from Manila for a significant period, and I was starved for news about the“homeland”, especially for updates on the May 2007 Philippine National Elections.Philippine Elections, as many commentators say, are best described ascarnivalesque, with the whole country thrown into frenzy from campaign road tours,catchy advertising jingles, and the literally star-studded lineup of celebrities-turned-politicos (Bionat 1998). I was then curious as to how such an occasion would qualifyas a kind of “media event” of ecstatic nationalism (Dayan & Katz 1992) for Filipinosliving away from the Philippines. And with 11% of the Philippine population livingabroad (“Stock Estimate”, 2006), I wanted to inquire into how this politically andeconomically significant community engage with homeland political affairs bywatching the news, learning about the candidates, and subsequently voting astransnational Filipino publics.While doing my interviews however, I found that news about the electionswas not closely monitored. Families did not readily gather around the television set,as I had thought. And talk about Philippine politics was either minimal or severelycritical, as Filipino migrants compared them to the more “systematic”, “sensible”, and“serious” politics of the British Parliament. Having satellite subscriptions to
TheFilipino Channel
(TFC) then did not “magically transport” them to the homeland asengaged citizens indifferent to the politics of the host country—a view thatconservative thinkers, policy-makers, and even the media themselves assume(Madianou 2005a: 522; Aksoy & Robins 2000: 351). In short, I didn’t get a sense of
ecstatic
nationalism from their news watching at all.But, still listening and observing, I noted that Filipinos reflect on their Filipino-ness in their media practices from a variety of less extravagant, though notnecessarily humble, ways: commenting on British news media’s depictions of Filipinonurses, boasting about Filipino athletes winning international tournaments, claimingthe superiority of Filipino soap operas over “boring” British soaps, and others.My most interesting discovery though happened at a birthday party in arespondent’s apartment in Bromley-by-Bow, East London. The media were a big-screen television, two microphones, and a thick playlist of “local” and “foreign” songs.Singing karaoke, it seemed, was what brought Filipinos around the TV and, perhaps,was what brought them “home”. Karaoke, the migrants claimed, is a distinctly“Filipino practice”. “Only in the Philippines do you get shot for singing out of tune,”one said unabashedly, referring to a BBC report of a man killed in Manila after an off-key rendition of Frank Sinatra’s
My Way
. And throughout such evenings, talk, gossip,and jokes about what it meant to be Filipino would draw both serious debate andbawdy laughs. The question whether such a practice could be called a “high holiday”
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