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Research in Education
2022, Vol. 0(0) 1–17
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DOI: 10.1177/00345237221110917
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Theorizing M
aori-Philippine
solidarities through agential
realism and punk rock pedagogy
Noah Romero*
School of Education, University of Auckland, New Zealand
Marta Estell´
es
University of Auckland, New Zealand
Wairehu Grant
University of Waikato, New Zealand
Abstract
This article utilizes looks to punk rock pedagogy or the ways in which countercultural and
decolonial ontologies are developed in punk subculture, to theorize M
aori-Philippine
relations in Aotearoa New Zealand. It uses an agential realist methodology to engage with
the creative works of TOOMS, James Roque, and Marianne Infante (three New Zealand
performing artists of Philippine ancestry). These works read through historiographic
accounts of the Philippine diaspora to theorize how contemporary independent artists
are reviving the ancestral bonds that once linked the Philippines and the Pacific. The-
orizing M
aori-Philippine relations through punk rock shows what Indigenous and im-
migrant peoples stand to gain when they decenter the colonizer and prioritize
communing with one another.
Keywords
Punk, new materialism, indigeneity, Philippine studies, diaspora
Introduction
My ancestor is said to have died pursuing a fish as big as an island. The act of fishing up a
land is famously attributed to Maui, whose exploits made him a hero in Aotearoa (New
Corresponding authors:
Noah Romero, School of Education, University of Auckland, 47, Crummer Rd, Auckland, Grey Lynn 1021,
New Zealand.
Email: noah.romero@auckland.ac.nz
*Noah Romero is also affiliated in Department of Teaching and Learning, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, United
States.
Zealand), Hawai’i, Samoa, Tonga, Niue, and throughout the Pacific(Wilcken, 2013).
While his adventures are markedly similar to those of Maui, the ancestor to which I
(Noah) refer was called Lam-ang and is regarded as the culture hero of the Ilokano people
of the Northern Philippines (Castro, 1984). The story of Lam-ang has been altered by time
and translation. The tale was not recorded in its precolonial form and was altered by
Spanish translators, who infused it with anachronistic Christian moralizing (Wilcken,
2013). The Hispanization of angbiagniLam-angillustrates one of the ways Spanish
occupation cut the Philippine archipelago off from the maritime South Pacificand
greater Southeast Asia. The Philippine historian Zeus Salazar (2000), however, argues
that the peoples of the Philippines, Polynesia, Aotearoa, Madagascar, Hawai’i, and
Southeast Asia originate from and occupy the same Austronesian cultural continuum.
Despite their separation by te moana nui a kiwa (the Pacific Ocean), precolonial
Austronesian cultures shared similar oral histories, aesthetic traditions, maritime trade
relations, and oceangoing technologies (Salazar, 1999). In The Forgotten Children of
Maui, the scholar, historian, and mambatok (traditional Philippine hand-tap tattoo artist)
Lane Wilcken (2013) examines the affinities among precolonial Philippine, M
aori, and
Polynesian artforms like skin modification, weaving, storytelling, and ritual chanting in
an effort to rejuvenate and revive these links. Wilcken (2013) echoes Salazar’s (2000)
invocation of a Pan-Pacific cultural continuum to argue that Maui, a great ancestor of
M
aori and Polynesian peoples, was a similarly regarded ancestor in the Philippines,
wherehewasknownas“[Lam-ang]…Lumawig, Awig, Aponitolau, Dumalawi, and
Wigan”(p. 9).
The genealogical, historical, cultural, and convivial links between the first peoples of
the Philippines, Polynesia, and Aotearoa are often viewed as secondary political concerns
to the ongoing ramifications of their encounters with more dominant powers (Salazar,
2000;Wilcken, 2013). Emissaries from such states have historically included settlers,
missionaries, occupiers, traders, military commanders, and teachers from the metro-
poles of Spain, Britain, and the United States (Coloma, 2013;Romero, 2020a). This
article seeks to decenter these hegemonic relations and draws from the new materialist
philosophy of agential realism to meditate upon the pedagogical construction of M
aori-
Philippine solidarities in Aotearoa. In so doing, we chart an exploratory course toward
reconstructing the ocean-faring channels that connected our archipelagos and ancestors
in years past. We theorize punk rock pedagogy (PRP) - or the ways by which punk
culture activates the teaching, learning, and embodiment of anti-oppressive politics-as a
contemporary effort to fish life out of murky waters. PRP is important in this project
because it is a site of pedagogic meaning-making where Eurocentric perspectives are
included, but non-dominant (Cordova, 2017). PRP allows us to engage with philo-
sophical, artistic, and pedagogical M
aori-Philippine engagements without filtering them
through dominant and colonizing discourses.
