After the Galleons


Book Description

After the Galleons tracks the progress of Philippine foreign trade in the nineteenth century from the end of the galleon trade to the Philippine Revolution. Distributed for the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.




Empire's Proxy


Book Description

Part of the American Literatures Initiative Series In the late nineteenth century, American teachers descended on the Philippines, which had been newly purchased by the U.S. at the end of the Spanish-American War. Motivated by President McKinley’s project of “benevolent assimilation,” they established a school system that centered on English language and American literature to advance the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, which was held up as justification for the U.S.’s civilizing mission and offered as a promise of moral uplift and political advancement. Meanwhile, on American soil, the field of American literature was just being developed and fundamentally, though invisibly, defined by this new, extraterritorial expansion. Drawing on a wealth of material, including historical records, governmental documents from the War Department and the Bureau of Insular Affairs, curriculum guides, memoirs of American teachers in the Philippines, and 19th century literature, Meg Wesling not only links empire with education, but also demonstrates that the rearticulation of American literary studies through the imperial occupation in the Philippines served to actually define and strengthen the field. Empire’s Proxy boldly argues that the practical and ideological work of colonial dominance figured into the emergence of the field of American literature, and that the consolidation of a canon of American literature was intertwined with the administrative and intellectual tasks of colonial management.




Japanese Pan-Asianism and the Philippines from the Late Nineteenth Century to the End of World War II


Book Description

In Japanese Pan-Asianism and the Philippines from the Late 19th Century to the End of World War II – Going to the Philippines Is Like Coming Home? Sven Matthiessen examines the development of Japanese Pan-Asianism and the perception of the Philippines within this ideology. Due to the archipelago’s previous colonisation by Spain and the US the Philippines was a special case among the Japanese occupied territories during the war. Matthiessen convincingly proves that the widespread pro-Americanism among the Philippine population made it impossible for Japanese administrators to implement a pan-Asianist ideology that centred on a 'return to Asian values'. The expectation among some Japanese Pan-Asianists that ‘going to the Philippines was like coming home’ was never fulfilled.







Crime, Society, and the State in the Nineteenth-century Philippines


Book Description

Just who committed criminal actions and why, and just why they were deemed reprehensible and by whom, provides not only insight into the behavior of the ordinary individual, but also reveals much about the policy and practice of Spanish colonialism in the Philippines.




Chinese and Chinese Mestizos of Manila


Book Description

For centuries, the Chinese have been intermarrying with inhabitants of the Philippines, resulting in a creolized community of Chinese mestizos under the Spanish colonial regime. In contemporary Philippine society, the “Chinese” are seen as a racialized “Other” while descendants from early Chinese-Filipino intermarriages as “Filipino.” Previous scholarship attributes this development to the identification of Chinese mestizos with the equally “Hispanicized” and “Catholic” indios. Building on works in Chinese transnationalism and cultural anthropology, this book examines the everyday practices of Chinese merchant families in Manila from the 1860s to the 1930s. The result is a fascinating study of how families and individuals creatively negotiate their identities in ways that challenge our understanding of the genesis of ethnic identities in the Philippines. “...[This book] helps contribute to the revision of the existing literature on the Chinese and Chinese mestizos with a new perspective that highlights the emerging field of transnational studies.” - Prof. Augusto Espiritu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign “...the author does an outstanding job and we recommend that citizens of the Philippine ‘nation,’ whether they see themselves as ‘Chinese’ or ‘Filipino’ would do well to read this work and understand the origins of the racial stereotypes that influence the way they look at particular members of Philippine society, particularly in Manila.” - Prof. Ellen Palanca and Prof. Clark Alejandrino, Ateneo de Manila University "...an ambitious study of the Chinese and first-generation Chinese mestizos of Manila...[the author] has added valuable research materials from Philippine and American archival collections and...a wide range of published primary sources...The book is meticulously annotated and rich in descriptive detail..." - Michael Cullinane, University of Wisconsin-Madison




Homebound


Book Description




The Promise of the Foreign


Book Description

In The Promise of the Foreign, Vicente L. Rafael argues that translation was key to the emergence of Filipino nationalism in the nineteenth century. Acts of translation entailed technics from which issued the promise of nationhood. Such a promise consisted of revising the heterogeneous and violent origins of the nation by mediating one’s encounter with things foreign while preserving their strangeness. Rafael examines the workings of the foreign in the Filipinos’ fascination with Castilian, the language of the Spanish colonizers. In Castilian, Filipino nationalists saw the possibility of arriving at a lingua franca with which to overcome linguistic, regional, and class differences. Yet they were also keenly aware of the social limits and political hazards of this linguistic fantasy. Through close readings of nationalist newspapers and novels, the vernacular theater, and accounts of the 1896 anticolonial revolution, Rafael traces the deep ambivalence with which elite nationalists and lower-class Filipinos alike regarded Castilian. The widespread belief in the potency of Castilian meant that colonial subjects came in contact with a recurring foreignness within their own language and society. Rafael shows how they sought to tap into this uncanny power, seeing in it both the promise of nationhood and a menace to its realization. Tracing the genesis of this promise and the ramifications of its betrayal, Rafael sheds light on the paradox of nationhood arising from the possibilities and risks of translation. By repeatedly opening borders to the arrival of something other and new, translation compels the nation to host foreign presences to which it invariably finds itself held hostage. While this condition is perhaps common to other nations, Rafael shows how its unfolding in the Philippine colony would come to be claimed by Filipinos, as would the names of the dead and their ghostly emanations.




White Love and Other Events in Filipino History


Book Description

In this wide-ranging cultural and political history of Filipinos and the Philippines, Vicente L. Rafael examines the period from the onset of U.S. colonialism in 1898 to the emergence of a Filipino diaspora in the 1990s. Self-consciously adopting the essay form as a method with which to disrupt epic conceptions of Filipino history, Rafael treats in a condensed and concise manner clusters of historical detail and reflections that do not easily fit into a larger whole. White Love and Other Events in Filipino History is thus a view of nationalism as an unstable production, as Rafael reveals how, under what circumstances, and with what effects the concept of the nation has been produced and deployed in the Philippines. With a focus on the contradictions and ironies that suffuse Filipino history, Rafael delineates the multiple ways that colonialism has both inhabited and enabled the nationalist discourse of the present. His topics range from the colonial census of 1903-1905, in which a racialized imperial order imposed by the United States came into contact with an emergent revolutionary nationalism, to the pleasures and anxieties of nationalist identification as evinced in the rise of the Marcos regime. Other essays examine aspects of colonial domesticity through the writings of white women during the first decade of U.S. rule; the uses of photography in ethnology, war, and portraiture; the circulation of rumor during the Japanese occupation of Manila; the reproduction of a hierarchy of languages in popular culture; and the spectral presence of diasporic Filipino communities within the nation-state. A critique of both U.S. imperialism and Filipino nationalism, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History creates a sense of epistemological vertigo in the face of former attempts to comprehend and master Filipino identity. This volume should become a valuable work for those interested in Southeast Asian studies, Asian-American studies, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies.