Tag: Philippines

A Typology of Filipino Women

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A review of Transpacific Feminities: The Making of the Modern Filipina, Denise Cruz, Duke University Press, 2012.

Transpacific feminitiesOrientalism grew out of a fascination with Asian women. From the scantily dressed harem recluse to the romantic Madame Butterfly figure, from the mousmé to the congaï, or from houri to geisha, the Western male gaze was literally obsessed by Asian female bodies, and constructed its vision of the Orient around figures of stereotyped female characters. Philippines’ women or Filipinas stood in a peculiar position with regard to these Orientalist wet dreams. They never fully fit the category of the Oriental woman as popularly conceived. Neither black nor yellow, the term used to describe her racial identity is “brown”. When traveling abroad, she is often taken for a Chinese, a Vietnamese, an Indonesian, an Indian, a Mexican, or a South American. Even now, mentioning Filipinas in a Western context brings to mind images of overseas care workers, domestic helpers, mail-order brides, or leading politicians such as the flamboyant Imelda Marcos or the stubborn Cory Aquino. Filipinas never coalesce around one single category. They escape the attempt to hold them as representative exhibits of an Asian feminity that would define a distinct type of Orientalist fantasy. As domestic workers, they cultivate invisibility and diligence. As politicians and heads of state, they embody leadership and prominence. As mail-order brides, what is conspicuous about them is not their sex-appeal but their subservient attitude and willingness to do household chores or sustain a family in depleted rural areas. There seems to be no middle ground or common features between these polarized figures. None evokes the sexual desires, eroticism, and male fantasies that otherwise characterize Orientalist visions of Asian bodies.

Racial constructions

Unsuccessful attempts to reduce Filipinas to a single stereotype are not new. Categories to designate them were always plural. In the Spanish colonial era filipino had referred to Spanish creoles, those of Spanish ancestry born in the colony, while indios were the locals of Malay ancestry. The term mestizo could refer to someone of Spanish and indio birth but more often meant a racial mixture with indio and chino or Chinese elements. Non-Christian peoples like the Negritos and Igorots, who lived in the highlands, were considered as infieles, that is, animists or infidels, and their hunter-gatherer societies were held as most backward and primitive. Muslim peoples in the South were grouped under the category Moros or Moors, and were in perpetual conflict with the Spaniards. These ethnic categories gave rise to enduring types of Filipino women: the Spanish mestiza, the pure-blood morena, the Sinicized chinita, the dark-skinned negrita… Americans who took over from Spain after 1898 added their own racial constructions to this imperial mix. The “Filipino savage” who went bare-breasted and wore a banana-leaf skirt was seen as a nonwhite other whose alterity incorporated imaginaries cast from the conquest of the New World, the annihilation of Indian native cultures, and the legacy of African slavery in America. The Spanish-speaking Doña was perceived as aristocratic, virtuous, dutiful, and subservient, forever in the thrall of the Catholic Church. The modern Filipino girl was the most amenable to the rule of empire: she benefited from access to enlightened education, transatlantic mobility, and emancipatory sisterhood with white women. She was the young lady waiting for a chivalric savior, and cultural salvation was what Americans intended to procure under their policy of benevolent assimilation.

Denise Cruz’s Transpacific Feminities explores many topics and episodes: the typologies that were made by Filipinos and Filipinas themselves in the context of the discussions leading to female suffrage in 1937; the exclusion of women from the national debates about proper language for literary expression; the emergence of the urban, transpacific college girl who flouted traditional forms of proper feminine behavior; the challenge posed by Japanese occupation that cast women as victims or, in the case of ‘Colonel Yay’, as freedom fighters; and the role of transpacific Filipinas in the Cold War context. The figure of Maria Clara, the heroin of José Rizal’s novel Noli Me Tangere, casts a long shadow over the place of women in Philippine society. Recognized by many literary scholars as the first novel by a Filipino, this satire of Spanish imperialism was written in Spanish and published in Germany in 1887 to avoid censorship. It tells the story of a failed romance between Maria Clara and Crisóstomo Ibarra, a mestizo who returns to the Philippines after years abroad with a European education and a desire to spread reform by establishing a new school in his hometown. Ibarra’s school never materializes, for he becomes implicated in both familial and revolutionary plots that interrupt his ambitious plans and end his engagement to Maria Clara. After more twists and turns, the heroin enters a convent, where nuns are subjected to medieval treatment. This female character has become a classic figure in Filipino culture. For some, she represented everything a Filipina should be: modest and chaste, homebound and subservient. For others, she was the epitome of a dying tradition, symbolic of the shackles of Spanish catholic rule. Her mestiza status is unsettled by a horrible secret: she is the illegitimate daughter of a Spanish friar who abused his mother and then became the girl’s godfather. Noli Me Tangere (“touch me not” in Latin) has become part of the national curriculum, and in its English or Tagalog versions it is still compulsory reading for high school students.

