American Colonies Research Articles

The Depiction of Native Hawaiians in American Media

This paper examines the ways in which colonial ideologies influenced the presentation of Native Hawaiians in American media throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Since the acquisition of the Hawaiian Islands as a U.S. territory in 1898, American cartoonists, advertisers, authors, filmmakers, and others have promoted racist, sexist, and oversexualized versions of Native Hawaiians to the American public because of their deeply ingrained, sometimes unconscious, colonial ways of thinking. Although Indigenous Studies is a growing area of interest in the academy, research on Native Hawaiian media representation and the impact of stereotypes on both Native Hawaiian identity and public views of Native Hawaiians is scarce. This paper uses political cartoons, travel ephemera, film footage, and various forms of print media to bring to light the most prominent stereotypes of Native Hawaiians and explore how the origins of these stereotypes can be traced back to American colonialism. Unlike pre-existing works, this paper scrutinizes various examples of Native Hawaiian media representations from an intersectional perspective, considering racial-, gender-, and sexuality-based approaches. It also critically examines the role of exoticization, instead of focusing on only one of the aforementioned approaches. By outlining the fallacious stereotypes of the Native Hawaiian community and explaining their origins, this paper can help arm the media industry with the necessary tools to create more culturally competent media content.

The emergence and role of Lancaster in Mexican public education

The Lancaster mutual teaching model originated in late 18th century England and quickly spread to the American colonies after receiving positive responses in Europe. In the 1820s, renowned Spanish physician, educator, and publisher Manuel Codorniú Ferreras brought it to Mexico, making outstanding contributions to the newly independent nation in educational philosophy, system, and methods. In the mid-19th century, with the absence of a centralized institution for public education in Mexico, the Lancaster Company took on the significant responsibility of guiding the direction of national public education development. Although this function did not persist for too long due to political changes in Mexico, the educational system continued to play an important role in the Mexican education sector. The Lancaster Company and its teaching system exerted a positive and profound influence on the democratization and secularization of education in Mexico, laying important foundations for the modernization and reform of Mexican education.

John Adams – the American Cicero? From the Genealogy of Res Publica Americana

When creating a new republic, the Foundings Fathers deemed it necessary to become well versed in the lessons of history, in order to avoid the fates of previous republics. Above all other historical corollaries, Americans evoked the example of the republican Rome that had upheld a system of government that aspired to ordered liberty as supported by a mixture of public civic virtue and effective institutional design for nearly five centuries. The comparisons were possible because the American colonies had kept the grammar school system of education then common in England, giving all educated Americans a basic grasp of Cicero’s reputation and writings, who represented eloquence, moral virtue and hostility towards tyranny. He thus became a source of inspiration for the Founders, and John Adams directly considered himself an American Cicero. In the article, the authors try to answer the question about the legitimacy of such a position of the 2nd President of the US. To do this, they compare the basic political categories of Cicero and Adams, pointing out their similarities and differences. They also examine to what extent Cicero’s thought could be applied to the reality of the young American republic.

Palestine is the Vanguard for Our Liberation: Insights from the Students’ Intifada at Columbia University

This essay, written by members and friends of Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD)—the Palestine solidarity group founded at Columbia in November 2023—brings forth an analysis of our movement. We begin by describing the steps that led to CUAD’s formation, and then its historical continuity with Columbia’s legacy of student activism. We discuss our approach to the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, the research that informs our demands, and two of our methods for accomplishing them: an encampment and building occupation. By contextualizing ourselves in Columbia’s student protest history, we hope to explain the lessons we have learned about the content and form of struggle. By explaining our demands, we hope to focus attention to our points of unity, often overlooked or misunderstood, even by our supporters. Finally, by describing our own experience of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment and Hind’s Hall occupation, we hope to situate the protests for which most readers know us in our own political, strategic, and practical framework. We analyze our movement through the principal lens of anti-imperialism, while situating ourselves in the context of the US imperialist core, from which we remain auxiliary to the liberation movement in Palestine.