Though European New Zealanders (or p
akeh
a) make up the statistical, economic, and
sociopolitical majority of Aotearoa, the nation’s intercultural relations are not fully
captured by the assumption that social life is defined by oppositional dyads like M
aori-
p
akeh
a, oppressor-oppressed, and citizen-alien (see Estell´
es et al., 2022). Relational
ontologies like agential realism call for a “critical examination of the practices by which
2Research in Education 0(0)
the differential boundaries of the human and the nonhuman, and the social and the
natural, are drawn”(Barad, 2003: p. 210). Agential realism offers a provocative ap-
paratus for examining, pondering and articulating the possibilities of Indigenous and
immigrant encounters in Aotearoa. Agential realism exhorts the analytic consideration
of nondominant viewpoints, such as those of the nonhuman and dehumanized (Barad,
2003).
This article diffracts the work of three Philippine-born artists living in Aotearoa and
explores the resonances between social justice, pedagogy, immigration, art, culture, and
history. Instead of seeking an understanding how tauiwi (non-M
aori) populations as-
similate to the dominant p
akeh
a culture, we privilege the possibilities intimated by the
practices and productions of Philippine culture bearers that orient their desire for inclusion
and equality in Aotearoa toward te ao M
aori (the M
aori world), m
atauranga M
aori (M
aori
knowledge), kaupapa M
aori (M
aori principles and ideas) and tangata whenua (M
aori
themselves; Pihama, 2019;Kidman, 2020). This study aims to show what punk culture in
Aotearoa might reveal about how racialized individuals learn to construct and embody
social relations founded upon kanohi ki te a kanohi (face-to-face) engagements that foster
manaakitanga (hospitality, generosity, and reciprocity), whanaungatanga (communal
bonds), and rangatiratanga, or self-governance and sovereignty (Mead, 2016). Such
M
aori-Philippine relations would be founded upon a concern for Indigenous futurity
(Goodyear- Ka’
opua, 2019) as opposed to the discourses of economic exploitation,
assimilation, and cultural invalidation that underpin the hegemonic and neocolonial
status quo.
Punk rock pedagogy and Indigenous futurity
PRP theorizes punk culture as form of critical pedagogy (Romero, 2016). PRP holds that
punks, through their participation in subcultural formations, often teach, learn, produce,
and contest knowledge about the contemporary struggles and historical positionality
of marginalized, minoritized, and colonized people (Cordova, 2017). PRP holds that
“being and becoming punk is a context-specific educative process that consists of
three pillars: 1) historically responsive analyses of the material conditions of op-
pression, 2) the use of punk music as a theoretical framework for contextualizing this
historical inquiry, and 3) community responsive action rooted in solidarity with
marginalised groups”(Romero, 2020b: p. 4). PRP demonstrates how communitarian
forms of education can disrupt the ossification of oppressive social formations. We
look to attestations of PRP’s ability to function as an exertion of affectivity that
unsettles events and phenomena that produce exploitative material conditions like
racialized discrimination and exploitation. By exploring how punk rock pedagogy
broadens conceptions of intercultural solidarity and M
aori-Philippine relations in
Aotearoa, this paper seeks to demonstrate how alternative approaches to teaching and
learning are central to processes of social change and the construction of horizontal
alliances. We do so by reading the subcultural productions of diasporic Philippine
peoples in Aotearoa through the lens of Indigenous futurity.
Romero et al. 3
Noelani Goodyear- Ka’
opua (2019) defines Indigenous futurity as the establishment of
social conditions, relations, and institutions designed to safeguard the continued survival
of Indigenous values and ways of life. Indigenous futurity is a notably positive aspiration,
in that the safeguarding Indigenous lifeways does not require the expulsion of settlers and
deterritorialized peoples from Indigenous lands. Rather, Indigenous futurity calls for the
abolition of settler colonialism and the dislodging of colonial epistemologies. Indigenous
futurity differs from settler futurity, which holds that the success of metropolitan colonial
projects requires the dehumanization and extermination of Indigenous peoples along with
the wanton exploitation of migratory labor. Settler futurity is also predicated on the
enslavement of Black bodies and the political and onto-epistemological construction of
Blackness as antithetical to humanity (Wilderson, 2020). Settler futurity, it should be
noted, underlies the invention of bounded national imaginaries like colonial New
Zealand, the United States, and the Philippines.
