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Alfred McCoy's absorbing, magisterial study exposes the dark side of the entanglement of the Philippines and the United States that began in 1898 and continues to this day. In the early years of the entanglement, new ideas about counter-insurgency, surveillance and policing on a national scale were introduced by the US Army, understandably more concerned with putting down resistance and establishing order than with allowing civil liberties to flourish. McCoy argues persuasively that these half-baked repressive ideas and practices, created to aid a fledgling colonial endeavor, have been central elements of Philippine governance ever since.
Repressive policies, of course, characterize all colonial encounters and many of them persist after independence. McCoy goes on to argue, however, that when the notions of national policing, surveillance and counter-insurgency were first introduced in the Philippines, they were unfamiliar, and would have been unwelcome in the United States. He shows how they migrated to America under Woodrow Wilson, whose regime was eager to enforce internal security during and after World War I. A colonial experiment, in other words, became part of the colonial power's own repressive arsenal at home and abroad, just as it did in the independent Philippines, under a series of pro-American regimes. One outcome of the colonial encounter, McCoy convincingly suggests, was a pair of closely allied, heavily policed surveillance states.
Policing America's Empire is a passionate, elegantly written book that owes its mastery to McCoy's narrative and analytical gifts, his years of painstaking research and his sure sense of the ominous global implications of his story.
Selection Committee: David Chandler (Chair), Barbara Watson Andaya, Charles Keyes, Nancy Peluso.
According to Heonik Kwon, Vietnam teems with ghosts. The ones that fill this absorbing, fastidious and poignant book are for the most part those of men and women who died in the wars that ravaged central Vietnam, the site of Kwon’s fieldwork, between 1946 and 1975. The bodies of perhaps a million such people, nationwide, have never been recovered, and while those who died fighting on the so-called “American” side have never been honored or recognized by the Vietnamese state, those who fought on the winning side have been given heroic status and, where possible, heroes’ burials. The state, in other words, has denied hundreds of thousands of ghosts their right to exist as objects of reverence by their descendants. In this way, the state has tried—without much success, Kwon tells us—to extend Cold War animosities into the ambiguous and ironically more humane world of the dead.
Ghosts of War in Vietnam is finely tuned and economically written. In fewer than 200 pages it still finds room to display the longing, reverence, and inventiveness of survivors and allows us to hear a series of extended, post mortem comments delivered through spirit mediums by the dead.
Building on his powerful earlier work about popular memory and the My Lai massacre, Heonik Kwon’s new book masterfully demonstrates his skills as a participant observer, as he guides us through present-day Vietnam and into the other worlds that exist, unseen to us, inside the spirits of its people.
Selection Committee: David Chandler (Chair); Barbara Andaya; Charles Keyes; Rita Smith Kipp.
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