[wp-svg-icons icon=”user” wrap=”i”] Carlos M. Piocos III [wp-svg-icons icon=”envelop” wrap=”i”]
Literature Department, De la Salle University, Manila, Philippines.
Rupkatha Journal, Vol. 14, Issue 1, January-March, 2022, Pages 1–11. https://doi.org/10.21659/rupkatha.v14n1.12
Abstract received: 15 March 2021 | Article received: 23 May 2021 | Revised : 29 July 2021 | Accepted: 14 August 2021 | First Published: 05 February 2022
(This article is published under the Themed Issue Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Literary and Cultural Studies)
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Women Trespassing Borders: Imaginaries of Cosmopolitanism from Below in Mia Alvar’s In the Country
Abstract
Mobility has been historically tied to conceptions of cosmopolitanism, bringing forward imaginaries of belonging-in-the-world and going beyond the narrow limits of parochial allegiances into embracing virtues of openness as global citizens shaped by the experience crossing borders and encounter with the Other. Despite dominant ideas about cosmopolitans as elite itinerants of middle-class intellectuals, artists, tourists, expatriates and capitalists, global migration with its entailing forms of mobilities from below—economic migrants, transmigrants, refugees, exiles—has redefined the term to include forms of minor and vernacular cosmopolitanisms that emerge among the migrant underclass. However, just like these forms of mobilities, these types of cosmopolitanism are also bound and shaped by class, gender and ethnicity. This paper explores versions of cosmopolitanism from below in the stories of Mia Alvar in her book, In the Country, that center on female domestic workers from the Philippines. Through the transnational itineraries of these border-crossing women protagonists in contemporary Filipino fiction, the article examines the intersections and contradictions of class, gender and race in cosmopolitan imaginaries of mobilities in Southeast Asia.
Keywords: mobilities studies, cosmopolitanism from below, migrant female domestic workers, Philippine contemporary fiction, Southeast Asian migration.