Organizer: Megan C. Thomas, University of California, Santa Cruz
Chair: Michael M. Cullinane, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Discussant: Paul Kramer, University of Iowa
A defining function of modern states has been the
exercise of discursive control over the meaning of the local in relation to
the foreign, the idiosyncratic to the universal. In few places has the troublesome
artificiality of this state function been more apparent and contradictory than
in the Philippines. In the forty years spanning the events of 1898, a profound
struggle for control of the discursive legitimacy of the state was afoot as
a weakened Spanish colonial regime endeavored to forestall insurgent nationalist
claims on political autonomy before yielding to the violent imposition of a
new U.S. colonial state over the Philippine body politic. Throughout this period,
rival claims to state authority couched their legitimacy in competing discourses
of race and civilization in an attempt to define and correlate the meaning
of the local and the foreign in the Philippine context. This panel’s papers describe three scenes of
this struggle for discursive control: Chu investigates representations of, and
policy toward, the Chinese, via newspaper cartoons and articles of the American
colonial period; Johnson studies competing cultural claims of cosmopolitan Hispanism
and political indigenism in a 1907 election campaign; and Thomas considers the “indigenous” and
the “civilized” in 1880s writings about history. The papers of the
panel reveal a profound paradox at the heart of the modern state, namely
that definitions of the local (such as ethnography attempts) are themselves
products of cosmopolitan intellectual commerce while claims to universal norms
of authority (the notion of civilization itself) have decidedly parochial wellsprings.
Colonial Period
Richard T. Chu, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Utilizing hundreds of media depictions of the Chinese found in English and
Spanish newspapers in the Philippines, this paper aims to examine how the
American colonial government and other political players dealt with issues surrounding
the “Chinaman” question from 1898 to the 1920s. The paper addresses
the following questions: What issues faced the American colonial government
regarding the Chinese question in the Philippines, and how did they try to resolve
these? How did their experience with their own “Chinaman” questions
in the United States affect, influence, or shape their policies vis-à-vis
the Chinese in the Philippines? How does an investigation of newspaper articles
and cartoons regarding the Chinese help clarify, complicate, or deepen our understanding
of American colonial policy toward the Chinese, and more broadly, questions
regarding the construction and negotiation of “race” in the Philippines
during the period under consideration?
Courtney Johnson, University of Wisconsin, Madison
In the spring of 1907, the Manila daily La Democracia, organ of the pro-statehood
Federalista party, published a celebratory political profile of Juan Sumulong,
who was a prominent Federalista then standing for election to the Philippine
Assembly. The front-page article included a photograph of the candidate and
opened with the following rhetorical question: “Is it necessary to have
Hottentot lips to be a true Filipino? asks candidate Sumulong.” The question
was answered implicitly by the European features of the man in the photograph
and, as the article made clear, it was meant as a powerful rejection of the
emerging political discourse of indigeneity then most forcefully articulated
by a young candidate from the rival pro-independence Nacionalista party by the
name of Fernando María Guerrero. Ironically, perhaps, Guerrero was then
the leading member of a vibrant young cadre of literary intellectuals who cultivated
a decidedly cosmopolitan strain of Hispanism, known as modernismo, as a bulwark
against the encroachments of an American campaign of cultural and political
assimilation in the Philippines. In this presentation, I will consider the curious
case of Fernando Guerrero’s dual cultural strategy —cosmopolitan
Hispanism and political indigenism— in the context of a partisan struggle
for control of National Assembly in 1907. The goal of this presentation is to
suggest that Filipino Hispanism, like the more “natural” political
discourse of indigeneity, was a vibrant and effective component of political
nationalism in the Philippines of this period.
Megan C. Thomas, University of California, Santa Cruz
In the 1880s, a considerable number of writings about Philippine history
contributed to the modernization of Spanish-language scholarship by using
contemporary theories and methods of history, ethnology, and linguistics to
investigate the pre-Hispanic Philippines and link it to the present. “Indigenous” or “native” peoples,
both ancient and contemporary, played significant but ambivalent roles in these
texts (written by Spaniards, Filipinos, and foreigners). These peoples--whether
pre-Hispanic or contemporaries who had refused or evaded both Catholicism and
Islam--were rendered sometimes as savages racially distinct from contemporary
Filipinos, and sometimes as great ancients. This paper investigates the range
of representations of non-Christian peoples of the Philippines in such writings,
looking particularly at: 1) the relationship drawn between pre-Hispanic and
contemporary peoples of the Philippines (both Catholic and non-Catholic), 2)
when a people is considered to be part of a “civilization” and when
it is not, 3) where and how “pre-history” is marked off from “history,” and
4) the “foreign” scholarly methods and authorities employed, and
how these are translated by the authors to the Spanish and Philippine contexts.
The paper relates these representations to Spanish and Filipino struggles over
colonial administration; legal and social status; and the racial, political,
and cultural boundaries of “Filipino.”
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