The mission of Alon is to provide an on-line forum for publishing original and refereed essays, artwork, reviews, and moderated reflections that productively and critically engage with Filipinx American and Filipinx Diasporic Studies. Its founding home is the Bulosan Center for Filpinx Studies, at the Department of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Davis. Its publisher is eScholarship, an open-access e-journal platform hosted by the University of California.

As our journal’s title, we deploy Alon – the Tagalog/Filipinx word for “a moving ridge, a swell of water, or a wave” – to signify the persistence of movement, stasis, and mobility in the long and continuing histories of Filipinx migrations within and away from our homelands. It is our codeword for how we live and what we live in, who we are and what we do, and where we’ve been and where we’re going. Alon constitutes our intersecting categories of subjecthood as much as it accumulates our subjectivities that refer to our races, ethnicities, genders, sexualities, classes, and numerous other social categories. In this signifying deployment of Alon, then, we recognize that our identities are always in process, that our locations are always unsettled, and that our communities are always in states of transition, in ways that may be unstable, anxiety-provoking, or pleasurable. At the same time, we honor and articulate our capacities to be generative of positive change, renewal, and transformation in all of our intersectional interventions. Alon, therefore, names our struggles and our possibilities.

Through Alon, we aim to generate and showcase works that positively engage with and critically analyze key questions in the production of knowledges regarding Filipinx Americans and Filipinx diasporic subjects: how are Filipinx bodies represented across multiple forms of media and in what ways do Filipinx people cultivate and create identities and subjectivities to counter these representations? What are the experiences of Filipinx migrants and what about these experiences shed light on the nature of global racial capitalism? How do they imagine and organize toward non-extractive, sustainable futures? How do Filipinx people construct an alternative global archipelago of being and belonging? How are these fields’ particular theoretical and methodological approaches rooted in scholarly production and activism? How are these projects linked with attempts to trace interracial solidarites, as fraught as they may be, to disrupt racial capitalism’s impulse to both homogenize and propagate “multicultural” difference? These and other related questions drive the work behind and in front of Alon.

Alon seeks submissions from those who are engaged in fields that include, but not limited to: Filipinx Studies, Philippine Studies, Filipinx American Studies, Asian American Studies, Asian Studies, Ethnic Studies, Diaspora/Transnationalism Studies, Gender Studies, Sexuality Studies, Cultural Studies, Literature, and the Visual and Performing Arts.