Philippines as a sovereign nation-state. This chapter shows how small, seemingly minute details—such as negotiations over where and under what conditions the culprits are held, who controls access to them, and who stipulates the terms of their detention—are where power dynamics between the United States and the Philippines can be seen. 3Sex and Romance chapter abstractThe global borderlands of active and decommissioned overseas U.S. military bases often conjure up images and sexual fantasies of local women at the beck and call of men, ready to indulge in their every desire. This chapter juxtaposes two alternative and competing understandings of the relationships between U.S. servicemen and Filipinas, as being wrought with violence, inequality, and exploitative sex versus being imagined in romance and seen through the lens of a heroic love myth. It shows how these relationships and the myths that surround them are regulated formally and informally, and it is precisely because they are both prevalent and at odds with one another that they contribute to the staying power of global borderlands. 4Born in the Shadows of Bases chapter abstractThis chapter turns its focus to Amerasians (children of U.S. servicemen and Filipina women), their place in Philippine and U.S. societies, and the conditions in which they thrive rather than barely survive. It shows how the intimate sphere of the family and home is affected by the political and economic relationships between countries. Multiple and competing laws and understandings governing morality and imaginaries of belonging affect the relationships created in Subic Bay. Yet even concerning familial relations, global borderlands do not all operate in the same way. U.S. military bases vary regarding familial laws and policies because place—its geography, sociocultural meanings, and use—matters. Because Subic Bay became a place linked to soldiers' respite from the Vietnam War, whether intended or otherwise, its affect on thousands, if not millions, of children around the world is unique. 5Labor and Imagined Identities chapter abstractThis chapter uses employment as a lens to examine how people on the ground experience Subic Bay. Focusing on the U.S. Subic Bay Naval Base as an employer and two businesses within the Subic Bay Freeport Zone—the Filipino-owned, upscale Harbor Point mall and the South Korean company Hanjin Shipping—the chapter shows how people understand national identities and inequalities through what Reyes calls labor imaginaries. That is, it shows how the experiences and reputations of employers and customers recreate utopian imaginaries and others—those based on human rights violations, hell, and poverty—and how people link them to their understandings of what it means to be a foreigner of a particular nationality. 6Buying Inequality chapter abstractThis chapter focuses on the Filipino and foreign men and women who work in, live in, and visit the Subic Bay Freeport Zone. Many people see the Freeport Zone as a continuation of the U.S. military past and a symbol of the future, providing ways to live the good life and be part of a modern global community. One way to become a part of this modern utopia is through consumption imaginaries, buying into this world through everyday purchases. Through these everyday purchases, people recreate symbolic and tangible stratification between classes and nationalities. However, these imaginaries do not always reflect reality on the ground. Corruption, crime, and intimidation also infiltrate the Freeport Zone and perpetuate inequality. Conclusion chapter abstractThe conclusion reflects on the reasons that global borderlands are a central object of study for the twenty-first century: they are the landscapes in which international tensions arise. Global borderlands simultaneously evoke a sense of a global modernity and are symbols of foreign powers' penetration into domestic societies. As such, they are the battlegrounds of international politics, as we see in contemporary political debates around free trade and global integration in the United States and the European Union. The interwoven fantasies, violence, and local understandings of the foreign are even more sharply divided when global borderlands are located in African, Middle Eastern, Latin American, and Asian countries, like the Philippines. Within these lands the socioeconomic and political stakes at hand are heightened due to their colonial histories and their lower and sometimes more precarious place in the hierarchy of global politics.

Reviews

Victoria Reyes brings us into a world that few observers have dared enter: the 'global borderland' that is the Philippines' Subic Bay, a former American military base. Through this invaluable and innovative ethnography, readers get to see, in vivid richness, the complex workings of money, love, sex, and power that characterize the afterlives of America's military empire in the Pacific. Sociology needs more historical ethnographies like this one. -- Julian Go * author of <i>Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory</i> * Global Borderlands has the makings of a scholarly classic, using methodologies from history, sociology, and anthropology to intervene in a broad range of fields, most notably borderland studies....Interwoven through each chapter is an engagingly descriptive ethnography with theoretical insights, which will appeal to scholars and students alike. Although the Subic Bay Freeport Zone in the Philippines, once a US naval base, is [Reyes'] case study, the book can be read productively by anyone working within borderland studies. Essential. -- M. J. Wert * <i>Choice</i> * Rarely can a study account for practices of globalization from above and below while situating the events of today in its colonial past, but Victoria Reyes accomplishes this extraordinary feat with her concept of 'global borderlands.' This is a wide-reaching study that should be of interest to anthropologists, geographers, and legal scholars, and sociologists of intimacy, globalization, and economics. -- Rhacel Parrenas, Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies * University of Southern California *