Desiring subjects of empire

Filipinas were thought to be more amenable to the civilizing influence of the United States than men. American women in particular cast themselves as saviors and emancipators of their oppressed “little sisters” and described them as symbols of oppressed women in need of rescue. Domestic authors developed a critique of the American-produced constructs of Filipino feminity as desiring subjects of empire. As an alternative, they promoted a version of elite transpacific feminity that drew from the best of multiple worlds. Commentators took great care to distinguish their fellow countrywomen from Orientalized notions of Asian women as either mysterious and exotic damsels or as uncivilized savages in need of salvation by the West. In their view, model Filipinas maintained an ideal balance between the modern and the traditional, between East and West, and between Anglo-saxon, Latin, and native cultures. They resisted the imperial project of assimilation and maintained a kind a counter-narrative to rising American hegemony. But justifying resistance and autonomy by using the English language came dangerously close to accepting the legitimacy of U.S. rule. The role of English in an independent Philippines republic was vehemently debated in the 1930s and 1940s. Colonial languages were hegemonic, as English was seen as the new lingua franca of the intelligentsia and Spanish was still used in legal proceedings and worldly conversations.  In 1937, Tagalog was instituted as the national language but still had to compete with many vernacular languages and dialects regularly used by the Philippines population. For writers, using English was a means to join a transpacific commonwealth of educated readers and writers; but they could not escape a nagging sense that the literature they were producing was disconnected from the socioeconomic realities of life in the Philippines. As in other national contexts, a separation emerged between ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature, between ‘popular’ and ‘artistic’ writing that tended to overlap the distinction between English and Tagalog. But even though women were early producers of literature in English, male authors tended to sideline them in their debates about language and literature, and they portrayed women’s literary efforts as inferior and unremarkable. To the misogynist essay “What Is Wrong With Our Women Writers?”, two feminist authors responded in 1941 with an article titled “Our Men Writers Are Not So Hot.” The emerging canon of literature in English that emerged from these early years comprises mostly male authors: Manuel Arguilla, Bienvenido N. Santos, Nick Joaquin, Carlos Bulosan, N.V.M. Gonzales… But women writers were nowhere to be found in this roster of national literature in English.

The rise of the university-educated, Western-influenced, transpacific Filipino coed ushered a debate what it meant to be Filipina in an independent Philippines and how it related to the new constitution and universal suffrage. Three decades of occupation by the United States had provided educational and professional opportunities for many Filipinas, who fell under the spell of American culture’s influence. Young Filipina coeds imitated what they read in magazine pages and saw on movie screens: bobbed hair, short skirts, plucked eyebrows, painted lips. Modern girls were by this time a global regularity, appearing almost simultaneously in China, Japan, India, the United States, Great Britain, and other countries. Like her counterparts, the transpacific Filipina coed elicited both admiration and anxiety. Transgressive expressions of sexuality—going out without the supervision of a chaperone, dancing cheek-to-cheek and kissing in public—gave rise to attempts to stop the influx of popular culture from the United States and delineate women’s proper role. Scathing articles blamed the coed for the disintegration of Philippine morality. By reply, Filipina feminists called for recognition of educated women’s contribution to families, to communities and to society as a whole. Novels and short stories were used to negotiate unclear and indeterminate national fates and recalibrate a class hierarchy that was continuously fluctuating because of imperial shifts. Romance was the genre of choice to disseminate imperial narratives of benevolent assimilation and imagine the subversion of hegemonic formations. It was linked both to empire building and to its undoing by nationalist forces and individual aspirations.