Indigenous futurity potentiates novel ways of understanding multiculturalism as it
interrupts normative discourses that assume the legitimacy of settler states and facilitate
settler moves toward innocence. How might a multicultural society look if it was instead
committed to the continued survival of Indigenous peoples and epistemologies? This is
the sentiment Filipino-Australian punk musician Harry Bonifacio Baughan ponders:
…white Australia isn’t going to serve our needs…they’re never going to hand over any
liberation. They’re never going to willingly dismantle the structures that make them ben-
eficiaries. It’s our…moral duty, to be closer to the people whose land it actually is. (Violata,
2018)
Here, Baughan argues against the assimilatory mandate of the deterritorialized
Philippine. Instead, Baughan argues that our job, as tauiwi, is to be closer to tangata
whenua or the people of the land- ‘the people whose land it really is’. Understanding
migration and assimilation from a rubric of Indigenous futurity thus inspires several
generative questions. What might Philippine immigrants learn about themselves and their
communities when they move away from dominant culture and seek communion with the
First peoples of our adopted homes? How might Indigenous peoples in developed in-
dustrial countries like Aotearoa regard immigrants from export-producing nations like the
Philippines if they were viewed as distant cousins from the same cultural continuum - one
that could not be fragmented by vast expanses of ocean but has since been carved up by
Western maps and mandates? Before applying this mode of critical wondering (Vossoughi
and Vakil, 2018) to a study founded upon immigrant PRP in Aotearoa, we explicate a
means for doing so methodologically that links the posthuman ontology of feminist new
materialism to the entangled pasts, presents, and futures articulated in both M
aori and
Philippine philosophies.
Methodology: Agential realism
This paper turns to Karen Barad’s (2007) philosophy of agential realism to think gen-
eratively about the multivalent waves that link M
aori and Philippine peoples in Aotearoa.
4Research in Education 0(0)
Agential realism, as a theory and method, “takes account of the fact that the forces at work
in the materialization of bodies are not only social, and the bodies produced are not all
human…[which] clarifies the nature of the causal relationship between discursive
practices and material phenomena”(p. 33–34). Agential realism is concerned with how
agencies (such as people, places, things, ideas, and imaginaries) do not pre-exist in
finished form but become recognizable through their relationships to other agencies.
Agencies emerge out of intra-activity or “the mutual constitution of entangled agencies”
(Barad, 2007: p. 33). Barad (2007) refers to the aggregated entanglements of mutually
constituting “individual events, entities, and sets of practices”(Barad, 2007: p. 389) as an
assemblage. The prospect of transforming one agency into another (such as oppression
into solidarity) occurs when new agencies (like Indigenous perspectives, alternative
lifeways, and dehumanized people) are introduced to ongoing material-discursive as-
semblages. Power, as such, is “a momentary exercise of affectivity by one relation over
another”(Fox and Alldred, 2017: p. 180).
One analyses intra-activity through diffraction, or by exerting power in a way that
disturbs an assemblage so that it might reveal more about how it works and what it does
(Barad, 2007). A classic example of physical diffraction is the act of placing a grate in
front of a light beam. When the beam encounters the slits on the grate, it bends and curls,
thus behaving more like a wave. The obstruction reveals unobserved facets of the beam’s
nature and capabilities. The diffractive apparatus disrupts the notion that the beam is a)
destined to always behave in a predetermined and observable manner and b) should be
limited to the finite linguistic concept of a beam in the first place. Diffractive methodology
attempts a similar endeavor with taken-for-granted ideas. In this paper, we position punk
rock pedagogy as a diffractive intervention in the dominant narrative of racialized ex-
periences in Aotearoa. We then meditate upon the possibilities intimated by this dif-
fraction by celebrating the forms of communion that emerge when Indigenous and
immigrant subjectivites are bonded to one another instead of the assimilatory demands of
settler futurity.
Concepts from Indigenous philosophies sometimes resonate with agential realism in
complementary ways (Le Grange, 2018). Jones and Hoskins’s (2017) observe that what
new materialism claims is “new”coincides with what M
aori have known since time
immemorial:
Much of M
aori everyday life is shaped by awareness of the human-non-human dynamic, as
humans (as M
aori) constantly negotiate with the natural world, endeavouring to meet its
dispositions and participate in its balances. It is widespread among M
aori today to talk about
a river, a mountain, an entire, tribe, or an ancestor that lived hundreds of years ago as yourself:
‘Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au’(‘I am the river and the river is me’).