Victoria Reyes brings us into a world that few observers have dared enter: the 'global borderland' that is the Philippines' Subic Bay, a former American military base. Through this invaluable and innovative ethnography, readers get to see, in vivid richness, the complex workings of money, love, sex, and power that characterize the afterlives of America's military empire in the Pacific. Sociology needs more historical ethnographies like this one. -- Julian Go * author of <i>Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory</i> * Rarely can a study account for practices of globalization from above and below while situating the events of today in its colonial past, but Victoria Reyes accomplishes this extraordinary feat with her concept of 'global borderlands.' This is a wide-reaching study that should be of interest to anthropologists, geographers, and legal scholars, and sociologists of intimacy, globalization, and economics. -- Rhacel Parrenas, Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies * University of Southern California *

Victoria Reyes brings us into a world that few observers have dared enter: the 'global borderland' that is the Philippines' Subic Bay, a former American military base. Through this invaluable and innovative ethnography, readers get to see, in vivid richness, the complex workings of money, love, sex, and power that characterize the afterlives of America's military empire in the Pacific. Sociology needs more historical ethnographies like this one. -- Julian Go * author of <i>Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory</i> * Rarely can a study account for practices of globalization from above and below while situating the events of today in its colonial past, but Victoria Reyes accomplishes this extraordinary feat with her concept of 'global borderlands.' This is a wide-reaching study that should be of interest to anthropologists, geographers, and legal scholars, and sociologists of intimacy, globalization, and economics. -- Rhacel Parrenas, Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies * University of Southern California * Global Borderlands has the makings of a scholarly classic, using methodologies from history, sociology, and anthropology to intervene in a broad range of fields, most notably borderland studies....Interwoven through each chapter is an engagingly descriptive ethnography with theoretical insights, which will appeal to scholars and students alike. Although the Subic Bay Freeport Zone in the Philippines, once a US naval base, is [Reyes'] case study, the book can be read productively by anyone working within borderland studies. Essential. -- M. J. Wert * <i>CHOICE</i> * The recent work of sociologists on the Philippines has contributed a great deal to our understanding of the negotiations of class, race, and place in the archipelago, and this work by Reyes certainly adds to that rich and burgeoning subfield. Global Borderlands is a text that opens up a great deal of possible questions in the context of borderlands studies, international relations between the United States and the Philippines, and the everyday act of place and meaning making in spaces where sovereignty may be questioned. -- Mark John Sanchez * <i>H-Diplo</i> * Global Borderlands offers a thought-provoking conceptual framework that cannot but enrich our understanding of globalization as well as international politics....By relying on multiple methods and on an interdisciplinary approach, Reyes convincingly conveys to the readers the dynamism and fluidity that concepts like sovereignty, power, inequality, as well as social interactions acquire in these global borderlands. -- Alice Dell'Era * <i>New Global Studies</i> * Victoria Reyes counters a simplistic narrative of American neoimperial dominance through military bases in international countries. Instead, the book reveals the complexities of contested sovereignties and their manifestations in United States and Philippine relations....Global Borderlands is an immensely engaging read. -- Amy Kahng * <i>Ethnic Studies Review</i> * Global Borderlands is a book that should be taken seriously on methodological, empirical, and theoretical grounds. Scholars of globalization, culture, law, and urban studies in particular should pay attention to the lessons that Reyes mines from Subic Bay. -- Annie Hikido * <i>American Journal of Sociology</i> * There is much to like about Global Borderlands. It is written for a broad audience and provides vivid evidence of the complexity, contingency and precarity in and near Subic Bay....Readers who approach the book on its own terms will be well-rewarded. -- Gregory Hooks * <i>Social Forces</i> *

Victoria Reyes brings us into a world that few observers have dared enter: the 'global borderland' that is the Philippines' Subic Bay, a former American military base. Through this invaluable and innovative ethnography, readers get to see, in vivid richness, the complex workings of money, love, sex, and power that characterize the afterlives of America's military empire in the Pacific. Sociology needs more historical ethnographies like this one. -- Julian Go Global Borderlands has the makings of a scholarly classic, using methodologies from history, sociology, and anthropology to intervene in a broad range of fields, most notably borderland studies....Interwoven through each chapter is an engagingly descriptive ethnography with theoretical insights, which will appeal to scholars and students alike. Although the Subic Bay Freeport Zone in the Philippines, once a US naval base, is [Reyes'] case study, the book can be read productively by anyone working within borderland studies. Essential. -- M. J. Wert The recent work of sociologists on the Philippines has contributed a great deal to our understanding of the negotiations of class, race, and place in the archipelago, and this work by Reyes certainly adds to that rich and burgeoning subfield. Global Borderlands is a text that opens up a great deal of possible questions in the context of borderlands studies, international relations between the United States and the Philippines, and the everyday act of place and meaning making in spaces where sovereignty may be questioned. -- Mark John Sanchez Rarely can a study account for practices of globalization from above and below while situating the events of today in its colonial past, but Victoria Reyes accomplishes this extraordinary feat with her concept of 'global borderlands.' This is a wide-reaching study that should be of interest to anthropologists, geographers, and legal scholars, and sociologists of intimacy, globalization, and economics. -- Rhacel Parrenas, Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies

Author Information

Victoria Reyes is Assistant Professor of Sociology at University of California, Riverside.

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