American Colonial Rule Research Articles

The Characteristics of the Chinese Exclusion Policy in the Philippines During the First Half of American Colonial Rule (1898-1913)

The Characteristics of the Chinese Exclusion Policy in the Philippines During the First Half of American Colonial Rule (1898-1913)

Daughters of the Diaspora: Traversing Chamoru Women’s Stories Beyond the Mariana Islands

ABSTRACTThis essay examines the importance of Chamoru women’s stories in understanding the growth of the Chamoru diaspora. The Mariana Islands, homeland of Chamorus, is a matrilineal society that has dealt with various waves of colonialism, often changing the routes of mobility available to Chamoru families. This essay discusses the outmigration of Chamorus under Spanish and American colonial rule through uncovering the absent accounts of our women’s experiences and the ways they aided in the community building in the diaspora. Their continued role as matriarchal figures push narratives about Chamoru issues to grapple with the lack of engagement with Chamoru women’s stories.

The interlacing of disease, death, and colonial discord: San Lazaro Crematorium, Manila, the Philippines

ABSTRACT American colonization of the Philippines restyled local civilization’s character. One notable transition prompted by American colonial rule was the adoption of new public health conventions. In spite of these practices being introduced to elevate the well-being and life expectancy of the Filipinos their implementation was met with resistance. Accordingly, this paper focuses upon the creation of the Philippines’ first crematory facility, namely the San Lazaro Crematorium (opened in 1903, in Manila). The work, thus, grants an overview of how Filipinos responded to a societal modernization project initiated by the American colonial regime. The paper discusses three matters: first, what American colonial policymakers sought, with reference to public health, to accomplish; second, how the American colonial framework directly challenged Filipino culture with regard to disease prevention and death management; and, third, why the construction of the San Lazaro Crematorium offers a unique entry point to grasp the nature of America’s initial governance of the Philippines. Such clarification has twofold value: it helps to deepen comprehension of the administration’s operation and, in association, native opposition to it; plus, given that the crematorium is presently derelict this paper can underscore its value as a dark heritage object worthy of preservation.

Echoing + Resistant Imagining: Filipino Student Writing Under American Colonial Rule

ABSTRACT This article articulates the concept of echoing + resistant imagining through an analysis of Filipino student writing under American colonization at the turn of the twentieth century. Following scholarship in postcolonial studies and cultural rhetorics, echoing + resistant imagining accounts for the pressures on colonized writers to imitate, reproduce, and affirm colonial discourses, while noting the agentive and resistant possibilities of their writing.

Echoing + Resistant Imagining: Filipino Student Writing Under American Colonial Rule

ABSTRACT This article articulates the concept of echoing + resistant imagining through an analysis of Filipino student writing under American colonization at the turn of the twentieth century. Following scholarship in postcolonial studies and cultural rhetorics, echoing + resistant imagining accounts for the pressures on colonized writers to imitate, reproduce, and affirm colonial discourses, while noting the agentive and resistant possibilities of their writing.

Empire's Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper by Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez

Reviewed by: Empire's Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper by Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez Thea Quiray Tagle VERNADETTE VICUÑA GONZALEZ Empire's Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. 219 pages. What can minor stories uncover about the intimacies of US empire? University of Hawai'i at Manoa Professor of American Studies Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez's second monograph, Empire's Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper, breaks decisively with historiographical conventions to address this question using provocative and refreshing methods uncommon to Philippine studies and Filipino American studies. Focusing its attention on Isabel Rosario Cooper, a biracial Filipina child star-turned-bodabil (the Philippines's homegrown version of vaudeville) performer in Manila who reinvented herself multiple times over, Empire's Mistress rewrites the life story of a mysterious and contradictory woman footnoted in history as "Gen. Douglas MacArthur's mistress" and makes a critical feminist intervention into now familiar histories of US imperialism in the Philippines. To understand Gonzalez's masterful contribution to transpacific Filipino history and cultural studies, it is important to situate this book alongside other interdisciplinary scholarship that similarly attends to the intimate labor of empire building and the sexuality of race in the US. The essays in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Duke University Press, 2006), edited by Ann Laura Stoler, come to mind immediately, along with Lisa Lowe's The Intimacy of Four Continents (Duke University Press, 2015), of which an article-length version appears in Stoler's [End Page 481] edited collection. These texts assess comparatively and relationally the ways in which policing indigenous, mestiza, and colonized women's sexualities and intimacies was central to settler colonial and imperial nation-building projects in North America, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Like these texts, Empire's Mistress also recognizes colonized women's intimate labor (which includes flirting, sex, and seduction) with imperial men as survival strategies that reveal the profound sexual and racial violence at the heart of empire (17). The first half of the book, in particular, illuminates the ways both Cooper and her mother, Josefina, navigated the shifting terrain (both literal and metaphorical) of the "New Filipina" in the Philippines and the US during the Philippines's modernizing and transitional period between Spanish and American colonial rule and during the archipelago's immediate postindependence period. And in its focus on early–to mid–twentieth-century Filipina women's history as national history, Empire's Mistress is a standout text among Filipino studies scholarship by US-based academics, of a kind along with Denise Cruz's Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina (Duke University Press, 2012) and Genevieve Clutario's articles and forthcoming monograph. How Gonzalez tracks this story through the Cooper archives—or, more accurately, despite the lack of archives—is what truly distinguishes this manuscript from the other aforementioned works, which hew closely to historiographical methods of uncovering lost or buried materials in order to tell different stories. What Empire's Mistress does, instead, is to write into the absences, elisions, and lies of the archive to imagine motivations for Cooper's actions far more complicated than the dominant narrative of her as simply or only the Filipina paramour of famed US General MacArthur. It utilizes a method described by scholar and writer Saidiya Hartman as a practice of "critical fabulation," articulated in her 2008 essay "Venus in Two Acts" (Small Axe, 2008:1–14) and more fully fleshed out in her latest book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (W. W. Norton, 2020: 13, xv), which speculates on the practices of "minor figures" of black women as "radical thinkers who tirelessly imagined other ways to live." Within the pages of Empire's Mistress, Cooper emerges as a "dangerously desiring subject," a woman who refuses to be captured or contained by the colonial archive, and whose "choices illuminate how people adapted and survived in conditions not of their own making, and in circumstances that were designed to wear away their dignity and humanity" (6–7). Writing across [End Page 482] genres, geographies, and temporalities, Gonzalez creates a "shadow narrative of archival detritus, fabrications, second takes and other...

Escuela Náutica de Manila: Scientific Education in the Spanish Philippines

Science education in the nineteenth-century Philippines has been portrayed as highly deficient, yet pockets of respectable scientific education existed. The Escuela Nautica de Manila, which opened in 1820, offered such an education. This article narrates its establishment and discusses its changing curricular offerings in relation to empire-wide initiatives and constraints internal to the Philippines. Its quality of scientific education can be glimpsed from reports related to three episodes: the earthquake in 1863; the planned closure of the school in the late 1880s; and the advent of American colonial rule in the early 1900s. This school survives as the Philippine Merchant Marine Academy. KEYWORDS: PILOTAGE • NAUTICAL EDUCATION • SEAFARING • COLONIAL SCIENCE, SPANISH COLONIALISM

The Dichotomous Legacy of the Catholic Church’s Opposition to the Philippine Revolution of 1896

ABSTRACT This article examines the repositioning of the Catholic Church in the aftermath of the Philippine Revolution of 1896–98, during the transfer of Spanish to American colonial rule. It reviews the consultations between the outgoing Spanish bishops and the Vatican’s Apostolic Delegate, Placido Chapelle, in January 1900, and the subsequent religious settlement promulgated in the Vatican’s Apostolic Constitution for the Philippine Church, Quae mari Sinico, in 1902. The Delegate’s identification with the Spanish bishops and their opposition to Filipino nationalist aspirations and the Filipino secular clergy confirmed the anti-Filipino position of the Church in the American colonial period. Both the Filipino bishops and the American bishops opposed independence and distrusted the nationalist leaders as anti-clerical Masons. This is followed by a discussion of the claimed reconciliation of Church and Filipino political aspirations in the post-Vatican II period in the 1960s, which culminated in the Church’s role in bringing down President Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. Committed to a theology of social justice, the bishops now aligned the Church with progressive democratic nationalists. In its successful opposition to the Marcos dictatorship in the name of “People’s Power,” the hierarchy claimed that through the “Miracle of EDSA” the Church had identified with and indeed represented the political will of the Filipino people.