This statement is not simply a metaphor but a deep visceral identification as the animated
embodied, river, mountain, or ancestor…It remains common in M
aori and other indigenous
thinking for ‘objects’- whether Hongi Hika’st
a moko on paper, a dead body, a forest, or a
piece of greenstone- to be understood as determining events, as exerting forces, as volitional,
or as instructing people. (Jones and Hoskins, 2007: p. 51, p. 51)
Romero et al. 5
One type of material-discursive intra-action that new materialism sometimes over-
looks- but Indigenous ontology does not-is the multimodal communion between the
living and the dead (for a notable exception see Mehrabi, 2016). M
aori and Philippine
knowledges alike hold that ancestral bodies walk amongst the living, possessing a vitality
that is unknowable to most but ineluctably vital nonetheless. Maui (or Lam-ang or
Lumawig), for example, is regarded as a once-living ancestor as opposed to a fictive
character from mythology or fantasy (Wilcken, 2013). Common pride in Maui’s exploits,
such as slowing the sun, stealing fire from the gods, and fishing up lands connects the
disparate cultures of Aotearoa, the Philippines, and Polynesia to a shared human pre-
decessor. This article’s engagements in punk rock pedagogy in Aotearoa draw from the
vitality of ancestral forces like the mythic manananggal, and the kumara/kamote. It
recognizes the aforementioned as guiding (and guarding) forces of this article’scon-
struction. Acknowledging these more-than-human ancestors encourages this study to
approach the entanglements of matter and discourse in ways that center M
aori and
Philippine knowledge. In so doing, we aim to deepen our understanding of what counts as
knowledge and who matters.
Like all agencies, race relations and racialized subjectivities can be theorized as
assemblages of entangled ideas, imaginaries, historiographies, things, and practices.
These include palpable cultural touchstones that link M
aori, Pacific, and Philippine
peoples like food, tattoos, art, outrigger canoes, history, and whakapapa (genealogy), and
tupuna (ancestors). But an agential realist account of the theoretical assemblage of In-
digenous and immigrant solidarity in Aotearoa ought also to consider the surveillance,
policing, gendering, and disabling of bodies racialized as Other. The experience of
minoritisation in Aotearoa involves positive and negative aspects that mark M
aori,
Pasifika, Southeast Asian and other non-European tauiwi as members of culturally and
economically nondominant communities. This paper, however, is not concerned with
theorizing disparity in Aotearoa, where p
akeh
a are overrepresented in most positive social
weather statistics (Pihama, 2020). It instead functions like a family reunion. We explore
the resonances between M
aori and Philippine lifeways and attend to the possibilities that
emerge when we come kanohi ki te a kanohi (face to face) and take note of the
resemblance.
Encountering text, matter, and history as sense-events
This paper’s attempt at exploring the possibilities that are opened up when we diffract
archipelagic lifeways, new materialism, and punk rock pedagogy through one another is
rooted in the work of three Aotearoa-based artists: TOOMS, James Roque, and Marianne
Infante. The extraction of these artists and their works arose out of a recognition that they
are some of the few prominent Filipino entertainers working in Aotearoa. As such, we
decided to examine how their work represented themes of multiculturalism and In-
digeneity, knowing that these themes are central in their art and that each wields outsize
influence among Philippine communities in Aotearoa.
None of these artists present themselves as leather-clad beer swilling punks in the
stereotypical sense. TOOMS, the band whose music, art, and pedagogy roots this study in
6Research in Education 0(0)
punk culture, classifies their music as “winecore”. Roque is a stand-up comedian and
Infante is an actress, playwright, and independent filmmaker. Their work, however,
surfaces concerns about the indeterminate subalternity of Philippine peoples in Aotearoa.
They reflect the inconvenient truths of racialized globalization at their audience before
breaking the mirror and rebuilding it with their friends. It is in this manner that TOOMS,
Roque, and Infante embody the ideological, philosophical, and pedagogical through-lines
of punk culture:
First, punk has tended to situate itself in opposition to any dominant culture or
perceived status quo.
Second, it exudes an irreverent disregard for symbols of authority and pre-established
hierarchies.
Third, punk typically purports to provide a voice or means of expression for the
disenfranchised, marginalised and disaffected.
Finally, punk has consistently demonstrated a commitment to some form of self-
sufficiency or autonomy: do-it-yourself, be yourself. (The Subcultures Network,
2014:p.2,p.2)
Applying techniques used in an earlier study (Romero, 2019), we compiled a database
of cultural productions from the aforementioned artists and paid specific attention to the
possible links between these artists’outputs, the literature on punk rock pedagogy and
Indigenous futurity. The data primarily comprised of the song lyrics and performance
transcriptions, which we linked to relevant literature and scholarship. We supplemented
the database with notes that clarified, muddled, or added nuance to the surface-level
themes and motifs broached in each artist’s work. These supplemental datapoints included
cover art, interview transcriptions, band photos, and promotional materials. Most of this
information went unused. Still, this methodological disciplinarity enabled us to embrace
an analytic openness which allowed one insight to flow naturally into another. This
approach led to meditations on the visceral vitality of mythical creatures, the dead, and
sweet potatoes.
