Capital-as-presence and space-as-absence: the language of Neoliberalism and the narrative of capital in Glenn Diaz’s The Quiet Ones

Braga, Rogelio (2024) Capital-as-presence and space-as-absence: the language of Neoliberalism and the narrative of capital in Glenn Diaz’s The Quiet Ones. Kritike 18 (2), pp. 98-120. ISSN 1908-7330.

Abstract

Glenn Diaz’s The Quiet Ones explores people’s lives in the labor force created by a global market system. Work, public services, geography, identities, production, and consumption are generally shaped and directed by the flow of boundary-less foreign capital investments from developed countries. The novel presents characters as workers in the business process outsourcing industry in the Philippines, expatriates as highly skilled workers who migrated to the country to look for better economic and social capital opportunities, and the various relationships with people surrounding these workers. This paper charts the terrain, nature, and the systemic movements of capital through (1) capital-as-presence in the text, framing or creating work patterns, human relationships, consumption behavior, and (2) space-as-absence that mediates relationships between states, citizens, and the State (represented by the law and state authorities), between citizens as workers, between citizens as workers and their cities. The paper concludes that the neoliberal economic agenda in/of globalization created a language where capital is deeply embedded in a textual negotiation of/in meanings that legitimizes the power structure that perpetuates, supports, enables, and reinforces an oppressive elite, imperialist, and capitalist economic market system as the only alternative in rendering a concrete livable world.

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