The threads of abandonment, hopelessness, and haunting connect the desiring characters in Old Movies by Ian Casocot (Philippines) and The King of Caldecott Hill by Amanda Lee Koe (Singapore). The television screen acts as a space for these lost characters to project their fantasies and form desires for companionship against an indifferent and globalized society. These fantasies staged by the screen, while an escape from the world and their afflictions to abandonment, also reveal a deeper connection with the work of dreams produced in their respective nations. To explore these connections, I echo Neferti Tadiar’s fantasy-production to analyze whether ‘the global order of dreamwork’ pervades in fiction and affects the ways of dreaming held by literary characters. I contend that the dreams of fictional characters, specifically, the way their fantasies are constructed, are symptomatic of the kinds of imagination (re)produced to construct the Philippines and Singapore as nations. At the same time, these stories confront readers with the ways of living administered by these national imaginations.

This paper explores the fantasy-productions of Filipino diasporic novels for young readers, namely the Filipino American novels "Hello, Universe" by Erin Entrada Kelly and "Patron Saints of Nothing" by Randy Ribay. The transnational concept of fantasy-productions is based on the theories of Neferti Tadiar and will be complemented by theories regarding mythographies and the imaginary by Arjun Appadurai.This paper will highlight how Filipino American novels decolonize American fantasy-productions, as seen in the children’s novel, "Hello, Universe", which won the most prestigious children’s literature award in the USA, the John Newbery Medal, in 2018. The mythographies in the novel help recuperate Filipino tribal representations, which were demonized by American fantasy-productions. On the other hand, the new mestizo consciousness, as found in "Patron Saints of Nothing", nominated for the US National Book Award for young adult literature and also won the Freeman’s Award in Asia in 2019, engages with the fantasy-productions of the Philippine government regarding Rodrigo Duterte’s Drug War, as well as confront American fantasy-productions regarding Filipino American invisibility and indifference. The mythographies found in the novel forwards Filipino American

solidarity in the values of "pakikisama" and "pakikiramay". These two novels show that Filipino American narratives are significant, because they are part of Philippine national discourse and converse with other fantasy-productions from the Philippines.

This study explores the confluence of masculinity and nationhood in the music videos of the P-pop boy group, Alamat. Alamat has distinguished themselves from other P-pop groups in recent years through their use of various Philippine languages in their songs and stylized depictions of traditional Filipino textiles, narratives, and imagery in their music videos. These demonstrate a distinctly “Filipino” approach to the K-pop boy-group formula that both reflects and responds to the socio-cultural sensibilities of Philippine audiences, vis-a-vis our colonial past and globalized present.

In this paper, I argue that Alamat’s musical and aesthetic demonstration of a Filipino identity relies on gendered, masculinized strategies. Scholars agree that the nation must be considered as a fundamentally masculine enterprise (Andersen and Wendt, 2015)-- one that is territorially and culturally maintained through the physical and discursive integrity of its male population, akin to Connell’s conception of a hegemonic masculinity (2005). Alamat, in my view, plays with traditional, hegemonic Filipino masculinity, characterized by strength, religiosity, and economic responsibility (Chan, 2017), through their music videos’ navigation of sexual bodies, desire, and national feeling. The visual, moving motif of “kaldag,” a gyrating dance move that directs the audience’s gaze onto the members’ bare torsos, centers male erotic desire in shoring up collective identifications not only with romantic pursuits but also with anti-colonial resistance. However, while these moves signal cultural and sexual potency, they also fulfill unique affective functions as they mark moments of emotional vulnerability. The music videos narrate various levels of alienation experienced by the country’s youth as an outcome of extensive labor migration, neo-colonial beauty standards, and poverty (Arnaldo, 2020). It is through this layered approach to intimacy and the national condition that Alamat manifests a hybrid masculinity, one that challenges entrenched narratives of domination and foregrounds desire and feeling as national/cultural agency.

‘Emergence’ — a collaborative, interdisciplinary, multimedia performance by Arvin Noguerras, Itos Ledesma, and the Daloy Dance Company — features multiple forms of engagement with Wilfrido D. Nolledo’s But for the Lovers (1972). Staged in Manila in 2024, the performance involved variations on Nolledo’s novel; themes of which were re-articulated through movement, sound, and a dramatic reading of an essay reframing and responding to quotations from the novel. The text was considered as a point of convergence and departure, and each component of the performance varied on themes explored in the novel, including confinement, freedom, and transformation.

This presentation seeks to reflect upon the process of transposing elements of Nolledo’s writing through different media, examining resonances among the sonic, choreographic, and the textual. The discussion centres on parallel strategies actualised through each medium, focusing on how techniques and approaches from each process respond to, reinforce, and modulate the aesthetic and political dimensions of the text.