Of Pathogens and Empires: The Discourse of Public Health in Katherine Mayo's, 'The Isles of Fear' - The Truth about the Philippine Islands (1925)

Abstract

In 1920s, as Philippines and intensified their nationalist attempts at independence from U.S. and British empires, an American woman journalist, Katherine Mayo, would publish two books - Isles of Fear(1925) and Mother India (1927) - hostile to peoples' struggles by foregrounding notion of race as proof why independence must not be granted to either population. In guise of a health report, two books relied on earlier scientific publications to stress contagions and maladies and, thus, imminent threat to Anglo-Saxon world should two colonies be granted autonomy. While scholarship on Mayo's writings has necessarily yoked two books together, The Isles of Fear has remained in former’s exegetic shadow. This paper takes up on lead to intervene in literature by focusing extensively on The Isles of Fear. It offers a discourse analysis that charts thematic grids of US public health regime in Philippines in early 1900s. Specifically, this paper examines how trope of the diseased Filipino body and its variant form, as embodied in caciques, were deployed to nullify cause of Philippine independence movement. It is hoped that by clarifying how these elements bear on each other, a better understanding of Mayo's declared domestic motivation - that of raising awareness of American public - could be inserted back into larger imperial project that was meant to include a similar write up on China and Japan with overall goal of advocating Westernization as antidote to Oriental’s ignoble living.