Creating a national archive in English

Denise Cruz’s approach to her topic is very much dependent on the material she selects as her archive. She draws from a wide variety of sources—novels, memoirs, essays, newspaper articles, magazine illustrations—but, with the exception of José Rizal’s Spanish language novel Noli Me Tangere, she only uses texts written in English. She notes that authors were publishing in English only two decades after the U.S. occupation began, and that women were particularly active in this field because of the educational opportunities that were created by the American occupation. What defines the transpacific Filipino is, more than any social or psychological trait, the use of English in a cosmopolitan setting. The writers examined in this book were part of a privileged group, those who lived in Manila, who had access to a university education, who travelled abroad, and who spoke and read English. Promoting the use of English was an integral part of the American imperial project. The Japanese were highly conscious of this point, and severely restricted publications in English during their short-lived occupation. Philippines literature in English was the product of a deliberate design to spread liberal values and democratic mores through education and assimilation. Instruction in English, the establishment of English as the national language, and opportunities to study in the United States were part of this imperial design. The use of language itself as a strategy for rule was closely tied with the packaging of the American presence in the Philippines as a magnanimous civilizing enterprise. By choosing English to couch on paper their dreams, hopes and aspirations, these Filipino women examined in Transpacific Feminities transformed themselves willingly into the desiring subjects that the American empire was attempting to mold.

Isn’t there a similar work at play in today’s world? As the author notes, the recognition of the United States as an empire has now become a regular feature of academic discourse. But the notion of cultural imperialism still faces much resistance or denial, and the fact that the English language constitutes the main tool for this imperial hegemony is often overlooked. By choosing to restrict her archive to texts written in English and by examining the case of English-speaking Filipina authors, Denise Cruz partakes in in a new kind of imperial project that does not bear its name. Transpacific feminities are reduced to those forms of women’s expression that are directly accessible to an English language reader. These women may have spoken multiple languages, from the old colonial Spanish to the new national Tagalog, or from French and German to Cantonese, Japanese, as well as other domestic dialects, but they are only considered within the limitation of one single parameter: their use of English as a mean of written expression. Other idioms indigenous to the Philippines or used in worldly conversations are silenced and relegated to the margins. The United States considered themselves as the gatekeeper of women’s liberation in their empire; in a way, Anglo-American academics still play this role by deciding which texts should be worthy of archival consideration and which should be left in perpetual oblivion.

Literary value

The author of Transpacific Feminities boasts of having recovered an untapped archive of Philippines literature in English that has remained hitherto forgotten and understudied. Merging archive recovery with feminist analysis, she advocates additions to an Asia Pacific literary cannon that, at least for the period under consideration, is (in her opinion) too often limited to male nationalist authors. But one could object that these texts written in English were not abundant and sophisticate enough to sustain a national literary tradition. Readership in English was reduced to a small segment of the elite. This may explain why Filipino authors often tried to reach out beyond their country’s shores. Many publications were edited by expatriates and geared in part toward the American community. The goal was to convince the American public to share the benefits of empire, or to grant the Philippines the independence and individual rights for which its people craved. Including new archives into a cannon or a reading list should include considerations of literary value and intrinsic quality. But as far as I can judge from the few excerpts and plot summaries, the literary fictions that are surveyed in this book seem to me of appalling mediocrity. I subscribe to the judgment of a critic who characterized a novel by Felicidad Ocampo as “an entertaining little tale, providing he does not read it with too critical an attitude.” Besides, Daniele Cruz is the first to point out that the language used in these stories was often deficient. By inserting the editing term “sic” in bracketed form in many direct quotes from the texts, she underscores the misusage of English and improper spelling or grammar in a way that can only be read as patronizing. Filipino and Filipina authors who tried their best to use the language of empire didn’t need to be exposed to such ignominy. As a non-native speaker, I sympathize with their plight.

Making the World Safe for Tourism in Asia-Pacific

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A review of Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai’i and the Philippines, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Duke University Press, 2013.