Data was coded according to four primary themes that emerged out of analysis:
immigration, indigeneity, solidarity, and resistance. We “read”scholarship on Indigenous
and immigrant experiences in Aotearoa “through”these coded texts to consider how they
might function as sense-events, or onto-epistemological possibilities intimated by the
“never-ending enfolding of non-human, human, practices, objects, affect, motility, dis-
course, nature, smells, sound, and other earthly elements”(Allen, 2018: p. 45). We
interpreted data, texts, and discourses as sense-events to explicate that the objective of this
inquiry was to discern the composition of assembled relations (such as “Indigeneity,”
“solidarity,”or “diaspora”) which consist of both human and nonhuman agencies.
Decentering human agency is indeed integral to the prospect of educational research
that can theorize disruptions of entangled assemblages that result in the suffering of
human beings and more-than-human others. This project’s analyses proffer insights on
how punk rock pedagogy, as a diffractive agency constituted out of human and nonhuman
elements, both illuminates and unsettles the possibilities of Indigenous and immigrant
Romero et al. 7
solidarity in a contemporary Aotearoa beholden to the dictates of racialized capitalism,
globalization, neoliberalism, and settler futurity. This project’s examinations of under-
theorized and overlooked forms of (neo)colonial autonomy, responsibility, and inter-
subjectivity are thus rooted Barad’s (2007) contention that “the asymmetrical exclusions
and constraints (such as those governed by asymmetrical flows of labor, capital, tech-
nology, and information) that accompany [global neocolonialsm], require ever more
vigilance concerning questions of accountability, not less”(Barad, 2007: p. 216).
Of winecore, comedy, kumara, and kamote: Reanimating the
severed philippine subject through M
aori-Philippine dialogue
There are roughly 70,000 people of Philippine descent living in Aotearoa, or about 1.5%
of the population. This figure is proportionally equivalent to the number of Filipinos that
live in the United States, where the Philippine diaspora has a much larger and more visible
presence. The experiences of Filipinos in Aotearoa, in comparison, remain relatively
under-researched in the Western academy. Previous literature has encountered and
theorized the Philippine diaspora in Aotearoa’s churches, hospitals, immigration offices,
schools, and workplaces (see Montayre et al., 2013; Siar, 2014). But a desire to un-
derstand the Philippine diaspora in Aotearoa beyond these normative contexts and in
places where p
akeh
a are not necessarily excluded but also not allowed to dominate, led us
to the art and music of the T
amaki Makaurau (Auckland) band TOOMS.
A self-described “winecore”punk duo, TOOMS consists of Dorian Noval-a Filipina-
New Zealander- and Nich Cunningham-of European descent. Both provide vocals and
instrumentation. TOOMS’s Bandcamp page hosts their digital discography and greets
visitors with an following image:
8Research in Education 0(0)
Drawn on paper with black, blue, and grey markers. The image depicts the band’s logo
accompanied by a rendering of Cunningham’s and Noval’s faces stapled together. The
illustration evokes a host of material-discursive entanglements. The corporal forms of
Noval and Cunningham are quite literally entangled in that their faces are crudely halved
and stapled together: a Philippine face grafted onto a European one. The crudeness and
asymmetry of the staple job evokes the tenuous and indeterminate state of race relations in
Romero et al. 9
Aotearoa. It hints at the eugenics of colonial genocide by suggesting the existence of an
unseen Mengelean scientist who thought to staple these faces together in the first place.
The split and sutured image also activates a more ancestral vitality by conjuring the
image of the manananggal, a vampiric Filipino creature who is able to separate the upper
and lower halves of its body. The manananggal is often portrayed as the vengeful spirit of
a jilted bride or childless woman who feeds on grooms, newlyweds, and infants. Poet
Reagan Romero Maiquez, however, invites us to think of the manananggal as a resilient
and contemplative character-one who is indeed stricken with grief but motivated by
longing instead of vengeance.
Bago tuluyang sumahimpapawid, naiisip niya mga karneng higit pa sa laman, sa sariwang
katawan.
[Before flying into the atmosphere, she thought about meat full of flesh and of fresh bodies.]
