Passionate Revolutions: The Media and the Rise and Fall of the Marcos Regime

by Talitha Espiritu

Overview

In the last three decades, the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos has commanded the close scrutiny of scholars. These studies have focused on the political repression, human rights abuses, debt-driven growth model, and crony capitalism that defined Marcos' so-called Democratic Revolution in the Philippines. But the relationship between the media and the regime's public culture remains underexplored.

In Passionate Revolutions, Talitha Espiritu evaluates the role of political emotions in the rise and fall of the Marcos government. Focusing on the sentimental narratives and melodramatic cultural politics of the press and the cinema from 1965 to 1986, she examines how aesthetics and messaging based on heightened feeling helped secure the dictator's control while also galvanizing the popular struggles that culminated in "people power" and government overthrow in 1986.

In analyzing news articles, feature films, cultural policy documents, and propaganda films as national allegories imbued with revolutionary power, Espiritu expands the critical discussion of dictatorships in general and Marcos's in particular by placing Filipino popular media and the regime's public culture in dialogue. Espiritu's interdisciplinary approach in this illuminating case study of how melodrama and sentimentality shape political action breaks new ground in media studies, affect studies, and Southeast Asian studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780896803114
Publisher:	Ohio University Press
Publication date:	04/15/2017
Series:	Ohio RIS Southeast Asia Series , #132
Edition description:	1
Pages:	284
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Talitha Espiritu teaches in the Film and New Media Studies program at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts. Her work on the Marcos regime has appeared in edited anthologies and in Journal of Narrative Theory and Social Identities.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Power of Political Emotions 1

1 The First Quarter Storm 20

2 Social Conduct and the New Society 53

3 National Discipline and the Cinema 84

4 Popular Struggles and Elite Politics 116

5 The Media and the Second Coming of the First Quarter Storm 144

6 The New Politics, Lino Brocka, and People Power 171

Conclusion: The Force of National Allegory 204

Abbreviations 219

Notes 221

Glossary 253

Bibliography 259

Index 268

Editorial Reviews

"It has almost become a truism that Philippine traditional politics is infused with, and even fueled by, emotion....A comprehensive history of this phenomenon is still waiting to be written, but Talitha Espiritu's Passionate Revolutions is a good place to begin....Drawing ... generally from the 'affective turn' in cultural studies, Espiritu argues for a more categorical consideration of the emotive dimension of this era--a theme that is only implicitly broached (though nevertheless almost always present) in most other standard accounts."--Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde

"Espiritu makes a major contribution to media studies by combining sensitivity to political-economic forces and political machinations with a suggestive investigation of a layer not often discussed in media studies: the national imaginary."--Clay Steinman, coauthor, Consuming Environments: Television and Commercial Culture

"Espiritu's grasp of the uses of cinema in Philippine political theatre, narrated in its breathtaking scope and absurdity, is this challenging and ambitious book's greatest strength."--Cherubim Quizon, Seton Hall University

From the Publisher