Securing ParadiseWhen she was a little girl growing up in the Philippines, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez considered American tourists and soldiers that she encountered or heard about as a benevolent presence. They were there to protect the land and to share their riches with a people in need of security and prosperity. This positive image was reinforced by the missionary schools founded by Americans, the remittances sent from abroad by relatives, the proceeds from commerce and military bases, and the endless stream of American movies and serials flowing from television. Later on, when her family emigrated to the United States, she would accompany her father to the Douglas MacArthur Memorial in Norfolk, Virginia, and share the gratitude held by many Filipinos for the general who liberated their country from Japanese occupation. For her, America was still the land of the free, a beacon of hope and opportunity for those seeking a better life beyond their own shores. But then she went to study at UC Berkeley and her worldview changed. She learned about the history of American imperialism, the gruesome stories of the Philippines-American war, the propaganda machine of Cold War politics, the complicity with authoritarian regimes, the destruction of the planet by the forces of neoliberalism, and the cynicism of exploitative raw power. Her homeland, the Philippines, became associated with the image of a puppet regime led by a dictator clinging to power with the backing of the US military. She applied the same critical lenses to the state of Hawaii and its populations after the was nominated as Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. For her, the Hawaiian archipelago was forced into the American fold at the end of the nineteenth century by a coalition of military imperialists, colonial planters, and migrant laborers who relegated the natives to subordinary status and even to cultural extinction. Being herself a nonnative in an adopted homeland, Vernadette Gonzalez purports to speak on behalf of the Native Hawaiians who should, however implausible it may sound, reclaim their sovereignty.

In the introduction, the author asks: “What alchemy transforms the terror of imperial violence and American postwar occupation to deeply felt understandings of American rescue, liberation, and benevolence?” One could raise the opposite question: how did a young girl raised in the spirit of America’s gentle embrace turn against a familiar presence and came to see it as a force of evil? How to explain this complete reversal, and what turned her from a believer of American kind-heartedness into a staunch critic of US malignity? Was it her studies in social sciences at UC Berkeley? And why did she choose to study at this university in the first place? Although she doesn’t give any biographical clues, I see three general reasons for this conversion: history, ideology, affect. These factors work both ways: the same historical, ideological and affective formations that explain Filipinos’ conversion to a myth of American compassionate guardianship also explain the anger, resentment, and challenge to the United States’ past and present imperial role. In a reversion of values, the soldier and the tourist can be seen alternatively as the Good American or the Ugly Yankee. Like a Janus-faced figure, the two characters are one and the same. He can be invited by his hosts to come home as a guest or, in the same movement, told to go home and depart. Thinking about tourism and militarism in Hawaii and the Philippines allows Vernadette Gonzalez to vent her anger against US imperialism past and present, and also to disavow the young girl who held hands with her father in American Pacific War memorials. In Securing Paradise, she applies critical lenses to analyze the history, ideology and affects sustaining the “military-tourism security complex” in the Philippines and in Hawaii.

Tourists and soldiers

In a way, the tourism industry is the opposite of militarization. Tourism is a peaceful activity, and tourists don’t go to war zones or to places exposed to the risk of insecurity. Unlike the soldier, the tourist doesn’t engage in violent or threatening behavior. He brings with him a camera, not a gun, and leaves behind dollars and trinkets, not bullets and explosives. The tourist is more often a ‘she’ than a ‘he’: a softer, warmer version of America’s presence in the tropics that stands in stark contrast to the masculine figure of oppression and threat. For Vernadette Gonzalez, the desires and economies of modern tourism are central to American military dominance in Asia and the Pacific. Tourism and militarism are mutually constitutive: both are part of am American project of domination and imperial outreach, and Hawaii and the Philippines form the first line of this concentric projection of power and sentiments. The roots and routes of the US military in these sites are foundational to tourist itineraries and imaginations. Tourism normalizes the presence of the military, prioritizes its needs, and disseminates a racialized and gendered idea of security. Both militarism and tourism rely on sedimented notions of colonized land and people (especially women) as waiting idly for their arrival, passively there for the taking. In many places, tourism has its roots in the militarized “rest and recreation” industry that thrived in the periphery of war theaters. The security that military bases provide is a fiction that starkly contrasts the reality of sexual exploitation and social insecurity that develops in the vicinity of army camps. The male tourist and the soldier both harbor voyeuristic and violent fantasies and usually turn their gaze against the bodies of women. For the author, many modern tourist sites are tainted by the illicit sexual economies and violence produced in rest and recreation sites of military occupation.