At doon din niya napag-isip-isip, na paglisan ay kanya ring maiiwan ng gutom na kalahati
niyang katawang maiiwan
[And there she thought that she could leave her hunger with the half of the body she left
behind.](Maiquez, 2005: p. 410, p. 410)
The manananggal’s desperate flight mirrors the waves of migration that bring Phil-
ippine bodies en masse to places like Aotearoa, Australia, Canada, the United States,
Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and Dubai. Philippine migrants are often regarded
as alipin ng mundo, servants of the world who are compelled to work for comparatively
low wages abroad in order to provide for their families and find self-worth by participating
in the civilizing project of technological modernity (Parreñas, 2005). Due to visa
complications and financial restraints, Philippine labor migrants often leave their families
in the Philippines. Remittances from overseas Filipino workers thus make up a significant
segment of the Philippine economy. Filipina women in Aotearoa most often take on
gendered labor in the health sector and as domestic helpers, acting as the mothers and
caretakers of global capital while leaving their own children with extended family
(Parreñas, 2015).
Southeast Asian migrants indeed have an undefined role within Aotearoa’s bicultural
framework beyond the provision of wage labor. Despite English being one of the
Philippines’two official languages and a majority of the Philippine population practicing
Roman Catholicism, Philippine migrants seldom report feeling at home within the
structures of mainstream social and institutional life in Aotearoa (Siar, 2014). TOOMS’s
poster thus hints at the migrant’s psychic and physical severance from a Philippine whole
and a self-effacing process of stapling what remains onto the performatively multicultural
body of global capital. As with all transplants, there is no guarantee of acceptance. The
Filipino in Aotearoa thus comes to matter in ways that are similar to the manananggal. Her
upper half takes flight in search of sustenance knowing that the source of true fulfillment is
planted elsewhere.
10 Research in Education 0(0)
The indeterminacy of the transnational Philippine subject permeates the music and
lyrics of TOOMS’s“Rats”:
Rats! In the
Rats! sewer
Rats! in the underground
If you want it
you must take it
The lyrics of “Rats”reflect a punk posture that exhorts oppressed peoples, or ‘rats in
the sewer,’to name what they want and take it. But the aural assemblage of “Rats”, with its
shouted vocals and pounding, drum-heavy instrumentation, calls for something more than
reactionary theft and thoughtless vandalism. Cunningham and Noval chant “Rats!”as if it
were both a rallying cry and a roll call. Through vocals that sound like commands and
drums that sound like bricks being laid, “Rats!”sonically builds the sewer around its
listeners before closing them in. The song asks the titular rats to take stock of their
surroundings and consider who else is scurrying about in the underground. Listening to
“Rats”on TOOMS’s bandcamp page, as the severed visages of Cunningham and Noval
look on, conjures a material-discursive assemblage that definitively calls the listener to
attention. It asks us to consider our acknowledge where we are and how we got here. It
also asks “now what?”and challenges us to define our goals and build coalitions united in
their pursuit.
This message contrasts with the standard story of assimilation and integration in
Aotearoa and elsewhere (Siar, 2014). When Filipino immigrants in Aotearoa do assimilate
to the dominant culture, they often report that doing so comes at the expense of their
Filipino identity (Montayre et al., 2017). James Roque, a Philippine-born comedian attests
to this tension in a 2019 stand-up routine:
Fifty percent of the time we [my family] would be super kiwi. My family loved the All
Blacks. Like, my Dad got really into the All Blacks, But a little too into the All Blacks. As if
immigration was watching.
The All Blacks, New Zealand’s national rugby union team, has a fraught racial history.
The team infamously left its M
aori players home for the team’s tours of apartheid South
Africa from 1928 until 1970. New Zealand National Rugby Union apologized for ac-
quiescing to the racist demands of apartheid South Africa in 2010, but the New Zealand
government remained silent on the issue. Equating the All Blacks with the invader-
colonial culture of New Zealand continues a running theme in Roque’s comedy: that
assimilation predominantly involves navigating one’s interactions with p
akeh
a and the
state. Roque derives comedy from critiquing the lack of Filipino nurses on the hospital
drama Shortland Street and his tense run-ins with police and immigration officials.
Roque’s comedy echoes Montayre, Neville and Holroyd’s (2017) finding that Philippine
Romero et al. 11
New Zealanders, like Filipino-Americans, are largely concerned with meeting the de-
mands of the dominant culture when they speak of assimilation and integration. As such,
the state of relationships between Filipinos and M
aori are largely unexamined.
