Peripheries: Histories of Anti-Marginality by Filomeno V. Aguilar Jr. is a collection of essays that, according to the blurb, "argues that the social and spatial peripheries of the nation-state are centers of historical change and dynamism in their own right." Aguilar is professor in the Department of History, School of Social Sciences, Ateneo de Manila University, and chief editor of Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints. He is the author of the books Clash of Spirits: The History of Power and Sugar Planter Hegemony on a Visayan Island (1998); Maalwang Buhay: Family, Overseas Migration, and Cultures of Relatedness in Barangay Paraiso (2009); and Migration Revolution: Philippine Nationhood and Class Relations in a Globalized Age (2014).

Interestingly, this book exhibits coherence even if its chapters were written on various occasions in the past and published in different scholarly journals, save for one that became a book chapter. This coherence comes from how each chapter demonstrates the book's main argument, which holds that center–periphery relations in the Philippines need not be hierarchical. Aguilar asserts that the histories of the margins and the center belong to a single analytical frame and that both equally constitute the nation (5).