“Militourism” is designed as the activity fusing the two activities of militarism and tourism: making historic battlefields fit for tourism, creating memorials and museums to commemorate past military engagements, displaying military presence as a guarantee of security for foreign holidaymakers, or attracting active military personnel and retired soldiers to beach resorts and scenic sites. It also involves transforming former military bases into vacation sites and other sources of economic revenue, or building dual-use facilities and infrastructures such as scenic highways or helicopter landing platforms. In Asia and the Pacific, these “militourisms” take place on terrains that have long felt the impact of being objects of imperial desire. The first touristic explorations and adventures in the Pacific also doubled as military reconnaissance and imperial prospection. The image of the tropics as paradise was instrumental in justifying a policy of land grabbing and imperial expansion; it also served to lure young soldiers enrolling in overseas tours of duty. The world of the soldier and that of the tourist are often one and the same. The business of tourism benefits from the high drama of war: places like Pearl Harbor remain popular because war is at the core of America’s past and present identity. Likewise, the US military benefits from the glorification of American cultures of war that occurs in sites memorializing past military engagements. Gonzalez describes the activities of “remembering Pearl Harbor” at the USS Arizona Memorial or “playing soldier” on former US training grounds in  Subic Bay as emotional labor: the labor that it takes to shape a national myth that is instrumental to Hawaiian dispossession and to the Philippines’s subordination.

History, ideology, affect

History is at the heart of people’s ambivalent attitudes towards the United States. The history of Hawaii and of the Philippines can be told in two very different ways: one eliciting sympathy and hope, the other criticism and grief. One reason for the adherence to the myth of American benevolence in the Pacific is that its believers are served with a rosy picture of history. And one reason for their conversion to the message of “Yankee Go Home” is that they come into contact with a very different story. It is this black book of misery and sorrow that Gonzalez presents to her readers. As she notes, Hawaii before the annexation by the United States was a sovereign kingdom that was undergoing struggles for internal unification and also fighting off external attempts on its autonomy. Massive population decline following the arrival of European explorers and sailors had produced conditions for exploitation, dispossession, and cultural ethnocide. A coalition formed by white plantation owners, missionary elites, and the US Navy collaborated to roll back native sovereignty with the Bayonet Constitution of 1887, the overthrow of the monarchy in 1893, and the annexation of the islands in 1898, creating America’s first foothold in the Pacific. This history is paralleled by America’s expansion westwards and its collusion with the Spanish empire in the Philippines. The Spanish-American War of 1898 was soon followed by the Philippine-American War, a nasty and brutish conflict in which torture was used against the native insurgents. This brought the Philippines into the American fold, and allowed the US Navy to strengthen its presence in the Pacific. Indeed, Hawaii and the Philippines would share linked fates as part of the American chain of garrison islands.

American tourists and soldiers are served a version of history that stands in stark contrast with the unofficial narrative told in Securing Paradise. They visit landmark sites and museums that present a sanitized version of the United States’ imperial expansion in the Pacific. America’s presence in the Philippines is retold as a story of rescue, liberation, and sharing of riches. The US administration of the Philippines, from 1898 to 1946, and the period following the annexation when Hawaii became a US Territory, from 1989 to 1959, are characterized as a progressive era during which the United States implemented a benign and modern form of stewardship. The authorities undertook a slate of reforms, hygiene, education, and economic projects that uplifted the population and created sympathy even among former insurgents. For example, in the Philippines, the military took on projects such as road building and land clearing to rehabilitate its public relations, substituting promises of constructive colonialism and economic development to its recent history of brutality and oppression. But it is the Pacific War that sealed the fate of these two territories and anchored them in the grand narrative of the United States’ national history. For the American public, Hawaii and the Philippines remain forever associated with Pearl Harbor, Corregidor, and the Bataan Death March. The enduring narratives of masculine sacrifice and heroism in World War II constitute the framing through which the two archipelagos are imagined and understood. This history is made visible and concrete through memorial sites and scenic circuits that have become a magnet for tourists. In these sites, visitors pay their respects to the dead, take part in rituals of remembering, and celebrate a bond of brotherhood with American soldiers, sealed with blood and anchored in Cold War rhetoric. Pilgrimage to historical military sites is not the preserve of American tourists or local visitors: even Japanese tourists are invited to “Remember Pearl Harbor” or to discover Corregidor as the “Island of Valor, Peace, and International Understanding.” For the author, the fetishization of December 7 overwrites January 17, 1893—the day the Kingdom of Hawaii was overthrown and its native population dispossessed.

