This chapter centers on Ricardo Saludo’s play The Silent Soprano, specifically its figurations of laboring Filipino bodies placed in the constancy of physical peril as they get absorbed into the foreign industries of domestic labor and popular entertainment. Using the case of domestics and entertainers in Hong Kong, this chapter explores how the globalization of labor converts female domestic bodies into global entities that are not only exploited as the means to capital accumulation but also silenced on the basis of their class, race, ethnicity, and nationality. Furthermore, it points out how the play mobilizes the romance between its lead characters to underscore a formation of racial supremacy and inferiority within the Asian region itself, where China and the Philippines are in constant tension with each other and follow a master–slave dynamic in the context of mass mediation and labor migration. This chapter ultimately uncovers the colonialist and imperialist tendencies that support and are perpetuated by such cultural logic of rescue, redemption, and romance.

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Migrant Racism and Romance

  • Oscar T. Serquiña, Jr.

摘要

This chapter centers on Ricardo Saludo’s play The Silent Soprano, specifically its figurations of laboring Filipino bodies placed in the constancy of physical peril as they get absorbed into the foreign industries of domestic labor and popular entertainment. Using the case of domestics and entertainers in Hong Kong, this chapter explores how the globalization of labor converts female domestic bodies into global entities that are not only exploited as the means to capital accumulation but also silenced on the basis of their class, race, ethnicity, and nationality. Furthermore, it points out how the play mobilizes the romance between its lead characters to underscore a formation of racial supremacy and inferiority within the Asian region itself, where China and the Philippines are in constant tension with each other and follow a master–slave dynamic in the context of mass mediation and labor migration. This chapter ultimately uncovers the colonialist and imperialist tendencies that support and are perpetuated by such cultural logic of rescue, redemption, and romance.