미국의 필리핀 식민통치의 시기별 특성

이 글에서는 미국의 필리핀 식민통치 과정 각 시기의 지침과 통치 이념들의 특별한 징후들을 개별적으로 세밀하게 살피고, 나아가 식민통치 전체 시기의 성격을 종합하는 것에 그 목적을 두고자 한다. 즉 각 시기에 특정한 지침이 제시되면서 해당 사안들에 대해 단편적으로 그 성격을 규정해 왔었는데 이번 기회에 이것을 식민통치의 전체 기간으로 확장하여 그 본질을 일별해 보고자 하는 것이다. 미국의 식민통치는 이념과 지침, 그리고 정책 모든 면에서 어느 정당이 집권하느냐에 따라 크게 변화된다. 물론 큰 그림으로 본다면 집권당의 국제관계 및 대외정책의 기본적 성향에 연동되는 것이고, 따라서 집권행정부의 교체에 따라 식민통치의 성격도 확연히 변동되는 특징을 보이는 것이다. 이런 맥락에서 미국 집권당의 변동에 따른 식민통치의 시기별 특징을 규명해 보고자 하는 것이다. 또한 ‘시기별 특성’을 종합해 봄으로써 미국의 식민통치의 구조/형태뿐만 아니라 동시에 그 본질을 보다 확연히 제시할 수 있겠다는 동기가 관통되고 있는 것이다.BR 미국이 필리핀을 식민통치한 시기를 성격 상 크게 네시기로 나눌 수 있겠다. 그것은 통치의 기구, 조직, 나아가 그 성격이 바뀔 정도의 전환점이 있었기 때문이다. 식민통치의 그런 성격 변화는 해당 시기에 필요한 지침을 제시하는 입법화 과정을 통해 특징지을 수 있다.1902년 쿠퍼법(The Philippine Bill of 1902, or Cooper Act), 1916년의 존스법(The Philippine Autonomy Act of 1916, or Jones Law), 그리고 1934년의 타이딩스-맥더피법(The Philippine Commonwealth and Independence Act of 1934, or The Tydings –McDuffie Act)의 제정 등을 대표적 기제로 제시할 수 있겠다. 즉 필리핀 독립문제와 관련된 내용, 특히 통치구조와 골격을 구성하는 대표적 내용을 보면 확연히 구분됨을 읽을 수 있다.BR 미국은 식민통치를 진행하면서 가능하면 식민지인들의 저항을 약화시키기 위해 지속적으로 당근을 제시했었다. 가장 매혹적인 제시는 정치적 조건이 성숙되면 독립인정을 고려하겠다는 것이었다. 그러나 여기엔 늘 조건제시가 부가되었었다. 무엇보다도 집권당 변화에 따라 그 가능성에 대한 성취도 평가가 달라지기 때문에 독립조건을 달성하기란 실제로는 처음부터 불가능한 것으로 시작되었다고 판단된다. 본질적으로는 식민지 지배권을 연장해 나가려는 저의의 실행이며, 또한 편리한 이론적 무기로 작동시킨 것이다. 대체로 민주당 집권시 유화정책과 독립가능성 제시를, 또 공화당 집권시 탄압정책과 독립가능성 불가를 운용해 나가는 일반적 경향성을 발견할 수 있다. 다만 대공황이라는 대내적 국가위기 국면에 이르면 각종 이익단체들이 필리핀독립을 강권하는 상황이 연출되었으며 현실정치 세력들은 초당파적으로 식민지 독립에 공감하였다. 결과적으로는 ‘10년 과도정부 후 독립’을 확약하였고, 그 후 국제환경에 복잡한 상황변화가 나타났지만 10년 후인 1946년 완전독립이라는 그 확약은 실행되었다.

The first Filipino City Beautiful plans

ABSTRACTNarratives of the City Beautiful in the Philippines have a tendency to adhere to a particular historiographical form: they commence with the early years of American colonial rule and Daniel Burnham’s grand schemes of 1905 for Manila and Baguio, then they provide reference to William E. Parsons’ city plans for Cebu and Zamboanga before fleetingly noting Juan Arellano’s Capitol complexes or his 1930 Iloilo Plan. To bring such historical accounts to a conclusion characteristically discussion of the Commonwealth Era (1935–1942, 1945–1946), and the development of Quezon City, are presented. Yet these histories of city planning in the Philippines during the American colonial period (1898–1946) essentially offer no detailed insight into the projects composed by Filipinos. Questions that include ‘How many plans did Filipinos compose?’, ‘Who designed them?’, and ‘What was their form?’ are consequently left unanswered.

Indigenous Pan-Americanism: Contesting Settler Colonialism and the Doctrine of Discovery at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues

Indigenous Pan-Americanism: Contesting Settler Colonialism and the Doctrine of Discovery at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues Baron Pineda (bio) On November 3, 2016, a ritual burning of the Doctrine of Discovery (the European legal concept that justified the dispossession of native lands by Europeans) was held at the Oceti Sakowin Camp in North Dakota.1 Episcopalian Reverend John Floberg, who was acting at the invitation of the Standing Rock Sioux, held a copy of the Doctrine of Discovery (presumably the Papal Bull titled “Inter Caetera” issued by Pope Alexander VI on May 4, 1493) and invited a committee of native elders to, if so moved, authorize the burning of the document. After a series of speeches and rituals, the document was burned to the applause and cheering of hundreds of native and nonnative water protectors (as many prefer to be called over “protestor”) and about five hundred clergy members. This interfaith campaign has gathered steam in the last five years and calls on churches and governments to renounce the Doctrine of Discovery. The campaign has resulted in official pronouncements from the World Council of Churches, Episcopal House of Bishops, Quakers, United Methodist Church, and Unitarian Universalists. The effort by indigenous activists received its most international notoriety when the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (where I have been conducting fieldwork since the first session in 2002) declared it the official theme of the Eleventh Session of the Permanent Forum in 2012. I examine the anti–Doctrine of Discovery campaign at the UN, particularly the Eleventh Session, and other related contexts for two reasons. First, the movement highlights the challenges and possibilities of what I call Pan-American indigenous activism because it has been embraced by a diverse group of indigenous activists from Latin America and North America, and it frames historic grievances in a uniquely pan-hemispheric way. Although it focuses on Papal Bulls generated under Iberian colonialism and what is now Latin America, it traces the connections and continuities of the colonialist and [End Page 823] imperialist ideologies that underpinned both English and Spanish aggressions in the Americas. Second, I argue that an examination of this movement is particularly apt in the context of the analytic possibilities and limitations of the concept of settler colonialism across the indigenous Americas. In the words of Patrick Wolfe, “settler colonialism destroys to replace.”2 This destruction and its aftermath create a unique dilemma for activists and others who attempt to redress it. This is the dilemma of (perceived) irreversibility—the larger (and more destructive) the damage, the less practical and realizable redress seems. I demonstrate the ways indigenous activists in the United States and Latin America strategically use institutions like the UN and the news media in unexpected ways to create what Kevin Bruyneel, focusing exclusively on the United States, calls a “third space of sovereignty” that “resides neither simply inside nor outside the American political system but rather exists on these very boundaries, exposing both the practices and the contingencies of American colonial rule.”3 Indigenous participants have used the symbolic capital of the United Nations to put pressure on national governments and corporations that are active in their territories and communities in a way that transcends the narrow mandate the United Nations gives to the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (and other venues for indigenous participation within the UN system). The Dakota Access Pipeline case is a recent example of an emergent Pan-American indigenous activism that to some extent is lodged in global governmental institutions but also defies the constraints inherently accompanying this positioning. Settler colonialism describes a process that unmistakably has played out differently, if at all, in Latin America and North America. Surely there has been “destruction and replacement” in both hemispheres during the colonial period, but it is widely acknowledged that the North American process was oriented less toward exploitation of native labor than toward the removal of native people to make way for English settlers and other imported and forced laborers from the Old World. The process of mestizaje, facilitated by a Spanish colonial system reliant on organized native communities, resulted in modern Latin American societies that as a general rule (with...

A. C. S. Peacock and Annabel Teh Gallop, eds. From Anatolia to Aceh: Ottomans, Turks, and Southeast Asia

This edited volume in the Proceedings of the British Academy series is comprised of 14 chapters covering interactions between the two regions from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries. Its various chapters were developed out of papers originally prepared for a workshop held at the International Centre for Aceh and Indian Ocean Studies (ICAIOS) in Banda Aceh in 2012 as part of a collaborative project between the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara (BIAA) and the Association for South-East Asian Studies in the United Kingdom (ASEASUK) on Islam, Trade, and Politics across the Indian The editors have done a remarkable job here in bringing together the work of historians and philologists to produce a volume of studies tightly focused along clearly defined axes of interaction between the two regions. Their efforts have produced a book that makes significant and meaningful contributions to our understandings of these trans-regional dynamics in the history of Southeast Asia. In this it both complements and substantially enriches a growing library of work focused on analogous vectors of the historical connections of Southeast Asia with the Arab Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia.1'The editors' very fine introduction to the collection presents an engaging overview of the field, highlighting the ways in which the various chapters contribute to developing richer and more nuanced understandings of diverse modalities of connection between the two regions. It is followed by a chapter from Anthony Reid, whose pioneering work stimulated a growing body of research on this field since his first publication on connections between the Ottomans and Aceh in 1969. In his chapter for this volume, Reid has produced a new essay that provides rich contexts for understand1) ing the findings of this more recent scholarship in a magisterial overview of ways in which understandings of both the historical and imagined relationships between the two regions have developed over more than four centuries.The remainder of the volume is comprised of a series of focused, in-depth case studies of particular examples of political, religious, economic, and literary connections between the two regions-including the presentation of new work on a wide range of archival sources. Jorge Santos Alves begins by introducing a previously little known dimension of sixteenth century OttomanSoutheast Asian interactions in the role played by Jews of Portuguese origin (who had lost much to both the Inquisition and the Estado da India) that were active at Istanbul in supporting a stronger anti-Portuguese stance in the Indian Ocean. The economic focus is also central to Andrew Peacock's own chapter, which highlights the importance of looking beyond diplomatic connections to the particulars of both trade commodities and the careers of individual merchants to develop more fine-grained depictions of connections as embodied in the people and things that moved between the two regions.Diplomatic and political relations return to center stage in several of the chapters that follow. Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells takes as her focus the Hadrami diaspora in the Netherlands Indies with an examination of both their pragmatic collaboration and resistance in light of appeals to their rights as Ottoman citizens. Isaac Donoso's chapter presents us with yet another case in which colonial views of the ties binding Muslims in Southeast Asia to the Ottoman Empire and the heartlands of Islam factored into diverse political projects. The other chapter in this volume focusing on the Philippines, by Gervase Clarence-Smith, opens up a window onto new dynamics introduced under American colonial rule and the remarkable experiments of this new colonial power with engaging the Ottomans as part of policies designed for the management of their Muslim subjects in Southeast Asia.The potential role of the Ottomans to influence the religious and political landscape of the region was, however, not purely the product of Western imaginations. …