Neoliberalism and neoliberation

The second factor that has the strength to induce positive or negative attitudes towards the United States is ideology. For Gonzalez, militarism and tourism in Asia-Pacific embody the ideologies of neoliberalism and what she calls neoliberation. Since the departure of the US military from the Philippines, Subic Bay and Clark Base have been transformed into special economic zones under public-private partnerships and now operate as commercial and tourist hubs integrated into global circuits of capital, labor, and commerce. The “post-base” era has not put an end to military cooperation between the US and the Philippines: on the contrary, US forces benefit from an advantageous Visiting Forces Agreement, they participate in joint training operation with their Filipino counterparts, and they are at the vanguard of the fight against Muslim extremist groups the southern region of Mindanao. The US Army left the Philippines through the door and came back through the window of opportunity provided by the fight against terror. Just as the war theaters of the Pacific War were transformed into symbols of liberation from Japanese occupation and fraternal collaboration between Filipino and American soldiers, the discourse of neoliberation transforms the exploitative economies of predatory capital and imperial outreach into narratives of security and shared prosperity. American military occupation and economic hegemony are cast in the same heroic light that fuses the twin ideologies of neoliberalism and neoliberation. The “return” of the base properties to the Philippines are presented as evidence of American generosity; meanwhile, the American military continues to occupy and tour the Philippines, and foreign capital, bolstered by the structural adjustment policies dictated by the Bretton Woods institutions, benefit from zero taxation and rampant violation of basic labor rights in the Special Economic Zones.

Or at least this is how Vernadette Gonzalez presents it, based on her own biased ideology and slanted perspective in which the United States is cast as the villain and its policies as conspirational schemes to maintain neocolonial influence over its dominion. This is, in a way, a missed opportunity: because beyond the Pavlovian denunciation of neoliberalism as evil, Securing Paradise raises many important economic issues. There is indeed an economic case to be made about the links between militarism and tourism. Both activities stem from certain comparative advantages and resource endowments, like having a long and accessible coastal line to build bases and resorts. Both generate rents and drive domestic prices up, giving rise to a particular version of the Dutch disease. Both military bases and tourism resorts may be the only viable economic sectors in territories that are otherwise too far away from centers of capitalistic concentration. There are complementarities between the two activities, as when the soldier goes on vacation as a tourist or when tourism is made safe by the presence of soldiers. But there are also contradictions, especially when the local population becomes more educated and more prosperous than the soldiers posted in their midst. Beyond a certain threshold, tourism development holds more promises than military build-up. When they are consulted about their own destiny, local populations will aspire to transform their territories into islands of peace, as opposed to hosting bases of discontent. But these issues of territorial specialization and economic reasoning are not raised in this book. Instead, the author adheres to a primitive notion of economics-as-witchcraft, with neoliberalism as dark magic and the Bretton Woods institutions as wicked witches. I don’t know where Vernadette Gonzalez got her economics, but it’s certainly not from UC Berkeley’s economic faculty. Even the variant known as international political economy, taught in political science departments and exerting some influence on literary scholars, has more consideration for basic facts and logical explanations than her casual treatment of economic factors.

