Spring 2025

Adrian Alarilla’s Dissertation Defense

Join us on Monday, April 7th, from 8:30am-10:30am HST for doctoral candidate Adrian Alarilla’s dissertation defense! His project, titled “Re/Producing Islands: Migrant Filipino Kinship, Subjectivity, and Settlerism Within and Across Imperial and National Peripheries,” is under the direction of Professor Vina Lanzona.

The defense will take place in Sakamaki A-201 and is open to the public. The defense will also be streamed on Zoom; the information can be found below:

• Zoom link: https://hawaii.zoom.us/j/89442390577
• Meeting ID: 894 4239 0577
• Passcode: 944397

Below is an abstract of Adrian’s project:

At the turn of the twentieth century, Migrant Filipino laborers crossed the transpacific US Empire to work on agricultural plantations in the imperial (and later, national) peripheries of Hawaiʻi, California, and Mindanao. While they became integral to the American domestication and exploitation of these peripheries, they also established their own “imagined communities” of belonging by adapting these imperial regimes into their own localized understandings of leadership, power, and community. The chaos of the encounter between colonizer and imperial subjects led to a generative, multi-lineal creation—indeed, reproduction—of islands of history. This dissertation argues that by highlighting gender, kinship, and affect, it is possible to reconnect these islands of history that have been disconnected by the periodization and nationalization of histories, and re-envision belonging away from imperial and national logics and towards local and translocal affiliations that have the potential to be anti-imperial and liberatory.

The event flyer is viewable at the link here.