Disinfecting the Dead, Sanitizing Empire: The Cultural Memory of Fallen Soldiers in Cuba

AbstractThe misremembering by Americans of the Spanish-Cuban-American War was not an accident of either time or place. Rather, it was a collaboration between the citizenry, political and business elites, and the military-industrial complex centered on the cult of the fallen soldier. As businessmen carved up the Cuban landscape and the military occupied Guantanamo Bay, the war dead played one last service of memory. American commemoration of fallen soldiers acted as a shroud to obscure the practices of American imperialism. The recovery of the war dead thus provides an interesting example of how officials wanted Americans to remember the conflict. Most of the fallen died from disease rather than combat. Recovering the war dead thus entailed an elaborate process of sanitizing the “sick” dead and disinfecting the remains of warriors buried in foreign and tropical soil to repatriate them back to the United States. The metaphorical intersected with the medical in presenting dead soldiers from an imperialistic war with “clean and sterile bones” that would neither threaten the health of the general public nor their collective memory. Such a re-presentation would help shape how Americans remember a clean and sterile “Splendid Little War” without acknowledging the mucky details of empire-building.

Contesting Indigeneity in Colonial Cuba

Abstract: This article analyzes the differing trajectories of two Indigenous pueblos—Guanabacoa (outside Havana) and Jiguaní (on the outskirts of Bayamo)—to explore the persistence of Native communities in colonial Cuba and various contestations of indigeneity across the longue durée. Though protected Indigenous pueblos were grafted into a larger patchwork of unequal and overlapping republics that formed the building blocks of legal pluralism across the Spanish Americas, they were virtually nonexistent across the Greater Antilles because conquest and colonization had destroyed Native chiefdoms. Consequently, surviving Native communities in the Greater Antilles were suspended between their own claims to Indigenous ancestry and how those with power defined them as an incoherent population. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, Spanish officials repeatedly dismissed the authenticity of Native communities on the island, suggesting that they were frauds from the Atlantic world or the vestiges of Indigenous communities that had long ago lost their "Color." Charting these contestations and attending to the formation, composition, and litigiousness of these pueblos demonstrates that indigeneity in Cuba was neither extinguished nor static; it was actively (re)created by a diverse community of indios who used histories rooted in the island's past and legal strategies routed across the Spanish American colonies. This article is accompanied by an appendix on the OI Reader (https://oireader.wm.edu/open_wmq/contesting-indigeneity-in-colonial-cuba/).

할리우드 SF 영화 속 반-아시아 인종주의 담론 비판

This article aims to highlight that the recent Hollywood SF film <The Creator>(2023), while seemingly a direct critique of American imperialist ideology towards Asia, still remains entrenched in typical Orientalist perspectives in its portrayal of the East and Asians. By adhering to the conventions of techno-Orientalism long observed in Hollywood SF movies, the film inadvertently perpetuates Western-centric ideologies. This study also examines how the immense cultural significance and power of the Hollywood signifier reinforce ideologies and solidify conventional perceptions. Through a socio-cultural and historical context, this paper explores the problematic and superficial attitudes of the film towards Asians and Asia as a whole.

Water Troubles: Peruvian Capitalists, Mining Infrastructure, and the First Copper Bonanza

Abstract This essay examines struggles over a water drainage tunnel as a window into the politics of mining, infrastructure, and national development in early twentieth-century Peru. It argues that the Peruvian mining elite operated as an organized network of entrepreneurs, mobilizing capital, environmental technology, and the power of the state to challenge the rising hegemony of US interests in Peru's copper corridor. Unlike the classic literature on nineteenth-century mining in Peru, which has presented Peruvian mineowners as a struggling bourgeoisie, this study focuses on this group's innovations and dynamism in the wake of the copper bonanza. It also studies its discursive strategies, which appealed to preexisting skepticism of free trade and anxieties about foreign influence. Altogether, this essay contributes to the literature on US imperialism and capitalist penetration by centering local actors and studying US hegemony as a contentious and contingent process.