Combat boots clamping and digital cameras clicking in Asia-Pacific

A conversion is always an affective turn: from love and attachment to abhorrence and alienation, from warm feelings of joy and happiness to dark motives of grievance and hate. Sometimes this reversal of sentiments can be triggered by a traumatic experience or a dreadful event: as when a story of rape and sexual aggression by soldiers or tourists turn the local population against any foreign presence. For Vernadette Gonzalez, the defining moment may have been provided by the image of President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda leaving the Malacañan Palace and fleeing the country in US army aircrafts after having been ousted by the people. She also describes a traumatic scene that happened to her shortly after September 11, when she was faced with the barrel of a gun for having committed a small breach of security protocol in a tourist resort. For her, tourism and violence are intimately intertwined. In the eyes of local authorities and American strategists, tourists’ safety and comfort take precedence over the needs and aspirations of the local population. The US military wants to make the world safe for tourism. It prioritizes certain forms of mobility and border-crossing at the detriment of others. As a result it makes the world more insecure, not less, and exposes local populations to new risks and insecurities. Although Vernadette Gonzalez doesn’t explicitly formulate policy recommendations, the solutions that can be inferred from the author’s presentation should be resolutely de-colonial: let the US forces go home for good this time, severe the ties of dependance and domination that bind local populations and indigenous peoples in exploitative conditions, reclaim the sovereignty of native right-holders and democratic representatives, protect the environment from the encroachment of army bases and tourist resorts, and bring an end to the tourism industry’s deleterious influence on the social fabric of host nations.

One may or may not agree with these solutions; but they appear to me as severely out of sync with the present geopolitical situation in Asia-Pacific. As the author herself acknowledges, the region is increasingly becoming more insecure; and the blame cannot be put solely on the presence of US forces, less even so on the continuous flow of American tourists. Any person who has travelled in the region can attest that the majority of tourists are no longer Americans or Europeans. These new tourists, who may be followed by soldiers as in the previous historical sequences described for Hawaii and for the Philippines, bring with them different dreams and aspirations, and interact with local populations and the environment in different forms and modalities. They too are looking for a paradise to cherish and to hold, but their version of heaven is based on different cultural and political assumptions. (For a local version of the mix between militarism, exoticism and affect, I recommend the 2016 Korean drama series Descendants of the Sun and its local adaptations by Vietnamese and by Chinese television.) One should lend an ear to the growing sounds of army boots and tourist crowds in Asia and the Pacific: are they harbingers of a new era when the digital camera will prevail over the machine gun, or will they repeat past experiences on a larger and more devastating scale? This is why I find books such as Securing Paradise useful: they allow readers who come to them with an unjaundiced eye to enter the fabrique of sentiments, and they enable us to envision a future that may not be determined solely by militarized tourism and the touring of armies on and off duty.

Imperialism and its Afterlife in the Philippines

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A review of White Love and Other Events in Filipino History, Vicente L. Rafael, Duke University Press, 2000.

Vicente RafaelIs America an empire? The standard view among conservative historians is that the United States only embraced imperialism with the Spanish-American War, and that this represented an aberration from the otherwise democratic trajectory of the nation. These same historians further argue that the imperial interventions of the United States, especially in the Philippines, were far more benign and progressive than its European counterparts. Taking over the Philippines Islands in 1898 was described, in official accounts at the time and in subsequent hagiographies, as an altruistic act motivated by America’s concern for the natives’ welfare. Whereas European empires were concerned with carving the world for themselves and extending their sphere of influence, America occupied the Philippines to fill the void left by Spain and to steer the still immature nation towards a course of self-government and independence. US colonialism in the Philippines was rhetorically driven by what President McKinley had referred to as “benevolent assimilation,” whereby the “earnest and paramount aim” of the colonizer was that of “winning the confidence, respect and affection” of the colonized. Even the armed conflict between the First Republic of the Philippines and the United States that lasted from early 1899 to mid-1902 and that cost the life of more than 200,000 Filipino insurgents and civilians was “characterized by humanity and kindness to the prisoner and noncombatant.” War and occupation were manifestations of “white love,” an act of compassion and altruism that emanated from American exceptionalism. If Filipino insurgents were killed, sometimes tortured, it was for their own good, and because they somehow requested it.

