Disciplining Cultural Pasts: A Review

Abstract

One of the great promises of extending our academic selves across disciplinary lines is the opportunity for introspection. Done well (which is to say sincerely and generously), undisciplined reading serves to unearth the norms that implicitly maintain modern scholarly boundaries, helping to guard against creeping crippling complacency. This is a useful way for subscribers of this journal to approach American Empire and the Politics of Meaning by Julian Go. Though ultimately posing a sociological challenge to prevailing theories of “culture,” Go makes a formidable contribution to historical scholarship. He has authored, from within a sociology department, a bona fide comparison of the cultural impact of U.S. colonial rule in the early twentieth century Philippines and Puerto Rico. The monograph, as a result, instructs not only about change in the past, but also about the present state of the discipline of history. Go's underlying premise is that, geographic remoteness aside, the people of Puerto Rico and the Philippines shared a fundamental predicament during the twentieth century's first decade. Both populations, as is well known, came under U.S. occupation after the so-called Spanish-American War of 1898. More crucially for Go, however, inhabitants of both places faced coerced cultural reeducation that simultaneously realized and legitimized their political subjugation. As American occupiers sought to legitimize a sovereignty won at the barrel of a gun, they presented themselves not as vainglorious rulers but as benevolent teachers. Construing their imperial burden in pedagogical terms, U.S. officials publicized their purpose as equipping unschooled peoples, elites especially, for the schemas of modern government. Lecturing, publishing, disciplining, and punishing, they set out to mold their tropical subjects into rational-minded individuals able to recognize the virtue of keywords like “liberty” and “rights.”