CSEAS TALK on OCTOBER 24, 2024

I will be giving a talk at Kyoto University’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies on October 24, 13:30 Japan Time. The format is hybrid, so hopefully some of you all can tune-in for those who can’t make it in person. This is the link to the event: https://kyoto.cseas.kyoto-u.ac.jp/en/event/20241024/

And here’s the summary:

Title: Subsidence: Surfacing Life in a Sinking City

Speaker: Allan Edward Lumba (CSEAS Visiting Research Scholar / Assistant Professor, Concordia University)

Abstract: Nationalist Artist of the Philippines Nick Joaquin once wrote, “The site of Manila was reclaimed from the sea—and the sea is still trying to get it back.” Three decades later, Manila is sinking at an alarming rate. This process, in which land vertically moves downward, is called subsidence. Subsidence is an increasingly dangerous threat to coastal cities around the planet and a particular threat to one of the densest populated areas in the world, metro Manila. Yet, the problem of subsidence is not simply the abstract threat of rising sea levels due to planetary warming. Instead, an often-occluded problem is the neoliberal corporatization of water management combined with the intensification and proliferation of extractive industries. As more of the traditional waterways have been diverted from Manila for commercial use, the city’s rapidly increasing population of migrants from elsewhere have turned to extracting more groundwater, decreasing the stability of the land beneath the city and causing the city itself to sink and crumble under its own weight. This talk situates the recent threat of subsidence within a longer history of racial and colonial capitalism in and around Manila. It will especially focus on a broader overview of political ecological and infrastructural conditions from the nineteenth century into the present, while simultaneously tracing social movements that have surfaced in relation to struggles over water and land in Manila’s edges.