The YWCA of the USA ‘In Service for the Girls of the World’, 1947–1985

Before mid-century, the Young Women's Christian Association of the USA (Y-US) was complicit with global northern imperial projects, as its work with women across national borders was characterised by an ethos of ‘imperial maternalism’. Applying Serene Khader's (2019) analysis of imperialism in global northern feminisms shows that Y-US's approach to ‘overseas’ work was ‘missionary’ in its use and promotion of ‘western’ values and strategies. Although Y-US inevitably worked within ‘asymmetrical power relations’ (Grewal & Kaplan, 2000, para.4), in the 1970s its approach shifted as it began to recognise these imbalances. By the 1980s, Y-US's ‘global’ programmes sought out women's context-specific knowledge to identify and critique structural inequalities and US imperialism, characteristic of ‘transnational feminist’ ethic. The contribution of Y-US to the YWCA movement was more complex, and positive, than a perpetuation of cultural imperialism. In its national policy and project planning and evaluations, Y-US continued until the 1980s to apply mixture of missionary and transnational feminist lenses to understand its role and responsibilities as a member of the worldwide YWCA movement, and to grapple with the implications of US power on the world stage.

Intellectual at the service of the United States hegemony

Intellectual at the service of the United States hegemony

МУЗИЧНА ПЕДАГОГІКА ПІВНІЧНОЇ АМЕРИКИ ЗА ЧАСІВ КОЛОНІЗАЦІЇ

The article dwells upon the evolution of music pedagogy in North America during the Colonial period. The study aims to highlight the development of music education in North America during this time and to identify the significant influences of European cultural heritage on the music pedagogy of the Indigenous peoples of North America. The authors have employed the following methods: systematization, analysis, and synthesis of historical, scientific, and pedagogical sources to generalize information on the outlined topic; historical and genetic analysis examines the impact of European notation systems and teaching methods on Indigenous traditions as well as the changes that occurred in musical practices during colonization; comparative analysis compares European and Indigenous musical traditions, particularly in the areas of vocal performance and pedagogical methods; cultural and contextual analysis addresses the social, cultural, and other conditions that accompanied music pedagogy during the Colonial period. The article provides a comprehensive analysis of how European musical practices were introduced and adapted within the colonial context, reflecting the complexities of cultural exchange and adaptation. The study focuses on transmitting European musical traditions, including instructional methods, notation systems, and musical repertoire, as they encountered the diverse cultural landscape of the American colonies. The article examines the role of music in colonial education, emphasizing its significance in religious instruction and socialization. It shows how hymns, psalms, and folk tunes were used in schools and religious settings to impart moral values and foster community cohesion. The impact of various European settlers is analyzed to reveal how their musical heritage influenced local pedagogical practices. Challenges such as geographical isolation, limited resources, and interactions with Indigenous populations are discussed to understand the adaptability of European music education practices in the colonial environment. The article also highlights the contributions of colonial educators and musicians who played a crucial role in shaping the musical education landscape. Future research prospects involve exploring contemporary educational practices in the context of historical influences and cultural changes, which will contribute to developing new approaches to music education that consider the diversity of cultural and social contexts. Key words: music pedagogy of North America, Colonial period, Indigenous peoples, European colonizers, musical traditions, cultural conflicts, assimilation, historical influence.

The Dying Sahara. US Imperialism and Terror in Africa by Jeremy Keenan

The Dying Sahara. US Imperialism and Terror in Africa by Jeremy Keenan

The West in Construction: Texas and Indian Territory at the Vanguard of American Imperial Expansion

Malgré leurs différences essentielles, qu’il s’agisse des raisons de leur création ou de leur peuplement, il apparaît que dans les années 1830 et 1840, la République du Texas et le Territoire Indien (à la suite du Removal Act) se développent selon des dynamiques similaires, faisant d’eux des avant-postes de l’expansion impériale des États-Unis. Alors que les deux populations de migrants s’approprient les territoires du « Grand Désert américain », qui ne sont pas encore organisés par les États-Unis, il semble que la latitude dont ces deux entités « entre-deux » jouissent, aux marges de la république américaine, leur permette de définir les termes de la construction de l’Ouest.