The “Little Brown Brother” in the Jim Crow South: Race, Sex, and Empire in State of Georgia v. Fortunatio Annunciatio (1932)

Come on, hurry! fourteen-year-old Rosa Mae Clower yelled while grabbing her fifteen-year-old friend Frances Hutcheson's wrist and pulling her through the crowd gathered in front of Atlanta's downtown McCrory's drugstore. On the afternoon of April 11, 1932, the popular Filipino yo-yo exhibitionists Fortunatio Annunciatio and Ambia Subia dazzled their audience as their agile fingers performed a litany of tricks with the toy, a craze that was sweeping through the city during the early years of the Great Depression. But the growing economic storm did to stifle the enthusiasm of the citizens of Atlanta who handsomely tipped the yo-yo kings. The two girls, who had spent extra money that day to ride the streetcar from Fulton High School to the show, clamored to see Annunciatio and Subia and applauded the talented duo after each trick, clapping until their hands stung. (1) As the crowd thinned out, Clower and Hutcheson remained at McCrory's, sipping Cokes, stealing glances at the two Filipinos, and catching twenty-five-year-old Amby Subia's eye. Subia and Annunciatio (who was twenty-seven years old) did not exchange words with their fans that day, but the two girls returned to the drugstore two days later to watch more yo-yo tricks. At this point, Subia approached Clower and Hutcheson, inviting them to come see a later performance at the convention hall. The girls never made it to the second exhibition, but that afternoon of April 13, Clower and Hutcheson climbed the stairs in the Tallulah Apartments and knocked on Annunciatio and Subia's door. What happened after the two girls entered the apartment that afternoon spurred a unique Georgia court case involving a Filipino man fighting for his civil rights within the racialized legal system of the Jim Crow South. (2) Following tips from neighbors who had observed the girls entering and leaving the apartment on April 13, Atlanta police barged into the Filipinos' abode the next afternoon, searching for evidence that the two had seduced and raped the young women. Hutcheson and another friend, Evelyn Barnett, were present at the apartment when the police arrested Subia and Annunciatio that day. Taken to the station for questioning, the girls revealed that Clower also frequented the home of the two suspects. The police called Clower in for questioning as well, and she eventually revealed that Annunciatio had forced himself upon her on the afternoon of April 13. Both Annunciatio and Subia faced charges of rape (or assisted rape, in Subia's case) and were found guilty by the court in Fulton County in May 1932. Newspaper coverage of the case inflamed the passions of Georgians outside Atlanta, with one resident from Thomasville in southwest Georgia declaring that those Atlanta yo-yo artists ought be wrapped around their necks with their [yo-yo] strings. (3) Sentenced to ten to fifteen years of hard labor at the Georgia State Penitentiary, Annunciatio appealed the decision ultimately to the Supreme Court of Georgia, arguing that he was denied a fair trial from the moment the police illegally entered and searched his home without a warrant until the assistant solicitor provided damaging and racist closing remarks to the jury regarding Filipinos. (4) Annunciatio's appeal marked the first time in Georgia history that a Filipino challenged the state's Jim Crow legal system (and its racist underpinnings). While the details of what exactly happened that April afternoon in the Tallulah Apartments remain unclear, Annunciatio insisted that the way the police, the prosecutors, and the Fulton County judge handled the case violated his basic rights as an American subject. Classified as nationals under American colonial rule, the little brown brothers of the Philippines (as Governor General William Howard Taft described the Filipinos) were allowed to migrate to and from America and, despite not being recognized as U.S. citizens, were afforded full constitutional rights when residing in the United States. …

Visible Japanese and Invisible Filipino: Narratives of the Development of Davao, 1900s to 1930s

