Passionate Revolutions

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.

"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

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.