Far Beyond the Oceans, O Sa Mga Ibayong Dagat: Terraformations of National and Diasporic Belonging in Filipino Canada

Abstract

This dissertation develops the theory of terraformation, which I define as a contested and co-constituted process of change that occurs at the political-affective terrains of belonging experienced at the scales of the nation-state and the diaspora. As this research project’s case study is the Filipino diaspora in Canada, I therefore examine the ways in which terraformation as a process occurs across three scales. Mirroring the journey of the Filipino migrant to Canada, I begin in the Philippines through a critical discourse analysis of the annual State of the Nation Addresses from 1965 to 2025, before the point at which Filipino citizens-migrants depart the homeland. I argue that the Philippine state has terraformed Filipino citizenship from a belonging into a possessive in its commodification of Filipinos in Overseas Filipino Workers. I then follow the migrants in their move to Canada and the Filipino diaspora as they become migrant-citizens; I contend that families and individuals experience legal terraformations of belonging not only in accessing permanent residency and citizenship to Canada, but also in how the migrant-citizen’s legal-affective relationship with the new home nation is influenced by the ways in which they are received into its social and cultural fabric. Finally, I examine how the diaspora challenges the terrains of diasporic and national identity within Canada as its new home nation. Particularly, I argue that through fictive works, the Philippines as a minoritised and racialised diaspora resists and unsettles the sedimented mainstream Canadian notion of Filipino identity in Canada as labourer, but that in doing so, it terraforms not only the ways in which the diaspora sees itself, but also how Canada as the new home nation understands itself vis-à-vis the diaspora. I conclude that terraformation as a theory of change and as a heuristic, with its insistence on remembering what has been invisibilised, has allowed me to explore the experience of the diaspora as a group that exists in contestation with political and cultural hegemony across the long span of political time.