Organizer: Sulo: The Philippine Studies Initiative at NYU; NYSEAN; Espacio de Culturas at NYU; NYU Department of History
Type/Location: In Person / New York, NY
Description:
Join NYSEAN, Sulo: The Philippine Studies Initiative at NYU, Espacio de Culturas at NYU, and the NYU Department of History for a book talk by Dr. Adrian De Leon, Assistant Professor of History at NYU. Dr. De Leon will be in conversation with Dr. Karen Miller, Professor of History and American Studies at LaGuardia Community College and the CUNY Graduate Center, and Dr. Chris Cañete Rodriguez Kelly, Mellon Teaching Fellow and Lecturer of English at Columbia University.
About the Book:
What does it mean to go back home, especially when “home” is shaped by conquest, labor, and longing? This question has animated the experiences of global migrants displaced by imperialism, capital, and the nation-states that have sought to manage their movements for their own political and economic benefit. Through vivid storytelling, Adrian De Leon traces how Filipinos, both at home and overseas, have both shaped the societies they’ve settled in and transformed the very idea of the Philippines itself.
By following the emergence of the Filipino return migrant (balikbayan), De Leon explores how statecraft in the Philippines—from the late Spanish period through the post-1946 independent state—attempted to co-opt value from migrant communities. Balikbayanshows how diasporic labor and transpacific political imaginations were central to the development of a modern Philippine nation-state, through enabling the continued conquest of the islands’ frontiers, and sustaining the economic recovery of a nation indebted by native elites and overseas empires. In turn, these lands were reframed by the state as the birthright of overseas Filipinos who yearned to connect with their roots.
Compiled through deep and thoughtful research in community archives, the itinerant histories brought to life in Balikbayan coalesce around a new cultural-economic form that has come to define contemporary nationhood: the homeland.
About the Speakers:
Adrian De Leon is an Assistant Professor of U.S. History at New York University, and the co-chair of Sulo: The Philippine Studies Initiative at NYU. Across historical periods and literary genres (especially poetry and narrative nonfiction), his work explores the breadth of Filipino diasporic experience and its fraught relationship with modern nation-states and global imperialism, especially (but not exclusively) the United States empire.
He is the author and editor of six books. His most recent publications include: Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America (University of North Carolina Press, 2023), which was awarded the Sally and Ken Owens Award from the Western History Association, and numerous other honors; Balikbayan: A Revenant History of the Filipino Homeland (University of Washington Press, 2026); and Notes from a Wayward Son: A Memoir (Bond Street Books/Great Circle Books, 2026).
Karen Miller is Professor of History and American Studies at LaGuardia Community College and the CUNY Graduate Center. Her current work examines internal migration programs, settler colonization, and their roots in US empire in the Philippines over the long twentieth century.
Chris Cañete Rodriguez Kelly is a literary critic whose work focuses on social relations of labor and aesthetic production. They received their Ph.D. in Literary Studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2024 and specialize in twentieth-century Southeast Asian and Asian-diasporic literatures, with research and teaching interests in Philippine Tagalog and Anglophone literature and translation, Latinx studies, critical indigenous studies, as well as American and Asian American Studies.
Registration:
To attend this event in person, please register here.