About

Allan Punzalan Isaac is a Professor of American Studies and English and serves as the Associate Dean of the Humanities. He specializes in Asian American, comparative ethnic, and postcolonial aspects of contemporary American literary and cultural studies. His academic work includes the publication of the book American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America, which received the Association for Asian American Studies Cultural Studies Book Award. His research interests encompass Asian American Studies, critical race theory, law and literature, and comparative race studies. Isaac has also authored Filipino Time: Affective Worlds and Contracted Labor, published by Fordham University Press in 2022. He has a background that includes a BA from Williams College and a PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University. Additionally, he was a Senior Fulbright Scholar at DeLaSalle University-Taft in Manila, Philippines during 2003-2004. Isaac teaches a broad range of courses related to theory, literature, ethnicity, and race.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Social Science
• History
• Gender studies
• Law
• Communication
• Philosophy
• Anthropology
• Archaeology
• Art
• Aesthetics
• Geography
• Linguistics
• Psychology
• Literature

Selected publications

• Critical Race Studies Now: Teaching Anti-Asian Racism within and outside of Institutions

  Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas · 2023-02-13

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• Fifteen. Datíng as Affect in Filipinx Migration

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2022

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  • Psychology
  • Communication
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• Datíng as Affect in Filipinx Migration

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2022-06-07

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• Datíng as Affect in Filipinx Migration

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2022-04-05

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  This essay considers “dating” (pronounced as “dah-teeng” and translated from Tagalog into English as a kind of force or impression) as a type of affect that constitutes a potentially generative site to explore the workings and circulation of affect on a global scale. Building on scholarship on the affective dimensions of Filipinx labor migration and, specifically, on care and carework, it poses the question of what it would mean to shift our focus from “return” to “arrival”—in the author’s words, to bend the time and space of the present—as a means to recover what might have been lost during movement or to find pleasure in fantasizing about alternative possibilities.

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• Introduction: Accumulating Time

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2021-11-02

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  The introduction takes a Fan Reaction Video for Venus Raj, a daughter of poverty and Filipino labor diaspora turned beauty queen, to trace how modes of affective exchange have lives beyond and beside capital productions. Communality is the precarious, oftentimes fleeting, gathering of the imagination, wherein human beings reach out to touch others. Coupled with an account of caregivers in Queens, New York, the chapter explores how affect limns the subtle and not so subtle shifts in mood and modes that frame relationships and ways of being in the world. Affective labor creates relationships and manipulates affect. The contractual obligation conjures proximity with another human being, but this power of affective redirection also carves another chronicity and space for the worker within the contracted work-time. These multiple movements nuance how we understand subjects interpellated by multiple locations and normative identities in terms of nation, gender, sexuality, race, and class. Yet, subjects remain irreducible to these calcified categories.

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• “We Have No Time to Wallow”: Death and Other Timely Diversions

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2021

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  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Social Science

  The chapter takes up affective diversions as explored in a musical, <italic>Care Divas</italic>, staged in Manila about queer Filipino caregivers in Israel. The musical brings global migration and the regional politics of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict into queer spaces, times, and communities. While death is always a possibility in war and within contract labor’s precarious condition in a war zone, death as staged by the musical performance makes visible lifeways and networks. The plot’s ‘“refusal to wallow,” as per the director, in the face of tragedies generates the emergence of other ways to form communalities, even life amid annihilation. The work, along with its source material, plays with stopping, extending, disembodying, retelling, and making impossible the life and time(s) of the protagonists. Refusing the hero/victim binary sought by nationalist fantasies, the musical looks at non-state-sanctioned relationships to show how family and nation as precarious fictions give way to temporary collectivities that find life in the musical’s virtual time and place.

