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Winner of the Elizabeth Agee Prize for best manuscript in American Literature

With the publication of The Innocents Abroad (1869), Mark Twain embarked on a long and successful career as the 19th century's best-selling travel writer. Jeffrey Melton treats Twain's travel narratives in depth, and in the context of his contemporary travel writers and a burgeoning tourism culture. As Melton shows, Twain's five major travel narratives--The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi, A Tramp Abroad, and Following the Equator--demonstrate Twain's mastery and reinvention of the genre.


 

In a globalized economy that is heavily sustained by the labor of immigrants, why are certain nations defined as "ideal" labor resources and why do certain groups dominate a particular labor force? The Philippines has emerged as a lucrative source of labor for countries around the world. In Marketing Dreams, Manufacturing Heroes Anna Romina Guevarra focuses on the Philippines—which views itself as the "home of the great Filipino worker"—and the multilevel brokering process that manages and sends workers worldwide. She unravels the transnational production of Filipinos as ideal migrant workers by the state and explores how race, color, class, and gender operate.

The experience of Filipino nurses and domestic workers—two of the country's prized exports—is at the core of the research, which utilizes interviews with employees at labor brokering agencies, state officials from governmental organizations in the Philippines, and nurses working in the United States. Guevarra's multisited ethnography reveals the disciplinary power that state and employment agencies exercise over care workers—managing migration and garnering wages—to govern social conduct, and brings this isolated yet widespread social problem to life.

 Since the 1960s, overseas migration has become a major factor in the economy of the Philippines. It has also profoundly influenced the sense of nationhood of both migrants and nonmigrants. Migrant workers learned to view their home country as part of a plural world of nations, and they shaped a new sort of Filipino identity while appropriating the modernity of the outside world, where at least for a while they operated as insiders.


   The global nomadism of Filipino workers brought about some fundamental reorientations. It revolutionized Philippine society, reignited a sense of nationhood, imposed new demands on the state, reconfigured the class structure, and transnationalized class and other social relations, even as it deterritorialized the state and impacted the destinations of migrant workers.


        Philippine foreign policy now takes surprising turns in consideration of migrant workers and Filipinos living abroad. Many tertiary education institutions aim deliberately at the overseas employability of local graduates. And the “Fil-foreign” offspring of unions with partners from other nationalities add a new inflection to Filipino identity.