Resistance to the Biopolitics of Resilience in the Philippines after Super Typhoon Yolanda: An Analysis of the Literary Anthology Agam

Abstract

Super Typhoon Yolanda hit the Philippines in November 2013 and caused the largest damage in the country’s history. Previous studies on the disaster have mainly discussed the problematic nature of the neoliberalist reconstruction process, which transferred responsibility for crisis response from the state to markets and individuals. These studies, however, have limited their scope to condemning political economic injustice and have failed to shed light on the creativity of people who, presupposing a degree of social and ecological precarity, try to design alternative lives under crisis conditions. This paper, therefore, critiques the literary anthology Agam: Filipino Narratives on Uncertainty and Climate Change, published by an environmental NGO in June 2014, and shows its significance in the social context of that time. While the idea of resilience gained the power to rigidly govern the victims’ lifestyle and their relationship with the natural environment in the aftermath of Yolanda, Agam utilizes media that do not fix meanings, such as photography and literature, to explore the uncertainty of nature, and presents an image of the Filipino nation that, in the midst of destruction, transforms itself and lives through the climate crisis by its own hands. This paper implies that a unique politics of climate is emerging in the contemporary Philippines that resists the biopolitics of resilience and stakes the very possibility of experiencing and responding to the climate crisis on its struggle.