Roque’s career as a theatre producer and his performances with the sketch comedy
troupe Frickin’Dangerous Bro provide notable exceptions. In a sketch entitled Tarot Card
Reading, Roque plays a medium who reads the futures of his South Asian and M
aori
castmates, each revealing marginal fates like poverty, marginalization, prison, and un-
employment benefits. Incensed, the castmates insist that Roque read the cards for himself,
which reveal that his future consists of “rejection from job interviews for having an ethnic
name, one dimensional characters in the media, and bloody Asian drivers”. Roque la-
ments that “maybe something is wrong with the cards. Or maybe the cards are always just
stacked against us”.
The play Pinay, written by and starring Filipina actress and playwright Marianne
Infante (and produced by Roque) explores themes of M
aori-Filipino kinship. Pinay tells
the story of a Pampangan family who moves to Te Waiponamu (the South Island of New
Zealand) after the Mt. Pinatubo explosion only to survive the Christchurch earthquakes
19 years later. Infante constructs much of the play’s narrative core around the relationship
between its Filipina protagonist, Marianne, and her M
aori best friend, T
ane. Marianne
meets T
ane on her first day of school as they bond over eating whole roasted sweet
potatoes wrapped in aluminum foil. Instead of rehashing the trope in which racialized
schoolchildren are bullied for bringing ‘exotic’food to school, the scene ignores p
akeh
a
perspectives altogether. It instead focuses on T
ane and Marianne’s argument over whether
their snack should be called by its M
aori name, kumara, or its Filipino name, kamote.
Kumara are notable in that they are native to South America but were a staple of the
trans-Pacific canoe voyages that brought Austronesian peoples to Taiwan, the Philippines,
Polynesia, Easter Island, Aotearoa, Hawai’i, and back again. The kumara linked the
people of these far flung locales in a shared understanding of sustenance and vitality. In
the scene with Marianne and T
ane, the kumara/kamote itself asserts its volition and
agency-its presence commands the characters and the audience alike to attention. Ma-
rianne’s kamote and T
ane’s kumara together remind them that they too were aboard those
ancestral waka/balangay traversing te moana nui a kiwa in search of shelter, sustenance,
and soil. It is the object whose life-sustaining agency may have brought Marianne and
T
ane’s ancestors into contact and it is the force that brings them face to face now. The
scene closes with them eating together in silence. In the next scene, which takes place a
decade later, Marianne and T
ane are portrayed as lifelong friends preparing to move into
their first flat.
The sense-events that emerge out of this exploratory engagement with ancestral vitality
and the various underground places in which one can locate the Philippine diaspora in
New Zealand began with and could not have been possible without the confrontational
illustration and confrontational music found on the TOOMS Bandcamp page. Nich
Cunningham and Dorian Noval, through multiple tendrils of their art, evoke decolonial
lines of inquiry, or what Dylan Rodriguez (2010) calls lines of betrayal, or “treason to a
deformed nationalism —that might substantively disrupt and displace the production of
the Filipino [migrant] as a labor of allegiance to …perpetual global projects of
12 Research in Education 0(0)
dominance”(p. 97). TOOMS suggests that Filipinos, despite having to navigate their own
way through exploitative world systems, are not fully divorced from a primordial un-
derstanding that their ties to the ancestors, the spirit world, and to M
aori precede, pre-date,
and preclude the neocolonial strictures placed upon their contemporary subjectivities.
They remind people who have experienced historical and contemporary dehumanization
that they share more than just their struggles. Still, listening to a band, watching a play, or
laughing at a comedy routine will not by themselves remedy issues like M
aori comprising
more than half of Aotearoa’s prison population despite being only 17% of the general
population. Staring at a pen and ink drawing will not change the exploitative economic
conditions that create the split psyche of the Philippine migrant. New materialism will not
change the fact that Filipinas make up one third of nurses who have died of Covid-19 in
the U.S. despite being only 4% of the nursing workforce. To echo Hoskins and Jones
(2017) once more, “[a]ll we can do methodologically in the face of these complexities is to
remain engaged and quietly and openly forestall interpretation”(p. 57).
For now, it is appropriate that deterritorialized Philippine peoples in Aotearoa consider
possible lines of betrayal. Seeking communion with M
aori as opposed to the scraps of
white supremacy and racialized capitalism takes us away from colonial pathology and
toward a place of healing. It is in such a place that one might encounter Half/Time’sHe
tangata, a song that instead of pathologizing Indigenous and dispossessed peoples re-
minds us that:
He tangata ahau [I am human]
P
er
aan
o ki a koe [So are you]
Kia t
upato in
aianei [be careful]
Kia kaha t
atou [be strong]
He tangata koe [you are human]
K
aore ano kia mutu [it’s not over yet]
He Tangata was one of the first songs created in the developmental stages of Half/Time,
before I (Wairehu) had even really decided on how the musical project ought to sound.
