PRAISE AND REVIEWS
on Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America
“A beautifully written and brilliant retelling of the history of Filipino America. De Leon’s work deserves widespread attention from readers interested in Asian American history, US history, Indigenous histories, and histories of race and empire.”
— Simeon Man, author of Soldiering through Empire.
“This impressive, ambitious book promises to open new lines of conversation between Asian American studies, Indigenous studies, and settler colonial studies. De Leon blends sophisticated theoretical analysis with fluent prose in a way that undergraduate students as well as scholars will appreciate.”
— David Aiona Chang, author of The World and All Things Upon It.
“De Leon traces the emergence of two groups from northern Luzon, Ilokanos and Igorots, and reveals their racial transformation into 'Filipino.' Conscripted first into the Spanish tobacco economy and then the US agricultural industry, these people moved from the margins to the center of American empire, at once indispensable to and yet disposable for capitalist production. De Leon explores how these workers responded to and reshaped the condition of their exploitation through politics and aesthetics, while the colonial production of records, photographs, and performances laid the foundation for seeing the 'Filipino race.' De Leon's brilliant and original book deserves a wide readership.”
— Vicente Rafael, author of The Sovereign Trickster.
“Historian [Adrian] De Leon…investigates the construction of the racial label of "Filipino" and the histories and ethnologies of people from the Philippines. In a geographic location on a global trade route, this group of islands experienced centuries of colonization, first under Spanish rule and then under American. The author goes to great lengths to say that the word "Philippines" came from Spain's king at the time. The Indigenous peoples of the region did not choose it themselves. He looks to the island of Luzon to explore its Indigenous past. Its peoples in the mountainous northern highlands and the flat southern lowlands were considered savages and peasants by Western imperial powers. The highlands ("bundok" in the native language becoming "boondock" in English) were specifically seen as ungovernable hinterlands. The concept of racial economy and the subjective nature of archiving inform De Leon's ideas of insurgent ethnologies. He concludes that their racial label directly results from the migratory and work experiences of many different peoples of the Philippines being regarded as one ethnicity outside of their homelands…. Recommended for all higher education collections in anthropology and social sciences.”
— Karen Bordonaro, Library Journal.
on barangay: an offshore poem
“In barangay, Adrian De Leon traverses continents and oceans and various histories of struggle and forced movement and he does so with immense wisdom and poise. His poetic sensibilities are global and critical and geographical, and so the book amounts to a wondrous feat of both imagination and political solidarity.”
— Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of A History of My Brief Body and winner of the 2018 Griffin Poetry Prize.
“This is a book where urgent questions live – and keep living, despite the ‘answers’ typically imposed on such questioning. Here is poetry that examines and sings of Filipino diaspora while refusing white supremacist empire and a reductive representational politics. Here is a poet who takes no word, no sound for granted; each carries history, kinship, future, loss, ‘a wayward library’ of new maps and the un-mappable.”
— Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency.
“barangay: an offshore poem by Adrian De Leon is a haunting and lilting elegy in fragments. Like Nathaniel Mackey’s Andoumboulou poems, these poems collect to a voyage song where migrants of the Philippines never land, never find peace; they are both survivors and ghosts drowned out by the victors of colony; they are ancient mariners who sing their wake in a constellation of broken languages that are lost and adopted; De Leon has turned these once marooned speech acts into poetry that is indelible and subversive and gorgeous.”
— Cathy Park Hong, author of Pulitzer Prize finalist Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning.
"This unforgettable collection journeys into the tributaries and offshore currents of Filipino history, culture and migration. Through multilingual and innovative poetic methods, Adrian De Leon traverses intergenerational, diasporic, archipelagic and transoceanic spaces. Be prepared, reader, to navigate the deepest routes and roots of memory and legend.”
— Craig Santos Perez, author of Habitat Threshold and winner of the 2015 American Book Award.
“As I read Adrian De Leon’s barangay, I first feel tides moving across the poems – an ebb and flow, the pulse of an oceanic heartbeat. There is something that might appear to disappear but always returns – something of the body and spirit more so than the mind. The next movement I feel is an intellectual one towards collectivity – a grounded praxis, a commitment to asking how we might navigate these tides together. De Leon’s poems offer the potential to transcend the siloing nations we are born into, demanding we share in the ocean’s frightful power and liberatory potential, “from Luzon to Lanai, from Ainu Mosir to Aotearoa.” Finally, these poems move me inward and earthward. They’re a reminder that the forging of a communal world must reckon with, and shed, colonial inheritances. A constant return to ourselves – that place of mirrors and accountability where waves meet the shoreline.”
— Shō Yamagushiku, Hamilton Review of Books.
on FEEL WAYS: A Scarborough Anthology
“This book is like a mixtape of Scarborough stories that belong to the streets and trails and concrete as much as to the authors whose fierce visions bring them to you. The force of Feel Ways is the dailyness that the voices of these new writers raise above the single stroke of often obliterating stories.”
— Canisia Lubrin, winner of the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize.
“Who better than the shining trio of Adrian De Leon, Téa Mutonji, and Natasha Ramoutar to curate this original tribute to the ache and love of a place? Feel Ways is proof again that here, where we have lived, there is beauty, fierce laughter, and enduring life.”
— David Chariandy, author of Brother.
“From the heartbreak of love to buying mangos out of white vans on the weekends, these are love letters to Scarborough and to all of us who live here, who have escaped, or who have chosen to stay. Whatever your feelings are about the suburbs, Feel Ways forces us to be seen for all our ugly and all our magnificence.”
— Eternity Martis, author of They Said This Would Be Fun.