Beauty and Brutality provides an exciting, original, and critical encounter with this labyrinthine city’s imagined and material landscape. The authors and contributors investigate the “messy, fleshy, recalcitrant, mercurial, and immeasurable qualities of the city,” examining its urban space and smell: how it is represented in films, literature, music, and urban streetart; how it has endured the politics of colonialism, U.S. imperialism, neoliberalism, and globalization; as well as how its queer citizens engage with digital media platforms to communicate and connect with each other. 

The first volume to offer a cultural and urban studies approach to Manila, Beauty and Brutality considers the tensions of the Filipino diaspora as they migrate and “re-turn,” as well as the citizens’ responses to the Marcos (and post-Marcos) dictatorship, President Duterte’s authoritarianism, and “Drug War.” Essays also map out of geographies of repression and resistance in the urban war of classes, genders and sexualities, ethnicities and races, and generations, along with the violence of urban life and growth. Ultimately, Beauty and Brutality frames Manila as a vibrant and ever-evolving metropolis that, even in the face of its difficulties, instills hope. 

Contributors: Paul Michael Leonardo Atienza, Christine Bacareza Balance, Vanessa Banta, Rosa Cordillera A. Castillo, Roland Sintos Coloma, Gary C. Devilles, Faith R. Kares, John B. Labella, Raffy Lerma, Bliss Cua Lim, Ferdinand M. Lopez, Paul Nadal, Jema M. Pamintuan, Oscar Tantoco Serquiña, Jr., Louise Jashil R. Sonido, and the editors.

Martin F. Manalansan IV is a Professor in the Department of American Studies and the Beverly and Richard Fink Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He is the author, editor, or coeditor of several publications, including Cultural Compass: Ethnographic Explorations of Asian America, which won the Cultural Studies Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies in 2002, and Q&A: Voices from Queer Asian North America (both Temple).  

Robert Diaz is an Associate Professor in the Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto. He is the coeditor of Diasporic Intimacies: Queer Filipinos and Canadian Imaginaries and a contributor to Filipino Studies: Palimpsests of Nation and Diaspora and Global Asian American Popular Cultures.  His writing has also appeared in Signs, GLQ, TSQ, Journal of Asian American Studies, Asian Diasporic Visual Culture and the Americas, Women and Performance, and Topia.

Roland B. Tolentino is a Professor at the University of the Philippines Film Institute. He is the former Dean of the University of the Philippines College of Mass Communication, and former Director of Likhaan: the University of Philippines Institute of Creative Writing where he is also a fellow. He has taught at the Osaka University, National University of Singapore, and the University of California, Berkeley. He is the Chair of the National Committee on Cinema, and Commissioner for the Subcommission on the Arts of the National Committee for Culture and the Arts, as well as a board member of the Film Development Council of the Philippines.