Alden Sajor Marte-Wood is an Assistant Professor of English at Rice University. He specializes in Asian Anglophone and Asian American literatures, media studies, and political economy. His writing has appeared in Meridians, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Post45, The Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics, Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities, The Journal of Asian American Studies, Asian American Literature: An Encyclopedia for Students, and the Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory.
Two decades ago, at precisely the same moment “intermediality” and “inter-Asia” began to enter the critical lexicon, the Filipina art historian Alice Guillermo evaluated the proliferation of films about Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) in the 1990s as visual attempts “to give an artistic and emotional unity to a tragic experience with which many people empathize” (107). While films about the OFW experience predate this period, Guillermo importantly calls our attention to the consolidation of the genre against the historical backdrop of inter-Asian labor contradictions and crises in the ‘90s. Focusing exclusively on the spate of Filipino films dramatizing the high-profile cases of actual Filipina contract workers “in extremis” (100) laboring elsewhere in Asia, like Flor Contemplacion (Singapore), Maricris Sioson (Japan), and Sarah Balabagan (UAE), Guillermo’s well-known account generatively attends to the uneven characterization, nationalist sentimentality, and political instrumentalization of this first wave of “OFW visual culture.” Missing from Guillermo’s account, however, is the crucial recognition that all of the films she analyzes are in fact cinematic adaptations of stories that first circulated in myriad media and discursive forms throughout Asia—television, newspaper, radio, policy reports, etc. Historicizing this origin story of “OFW visual culture,” now more than thirty years old, my essay develops the concept of “transmedial migration” as an attempt to ground Irina O. Rajewsky’s notion of “medial transposition” (51) within the historical specificity of Filipino reproductive workers’ expanded, but subordinated circulation throughout the region at the beginning of the so-called “Asian century.” Just as Filipino reproductive labor becomes transnational in its out-migration, so too does charting the decades-long history of “OFW visual cultures” reveal another type of migration: a transmedial one, in which OFW narratives move through different media forms, each with new horizons of possibility and structural limits. Furthermore, given that so many of these media texts are produced by non-Filipino Asians (e.g. Singaporean, Japanese, and Korean cultural producers), this essay interrogates the collective reproduction of “OFW visual cultures” as a uniquely inter-Asian mode of mediatic representation. Departing from the real-life adaptations of the 1990s and their sentimentalist derivatives like Rory Quintos’s Anak (2000) and Chito S. Roños Caregiver (2008), this essay first examines the rise of economic allegory in the OFW horror films from early 2000s (Kelvin Tong’s The Maid [2005], Chito S. Roño’s Sukob [2006], and Yam Laranas’s The Echo [2008]). It then turns to the festival-circuit social realism of films from the 2010s (Anthony Chen’s Ilo Ilo [2013], Hannah Espia’s Transit [2013], and Zig Dulay’s Bagahe [2017]) and Sung-A Yoon’s art-house documentary Overseas (2019), as a means to locate this shift from earlier sentimental or fantastic visual forms to “semiperipheral realist” ones as the inauguration of OFW visual cultures “transmedial migration” into autobiographical, autofictional, and interactive epistolary forms made possible by platform mediatization within the OFW diaspora. Examining the contemporary proliferation of OFW vlogging and video content production on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Tik Tok, this essay ends with an evaluation of the new digital autonomies and foreclosures for OFW narratives signaled by this uniquely 21st-century, inter-Asian remediation of life writing into livestreaming.