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• “Holding Out for Something Better”: Timing and Other In-Between Times

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2021-11-02

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  The chapter considers timing or timeliness, as a qualitative experience of time, in three short stories about Filipinos in different types of service work: Mia Alvar’s “The Miracle Worker” in her short story collection <italic>In the Country: Stories</italic> (2015) about a special education teacher in Bahrain; Michelle Cruz Skinner’s “In the Company of Strangers,” the title short story triptych about domestic workers in Italy; and Nicholas Go’s flash fiction, “The Blind Oracle of Mactan” about a youthful 400-year old masseur who can foretell the future. Timing and timeliness, or k<italic>airos</italic> in rhetoric, is that intangible eventuality not wholly about individual intent but the deployment of social conditions to configure possibilities for the moment. These narratives of economy highlight how the authors nuance the moment of insight to draw attention to in-between times—speculation, meantimes, and conjoined futurity. These times in-between bring to light vital exchanges and value-making that generate possibilities for world-making and communing otherwise.

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• “I’ve Never Been to Me”: Redirecting Arrivals and Returns

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2021-11-02

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  The Filipino vernacular concept <italic>datíng</italic> captures a person’s composure, arrival, and impact on place and others around them. Thus, someone’s arrival also becomes a moment of other possibilities. Ramona Diaz’s documentary <italic>The Learning</italic> (2011) tells the story of Filipina schoolteachers from across the Philippine archipelago who were recruited to Baltimore, Maryland’s struggling and de facto predominantly Black public schools. Much of the film narrative is focused on the maintenance of kinship across great distances with back-and-forth splices but also spends much time on the film subjects’ performative gestures that redirect narratives away from well-worn tropes of duty, resistance, and self-sacrifice. <italic>Datíng</italic> indexes the body’s capacity to configure space, arrivals, returns, and atmosphere to stage other worlds, away from an overarching national or labor narrative.

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• Coda: Presence and Mourning to the Future

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2021-11-02

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  The coda looks at mediated mourning practice, E-Burol, live-streamed funeral vigils, a common decade-old technological practice made necessary by Filipino diasporic life, to explore various embodied conceptions of sociality and relationality when time and space do not coincide but are juxtaposed through a mediated interface. Since the medium affords entry and exit into various modes of time—ritual time, everyday time, and end times, E-burol makes manifest various ways of being with others. I highlight two Tagalog concept-words that map other ways to generate ecologies of communality: <italic>pakiramdam</italic> (literally, to make oneself felt, or to feel a presence) is affective engagement without immediate proximity at all, and <italic>kapiling</italic>, with the collectivizing <italic>ka</italic> prefix, is to be in someone’s proximity or vicinity but does not necessarily include or demand any interaction between the two parties.

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• Filipino Time

  Fordham University Press eBooks · 2021-11-02

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  <italic>Filipino Time</italic> examines how a variety of immaterial labor performed by Filipinos in the Philippines and around the world, while producing bodily and affective disciplines and dislocations, also generate and explore vital affects, multiple networks, and other worlds. Whether in representations of death in a musical or keeping work time at bay in a call center, these forms of living emerge from and even work alongside capitalist exploitation of affective labor. Affective labor involves human intersubjective interaction and creative capacities. Thus, through creative labor, subjects make communal worlds out of one colonized by capital time. In reading these cultural productions, the book traces concurrent chronicities, ways of sensing and making sense of time alongside capital’s dominant narrative. From the hostile but habitable textures of labor-time, migratory subjects live and weave narratives of place and belonging, produce new modes of connections and ways to feel time with others.The book explores how these chronicities are re-articulated in a capacious archive of storytelling about the Filipino labor diaspora in fiction, in a musical, in an ethnography, and in a documentary film. Each of the genres demonstrates how time and space are manifest in deformations by narrative and genre. These cultural expressions capture life-making capacities within the capitalist world of disruptions and circulations of bodies and time. Thus, they index how selves go out of bounds beyond the economic contract to transform, even momentarily, self, others, time, and their surroundings.

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Frequent coauthors

• Robert Diaz

  University of Toronto

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• Ferdinand Lopez

  1 shared

• Anjali Nerlekar

  1 shared

• Martin F. Manalansan

  1 shared

• Anita Mannur

  1 shared

• Josen Masangkay Diaz

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  1 shared

• Gary Devilles

  Ateneo de Manila University

  1 shared

• Robert Diaz

  1 shared

Awards & honors

• Association for Asian American Studies Cultural Studies Book…