From group mentoring to collective liberation: The imperative to decolonize nursing academia

Four Black early-career faculty members, one Black doctoral student, a Black senior faculty member, (herein referred to as scholars), previously engaged in cross-cultural mentoring with a White senior researcher to bolster their scholarship. In the years following the 2020 racial reckoning, the scholars were motivated to reconvene by the realization that traditional scholarship activities of academia ignore historical educational oppression and fail to account for the contemporary effects of racism and discrimination rooted in American colonialism. Collaborative autoethnography, a decolonizing qualitative approach to research, was used to explicate our journeys in academia. The tenets of Freire’s critical pedagogy (conscientização, scholarship, praxis) framed our collective experiences. We describe resisting academic structures of power, discrimination, and disadvantage through reformation, crafting a vision statement and utilizing positions of influence. To decolonize nursing academia, we invite the scholarly community to pursue liberation and contest structures that center Whiteness and marginalize collectivism and collaboration.

WAKE

WAKE is a queer postcolonial ritual centering grief, healing, and solace through movement within the collective. Created by choreographer Jay Carlon with collaborator and vocalist Micaela Tobin, alongside a live electronic musical score, WAKE is a meditative performance imbued with images, sound, and objects derived from Carlon’s Filipinx heritage and dedicated to those born in the wake of US imperialism.

The “bridge character”: Carl Schurz and West German–American rapprochement

In 1952, West Germans and Americans held a joint, year-long observation celebrating the centennial of the arrival of German-born Carl Schurz in the USA. The collaborative, transatlantic celebration served to publicize a historical and cultural relationship between the German and American peoples through the memory of Carl Schurz. State and non-state participants publicly remembered Schurz as the quintessential German–American and a “bridge character” that transcended national borders, occupied an important ideological space, legitimized the Cold War relationship between erstwhile enemies, and perpetuated an on-going process to construct a transnational, cultural identity rooted in Western liberal-democratic political culture. For the US government, the historical character of Carl Schurz also became a means of promoting a liberal heritage in the face of on-going Soviet accusations of American imperialism, warmongering, and poor race relations.

Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines

Monetary Authorities: Capitalism and Decolonization in the American Colonial Philippines

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)

Derrida, Autoimmunity, and Islamic Medicine

Autoimmunity often refers to a medical condition, yet it was used by Jacques Derrida to theorize the conflict between religion and science as well as Islam and the West. Derrida’s use of the term autoimmunity became widespread after he used it to diagnose the “American Organism” in the aftermath of the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York City on September 11, 2001. Most commentary on Derrida’s political diagnosis have focused on his reading of Islam as an Other within the US body politic. This essay takes a different approach and reads Derrida’s diagnosis within the tradition of Islamic Medicine. If we are to truly rethink the othering of Islam as a viral autoimmune disease in the body politic of the US empire, we need to understand Islamic thought as forming the very basis of the West’s image of itself. I argue that Islam is far from a self-contained category opposing the West: a virus or a plague attacking it from the outside. Rather, Islam is the swallowed-within of the West itself, to which, the West continuously returns/reacts in an autoimmune fashion.

The Monroe Report, US colonialism and English language education in the Philippines

AbstractThis article focuses on a foundational text in the history of English in the Philippines, that is, the 1925 document, A Survey of the Educational System of the Philippine Islands, which came to be known as ‘The Monroe Report’. Although the Report has often been cited as an emblematic example of colonial control and hegemony, a close scrutiny of the text, as well as a consideration of the historical context, makes possible other more nuanced readings, which situate the Report in the educational progressivism of early 20th century United States, and simultaneously remind us of the continuing relevance of the Report today.