The American colonial state on display: the Philippine Library exhibit at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition

Abstract

In 1915 San Francisco hosted the Panama-Pacific Exposition. Included among the exhibits was one produced by James Robertson, the librarian of the Philippine Library. This exhibit fulfilled a number of functions. It directly tapped into one of the main discourses the exhibition's organisers wished to promote – the superiority of the people of the United States in comparison to the supposedly enfeebled Spanish society that had been dispossessed of their own colonial lands, first in California, and then in the Philippines. At the same time, however, the display moved away from earlier exhibitions that fixated on ‘primitive’ peoples towards one that highlighted a supposedly more advanced local print culture. This also contributed to a hegemonic project, in this case, within the Philippines itself, where the American colonial state needed to rule with, and not over, the local elite.