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 In the Country: Stories (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 kairos 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.

In July 2011, Care Divas , an exuberant, high-energy musical about Filipino migrants in Israel, enjoyed its third run of shows in six months to sold-out audiences in Manila. Highlighting the intimate spaces of contemporary global labor migration, the smash-hit musical reveals how multiple intimacies and histories rub up against each other and enable temporary collectivities and affinities in the timespace compression of globalization. I suggest that this precarious global time “in between” is nonidentical with national time effected by the negotiation with spaces and histories that do not necessarily belong to the migrant. From the migrant’s standpoint, precarious global time is nonidentical with any particular national time riven by the disruptions of multiple spaces and histories—a reframing that generates alternative socialities and temporalities outside of the national order.

No abstract

No abstract

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.