Postcolonial disorientations: colonial ethnography and the vectors of the Philippine nation in the imperial frontier

Abstract

This essay argues that American colonial governmentality in the early twentieth century was constituted by an ethnographic discourse that was inflected by an imperial frontier orientation. The frontier governmentality interdicts and disciplines Filipino society and culture for colonial formation, thus planting American frontier dreams in the state's education and land policies. But it was driven by the contradictions between two types of interdiction I call the “home” and “base” vectors, which have directed the disorientation of Philippine postcoloniality, trapping it between American dreams Filipinized to the hegemony of elite nationalism. As the mestizo elites came to embody Philippine nationalism in the later years of colonialism under the framework of imperial democracy, the Filipinization of the frontier ethnographic discourse entailed an elite autoethnography of racial blending, which produced a nation with an orientation seeping into the American Southeast Asian frontier. The Philippines is thus not simply an American client state, a cacique democracy or a deferred postcolony, but the vehicle of American imperial frontierism in Southeast Asia during the Cold War. The implication is that we are seeing the accentuation of the home/base contradictions in the frontier discourse in the fragmentation of the Philippine nation today, with Filipinos running through the enlarged frontiers of America's neoliberal empire as itinerant laborers.