Perhaps more significantly, He Tangata was my first attempt at writing a song entirely in te
reo M
aori. I am not a fluent speaker of my mother tongue, a common source of whakam
a
(shame) for young M
aori seeking their own sense of identity within Aotearoa’s often
p
akeh
a biased bicultural landscape.
As the child of a M
aori mother and P
akeh
a father I became familiar with the term ‘half-
caste’at an early age, a term that I would later lay claim to on my own terms, even
pastiching it by adopting the stage name ‘Half/Time’. Making peace with these societally
imposed denominations was a necessary step towards reclaiming my own attachment to te
ao M
aori.
When I began writing He Tangata, the only restriction I put on myself was that I would
not over stretch my own limitations of te reo. Beginning with a simple melody to guide the
Romero et al. 13
vocal line, and a lyrical premise of self-acceptance, I sporadically noted down phrases and
lyrical passages in a combination of te reo and English. Rather than relying solely on
bilingual dictionaries or translation apps in times of confusion, I spoke with my good
friend, confident reo speaker and educator, and fellow PhD candidate at Waikato Uni-
versity, Kanauhea Wessels. Our k
orero (discussion) would center not only on my usage of
particular words and phrases, but also the intentions I had for the song. Engaging in this
process with a trusted friend providing guidance gave me the confidence to move ahead
with creating this song. In spite of my initial sheepishness, the writing process (and
performance) of He Tangata has given me a new means of engaging with both te reo
M
aori, and the experience of being unashamedly M
aori in alternative music spaces.
He Tangata also serves as a plaintive meditation on Indigenous futurity and the
prospect of horizontal alliances between dispossessed peoples. It communicates the
notion that there are people out there who recognize the humanity of the Other, in defiance
of polities and conditions rooted in invader coloniality. In this agential meditation on punk
rock pedagogy, subculture, diaspora, and Indigeneity, He tangata serves as totem and
talisman. It reminds all colonized peoples that our linkages to one another go beyond our
shared experience of invasion.
Conclusion: The remembered children of maui/insurrecting
Pan-Pacific solidarities
As its point of departure, this study interrogated the broader significance suggested in the
works of various diasporic Philippine-identified artists living in Aotearoa. We did so by
framing our investigation of these works through the analytic of punk rock pedagogy,
which contends that learning to embody the oppositional politics of punk rock subculture
often spurs community-embedded and mostly informal forms of transformative education
(see Barrett and Grant, 2021). Heeding agential realism’s call to privilege the agency of
nonhuman others further illuminated historical and contemporary points of conviviality
between M
aori and Philippine communities beyond their respective relationships to
Eurocentric colonialism. As such, this project serves as a provocation for educators and
educational leaders in Aotearoa to continue centering te ao M
aori in efforts to proffer
instantiations of multicultural, democratic, and global citizenship education. It suggests
that researchers should value and emphasize the possibility that linkages between migrant
populations and M
aori not only exist, but they might also exist independently of invaders,
settler states, and settler futurity.
Diffracting the punk rock pedagogy of TOOMS through the oeuvres of James Roque,
Marianne Infante, and Half/Time will not alone heal five centuries of colonial history. This
study does, however, unearth provocative lines of questioning, in that it suggests that the
prospect of healing the severed Philippine subject in Aotearoa lays not in serving as wage
labor for capital. Sustenance and fulfillment might rather lay where it always has-in our
concert halls, community arts spaces, the flesh of the kumara/kamote, the kanohi ki te a
kanohi relation, in communion with our ancestors and kinfolk, and in everyday acts of
intercultural solidarity with tangata whenua. These forms of resistance not only offer an
alternative to dominant narratives of cultural assimilation and racialized experiences in
14 Research in Education 0(0)
Aotearoa, they embody horizontal alliances between Indigenous and deterritorialized
peoples towards Indigenous futurity. These encounters illuminate new forms of multi-
culturalism that remain undertheorized and, therefore, underrecognized in the Western
academy and current debates of global citizenship and multicultural education (see Banks,
2004;Pashby et al., 2020).
Punk rock pedagogy purports to unearth the broader pedagogical significance of the
types of teaching and learning that occur in the punk underground. Applying a new/
ancestral materialist lens to the study of PRP transforms the study of punk rock as a form
of education into a messy and relational attempt to grasp how ideas, things, pasts, futures,
and ancestors are intrinsically intwined and reveal themselves to us if we are open. In so
doing, the non-human agent reveals that it has been here all along. The kumara/kamote
did not need us to exist. It is the inverse that holds true.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
ORCID iD
Noah Romero https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8445-6800
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