FILIPINO ECOLOGICAL IMAGINATION: TYPHOON YOLANDA, CLIMATE CHANGE, AND IMPERIALISM
IN PHILIPPINE POETRY AND PROSE
JEFFREY SANTA ANA
Jeffrey Santa Ana
 BA in English/Environmental Studies from the
University of Pennsylvania
 PhD in English from University of California,
Berkeley
 Focus on cultural works of Asian Americans and
Asian-Pacific immigrants, migrants, and refugees in
the postcolonial diaspora
 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching
 Faculty Diversity Program Award
 Associate Professor in Stony Brook University
Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda
 November 8, 2013
AGAM: Filipino Narratives on Uncertainty and Climate
Change
 Published in 2014
Introduction
 Filipino Ecological Imagination-social remembering
that both imagines and modifies a postcolonial
ecocriticism to mediate environmental destruction
within the history of imperialism in the Philippines
 Anthropocene-human activity as the dominant
influence on environmental change
 Empathic position in grasping the vast scale of
climate change and comprehending concerns of
environmental justice
Typhoon Yolanda, Imperialist Militarism, Fossil Fuel,
and the Anthropocene
 Visayan Islands as a primary site of violence and
destruction
o Philippine-American War, World War II,
Japanese Occupation, Balangiga Massacre
o Yolanda (now)
 “Western capitalist trade and industry would not
have thrived without access to military and political
power”
 “conditions in which Western capital could prevail
over indigenous commerce”
 “Asian nations have rushed to get out of poverty
and achieve economic growth through carbon-
intensive technology”
 Development schemes: “naturalization of capital
that are executed as economic schemes of
modernization and progress”
Postcolonialism, Filipino Ecocriticism, and
Environmental Justice
 Remembering and reclaiming of histories of
imperialism
 Formulation as single, monolithic force vs. result of
consumer appetites of developed countries
 Assess past and present colonial powers
Memory, Ecology, and Climate Change in Agam
 He Said and How Do You Read the Clouds?
o Dwelling- long-term imbrication of humans in a
landscape of memory, ancestry and death, of
ritual, life and work
o Bond with the island
o Ruination and loss due to climate change
 Mnemonic relationship to the environment
 “historicizes the people’s origins from which they
have been forcefully removed because of the
environmentally destructive consequences of
human-induced climate change”
 Socioenvironmental Memory- postcolonial
narratives of remembering that make visible the
slow violence of climate change historically caused
by centuries of resource imperialism inflicted on the
global south and the unsustainable burning of fossil
fuels that have fulfilled the consumer appetites of
rich-country citizens
Slow Violence and Postcolonial Memory
 “a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed
across time and space”
 “unsettled dominant paradigms of US nation-
centered environmentalism
 Human-induced violence- act of violence against
the collective memory of postcolonial societies
 Neoliberal Policies of IMF and World Bank
Postcolonial Ecological Imagination
 Post/Colonial melancholia- loss of the right to own
the loss
 Continuing effect of displacement that are both
physical and temporal
Filipino Ecological Imagination and the Inang Bayan
 Environmental degradation as an injustice of
colonial and imperialist oppressions
 Recuperate and preserved through memory
 Imperial debris- the aftershocks of the empire
 “the wasted matter left over by a project of
development”