Multimodal Autoethnographic Sincerity

Critically departing from theories of autoethnography, diaspora, and multimodality, this article introduces "multimodal autoethnographic sincerity," which I define as a critical communication method that puts the researcher's affective feelings in conversation with their mediated productions of culture. I use multimodal autoethnographic sincerity to further produce knowledge on an ethnographic film, which I filmed in my father's provincial hometown Kalibo, Philippines. The new autoethnographic cultural critique I contribute to my film's diasporic inquiries is a mapping of the festival's transnational analysis against my affective feelings within my own Filipinx evolving body. I demonstrate the heuristic and generative capacities of a multimodal autoethnographic sincerity that makes multiple communication modes (diasporic body, homeland, cultural critique, filmmaking, and writing) in my knowledge production an ongoing intersubjective inquiry into the Philippines, colonialism, and the legacies of U.S. Empire. Ultimately, multimodal autoethnographic sincerity allows researchers to conceive of and methodologically examine diasporic identity as a relational process versus a racial and ethnic essentialism in today's mobile condition of diasporic peoples.