Although the southern Philippine province of Davao had the largest number of Japanese inhabitants in Southeast Asia before the Second World War, the Japanese in Davao were a minority compared with the Filipino settlers there. Nonetheless, the literature has focused predominantly on the role of the Japanese in the development of Davao’s abaca (Manila hemp) industry and, by extension, the development of Davao itself during the period of American colonial rule. This article seeks to explain, given this predominant focus on the Japanese, the relative invisibility of Filipinos in the narratives of Davao’s development during the period of the 1900s to the 1930s. KEYWORDS: DAVAO • MINDANAO • FILIPINO SETTLERS • JAPANESE MIGRANTS • ABACA

Rickshaws and Filipinos: Transnational Meanings of Technology and Labor in American-Occupied Manila

AbstractThis article tells the hitherto unknown history of the rickshaw in the Philippines. The Filipinos’ encounter with this transport mode was brief and largely revolved around a failed rickshaw business in Manila in 1902. The venture quickly fizzled out, but not without controversy, deeply rooted in the colliding socio-political forces in the city at that time: the reliance on a non-motorized transport system; the consolidation of American colonial rule against the backdrop of an ongoing revolution; the birth of the first Filipino labor federation; and the implementation of a law banning the employment of Chinese workers from unskilled trades. The controversy turned the rickshaw into a disputed symbol. On the one hand, the rickshaw enterprise was criticized by Filipino carriage drivers and nationalist labor leaders, who viewed the vehicle as an essentially foreign apparatus that would enslave Filipinos. On the other hand, the Americans used the Filipinos’ opposition to the rickshaw to prove the supposed un-modernity of the lazy native workers, who failed to grasp the idea of the dignity of labor. These disputes were inextricably linked to the clash of discourses between Filipino nationalism and colonial modernity, two competing perspectives both influenced by a comparative transnational frame.

Under the Sign of Sovereignty: Certainty, Ambivalence, and Law in Native North America and Indigenous Australia

Under the Sign of Sovereignty: Certainty, Ambivalence, and Law in Native North America and Indigenous Australia Audra Simpson (bio) The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.–Indigenous Relations. by Kevin Bruyneel. University of Minnesota Press, 2007 American Indians and State Law: Sovereignty, Race, and Citizenship, 1790–1880. by Deborah A. Rosen. University of Nebraska Press, 2007 Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters. edited by Aileen Moreton-Robinson. Allen & Unwin, 2007 The notion of “sovereignty” is saturated with the certainty of jurisdictional and territorial authority over peoples and places. Yet nothing is simultaneously so certain and yet so fraught with precariousness as the practice of sovereignty— globally or locally.1 This uncertainty is read through the sign of its failure: territories that fissure and are fought over by force and by fiat, as well as by a precedential practice that continues to reinscribe states with their right to govern, and in the case of democratic systems, laws to also check the exercise of that governance. This uncertainty is especially precarious and, in different ways, onerous in Indian country. Indian country2 may be conceptualized as spaces of Indigeneity that are framed by settler regimes. Once independent and autonomous, the spaces that are conceptualized and peopled and known as “Indian country” now have limited forms of political autonomy that may be [End Page 107] exercised, but, in a double-bind situation, that autonomy is exercisable only because recognition is conferred upon those peoples to exercise this autonomy. This recognition, often temporalized in a moment (that of “treaty making,” for example) guarantees Indian polities their sovereign status. These forms of recognition are historical and juridical and embed within them the intentionality, the ambivalences and exigencies of settlement itself: dispossession, protection, alienation, incorporation, exclusion, assimilation, containment, all of which encode the needs and desires of states that are new, that are in process, that are complicated and struggling always not to fissure. All of this, coupled with massive immigration, occurs in the face of the greatest threat to settler state security and the economic, political, and moral right to govern these entirely new spaces: Indigenous peoples, their governmental and philosophical systems, and most significantly, their lands. It is in this context that Indigenous sovereignties are enunciated and enacted today. This is a context of general “constructedness” and also fragility, a frame of precariousness that has been inscribed in law through law itself.3 If Indigenous peoples ironically are to protect their lands and their people from further encroachment and expropriation (a protective measure) they might have recourse to the very instrument that has been used to take their lands and authorize their disenfranchisement and misery: law. Law is to protect them in the present; yet their sovereignty, granted by law, threatens the very exercise of that sovereignty. These jurisdictional, temporal, historical, and ultimately spatial issues are taken up in theoretical and practical depth in Kevin Bruyneel’s The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.–Indigenous Relations. In this theorized history of law, policy, and Indigenous political action, Bruyneel offers an account of U.S. empire building and Indigenous engagements with that process through the concept of the “third space.” The “third space” is defined first by what it is not: “that which resides discretely inside or outside of the American political system but rather exists on these very boundaries, exposing both the practices and the contingencies of American colonial rule” (xvii, emphasis mine). Without taking up Derrida directly, Bruyneel further describes the third space as a supplemental site that is unassimilable to the institutions and discourses of modern liberal democratic settler-state and nation. The third space is thus a site of pronounced and moveable activity. Bruyneel is heavily indebted to Homi K. Bhabha’s writing on identity in his thinking through the politics of a moment: the distributive politics of multiculturalism in England, which forced an essentialized rendering of identity for a multicultural politics of recognition. 4 Bhabha’s critical rendering of identity was to view it as [End Page 108] hybridity (always), a homologue of systems of signification in a constant conversation with each other rather than fixed, essential, and somewhat characterological configurations of difference...

Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity (review)

Reviewed by: Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity K. Scott Wong Almost All Aliens: Immigration, Race, and Colonialism in American History and Identity. By Paul Spickard. New York: Routledge, 2007. 744 pp. $95.00 (cloth); $39.95 (paper). With this book, Paul Spickard has produced the best single-volume study of American immigration history available today. Using the latest scholarship in a variety of overlapping fields, Spickard provides both an overview of immigration history from initial contact to the present and a revision of the standard approach to American immigration history, the East Coast–based model of European arrival and eventual assimilation. Instead, Spickard provides three models that can be used to interpret the history of immigration, race, and ethnicity in American society: the immigrant assimilation model, the transnational diasporic model, and the panethnic formation model. In each of these models, Spickard points out that "race" and "race-making" are vital to the understanding of how we interpret immigrants and their experience in the United States, while also paying attention to the impact of American colonialism on why and how certain immigrants arrive at our shores. In other words, Spickard rejects the time-worn model of American immigration history as mainly the story of Europeans who came here willingly and eventually discarded their foreignness to become "Americans." By insisting that immigration history take the issues of slavery, racism, exclusion, and colonialism seriously, Spickard paints a much more complex and truthful portrait of the making of America. At the heart of Spickard's approach to studying American immigration history is his insistence that we depart from the notion that immigration history is primarily about Europeans coming to America, and that "American" denotes an "Anglo-conformity" or "Anglo-normativity." Spickard's first challenge to the older paradigms of immigration history is to present a well-argued chapter that depicts the many indigenous groups living in North America when Europeans first arrived. Using a wide array of photographs, maps, and charts, he clearly demonstrates the diversity of the native population during the pre-Columbian period. (The entire book is graced with a wonderful selection of visuals and information-packed charts and tables.) Once establishing that European, and later Asian, immigrants or settlers did not arrive to a "virgin land," Spickard moves to a discussion of slavery and how it affected the construction of race and racism in America. From there, he explains how naturalization legislation favored white males, thus disenfranchising women, blacks, Native Americans, and Asians. At the same time, immigration from Great Britain, Ireland, and northern [End Page 282] Europe created a society that privileged whiteness, which in turn held nonwhite newcomers or those already in the country in contempt. In addition to blacks, Native Americans, Asians, and Mexicans, many Americans held disparaging views of those whom they encountered through conquest, such as Hawaiians and Filipinos, while bringing them under American colonial rule. At the same time, immigrants were arriving from China and Japan, causing more turmoil to the American conception of racial hierarchies. Spickard deftly ties these racial and class tensions to the rise of American capitalism and the conflicts between race, labor, and management. The racial and class conflicts gave rise to exclusionary legislation and the codification of whiteness as the basis for citizenship. In the course of this discussion, he covers the exclusion of Chinese and other Asian immigrants, the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, which created national quotas for all sending countries and declared that those who were ineligible for citizenship could not immigrate. This law drastically reduced the number of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe because of their countries' low annual quotas for immigrants and nearly eliminated all immigration from Asia because they were ineligible for naturalization. Hence, as Spickard points out, by the first third of the twentieth century, the racial hierarchy that determined citizenship and who could become an American was "cemented" through law and exclusionary practices. The cracks in this cement, however, began to show with the impact of World War II. Japanese Americans were rounded up and incarcerated for the duration of the war, but Mexicans were recruited to fill the labor shortage resulting from...

Truth and Lies about the Philippine-American Century

This book takes its title from a catch phrase that appeared in several Manila newspaper articles of July 1996 covering the semicentennial commemoration of formal independence and Philippine-American Friendship Day. On July 4, 1946, officials representing the governments of President Manuel Roxas of the Philippines and President Harry Truman of the United States convened in the city's Luneta Park to end forty-eight years of American colonial rule, inaugurate the Philippine Republic, and pledge future cooperation between the two nations. Fifty years later, American and Filipino officials gathered in the same spot to reenact the historical proceedings. During one part of the ceremony, as the Philippine flag was raised and the American one lowered, the two banners intertwined for several moments. As reported in the Filipino media, many audience members took the entangled flags to indicate an alternative, messier version of the past. Newspapers reported the ceremonial glitch with comments on Filipinos' love-hate relationship with America, and America's neocolonial hold on Philippine sovereignty. The anecdote illustrates Sharon Delmendo's objective to understand the complex connections between the Philippines and the United States. She tells a story of two nations drawn into conquest, invasion, insurgency, military alliance, and economic dependency from the late nineteenth century to the present. The author argues that, over the last century, the Philippines and the United States forged a mutually constitutive relationship in which they asserted their national integrity through and against one another. Notwithstanding the oft-celebrated Philippine-American alliance, Filipino and American nationalists alike have taken pains to deny altogether the historical entanglements between the two countries. The book is valuable for articulating one of the central guiding questions of Filipino studies, a field that has expanded in

Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (review)

Reviewed by: Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History by Catherine Ceniza Choy Arleen Garcia de Vera Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History. By Catherine Ceniza Choy. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003. In Empire of Care, Catherine Ceniza Choy delves into the historical factors behind the emergence of the post-1965 international labor migration of Filipino nurses to the United States. Critical of past approaches that enfolded this migration into a larger spontaneous “brain drain” of Asian professionals and that portrayed these immigrants as taking advantage of the better salaries offered by industrial nations beset by labor shortages, Choy also challenges these approaches’ assumptions about American exceptionalism and the benevolence of American empire in the Philippines. Her thesis rests on four elements. Rather than a recent phenomenon set in motion by the liberalization of immigration laws, the waves of nurses to the United States originate with early twentieth century American colonial rule in the Philippines. Hence, the willingness of these women to leave is due not only to economics but also to cultural desires fashioned by America’s history of empire. Furthermore, the racialized social hierarchies first established under imperial rule continue into the present. Finally, the migrations of these nurses are not one-time journeys but transnational processes. Together these phenomena constitute what Choy calls an “empire of care.” In its early manifestation, this empire of care describes the hierarchical relationships between American supervisors and administrators and Filipino nurses and the transnational ties that facilitated the movement of the latter back and forth between the two countries. After independence, these connections continued and expanded further with globalization, creating in their wake uneven and exploitive relationships between developing and industrialized countries in the access and provision of health care. The resulting imbalances can be severe. During the 1970s, for example, when shortages created a demand for foreign-trained nurses in Canada and the United States, the ratio of nurses to every 10,000 persons in those two countries was fifty-seven and fourty-nine, respectively. By comparison, the ratio in the Philippines was only eight for every 10,000 (113–114). This study offers rich, new insights into the workings and consequences of American empire. During the first few decades of the twentieth century, American administrators sought to institutionalize Western medicine by setting standards for the education, training, and licensing of professionals. Though improving public health and sanitation and recruiting Filipinos into the health fields appear benevolent, there were exclusionary and coercive aspects to this story of “progress.” As Choy demonstrates, undercutting the progressive nature of this enterprise were racialized assumptions about Filipino capacity and hygiene. This led to a hierarchy of American nurses as supervisors and Filipino nurses as subordinates, a hierarchy reflected in segregated dormitories to keep American nurses from Filipinos who were seen as carriers of disease. Despite their “inferior” status, Filipino women circumvented or remade policies, thus exerting control over their own lives and helping to shape the broad outlines of colonial society. Most significantly, Choy traces Filipino nurse migration back to American colonialism. The American system produced nurses whose training and English fluency better suited them for work in American hospitals and whose colonial outlook encouraged them to prize, if not seek out, opportunities in the United States. Especially valuable are the analyses of the larger implications of these migrations for both societies. It details step by step how transnationalism was institutionalized on a larger scale, from pensionados whose travels strengthened transnational ties between metropolitan society and the homeland, to United States-sponsored professional exchanges that cemented international relations in the face of concerns over the Cold War, and the active efforts of United States and Philippine hospitals and travel agencies to recruit Philippine professionals. On the United States side, Choy pays careful attention to the experiences of Exchange Visitor Program nurses and their attempts to cope with hospital abuses. She also shows the cultural effects of these transnational migrations. During the 1970s, amid the growing disillusionment over the Vietnam War and tensions over foreign nurse graduates, the welcome accorded Filipino nurses eroded, degenerating into battles between nursing organizations over licensure. Also examined are transnationalism’s...

Women’s Magazines in English from 1920 to 1972: Instruments of American Hegemony

Using Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, this paper discusses how women’s magazines in English, specifically those that were published from 1920 to 1972, served as tools for the subjugation and cooptation of Filipino women towards accepting American colonial rule, and consequently, the ideologies of capitalism and patriarchy. While these magazines did show, during the early years of American colonization, some potential for advancing the feminist cause, they, on the whole, affirmed the dominant patriarchal and capitalist beliefs, values, and way of life in their covers, editorial contents and advertisements.