America’s deadly embrace

For proof of the deadly nature of America’s imperial embrace, one needs to look no further than to the images of piled corpses lining roads and the close-up photographs of dead insurgents taken during the Philippines-American War. Photographs of war dead date back to the American Civil War and have come to signify the irreducible essence of war’s horrible truth. But these images of dead Filipino bodies piled upon another inaugurate another series, one which ends with Abu Ghraib and that signifies the obscene power of the United States over death itself. These are not noble dead that are meant to be remembered and honored: they are mere lives taken away by a biopolitical state that has the ability to make live and let die. Death pinned down and made visible Filipino fighters that were otherwise so elusive for American army troops in a guerrilla warfare based on sporadic engagements and ambushes. These old historical photos are painful to watch: dead bodies are lying in distorted fashion, with members at protruding angles, faces turned away, clothes soiled with mud. But perhaps the most painful scene for modern viewers is to see the American soldiers looking over the aligned corpses, taking poses like big-game hunters over their booty. These pictures, along with the news of atrocities committed by US forces—the torching of villages, the killing of prisoners—came as a shock for a part of American public opinion at the time they were published in local newspapers. In particular, many Americans were puzzled by the news, in 1902, that United States soldiers were torturing Filipinos with water. The “water cure”, of which gruesome pictures were also published, involved pouring water down the throat of a prisoner so that the man would swell like a toad and suffer excruciating pain. During public hearings, Governor-General William Howard Taft justified the practice by pointing to “some rather amusing instances” in which, he maintained, Filipinos had invited torture. Eager to share intelligence with the Americans, but needing a plausible cover, these Filipinos, in Taft’s recounting, had presented themselves and “said they would not say anything until they were tortured.” In many cases, it appeared, American forces had been only too happy to oblige them.

If further proof needs to be given of America’s imperial nature, it can also be found in the narratives of colonial domesticity sent home by the wives and daughters of US officials administering the islands, or in the photographs of tribesmen and racialized members of ethnic groups that illustrate the 1905 publication of the census. Women from the United States writing from the Philippines during the first decade of American rule exhibit the same racial prejudices and sense of moral superiority as the female representatives of European neighboring empires, concerned as they were with upholding middle-class respectability amid what they perceived as the barbarism of a colonized people. In tracing their remarks about the natural landscape, colonial house, and the behavior of native servants, the modern reader can see how they dealt with the imperatives of domesticity outside the domestic sphere they were used to. Colonial domesticity in the tropics heralded the conjugation of whiteness with feminity as a sign of public entitlement as well as a source of private ambivalence. As women, these writers invariably stood in an uneasy relationship to the masculinized sphere of empire, being both domineering over (male and female) locals and submitted to the masculine authority of their husbands and fathers. Helen Taft, the wife of the Governor-General, writes of going to places where “white women were still novelty, and I’m sure we looked much more peculiar to them as they did to us.” As for the census, it was, as students of empires have shown in other historical settings, a powerful technique of domination and surveillance that made visible the subjects of colonization within the borders of the occupied state. The language of benevolent assimilation was no different from the doctrines of other colonial powers at the time: rather than merely govern colonial territories, empires had a “civilizing mission” that would allegedly bring Western values to backward peoples and that justified armed action against any form of opposition.

The afterlife of empires

The afterlife of empires in the Philippines manifests itself in many ways. The term Filipino itself first designated the sons and daughters of Spanish parents born in Las Islas Filipinas, while the natives were designated as Indios and the persons of Chinese ancestry as Tsinoys or Sangleys. Spanish was the language in which the late nineteenth-century nationalist figures expressed their sense of the nation. It remained the language of choice among Filipino elites well into the twentieth century, and was used in colonial courts and the colonial legislature until the eve of the Pacific War. Hence, for the prewar Filipino elites, class identity and national consciousness continued to be expressed in Spanish, while English remained a relatively new and foreign language with which one “spoke up” to the source of imperial authority. The politics of language bears the imprint of different layers of rule, resistance, and collaboration. For Vicente Rafael, the relative foreignness of English among the national elite at the time of the Japanese occupation helps to explain the nature of the collaborationist rhetoric and the facility in which Filipino leaders were able to retrospectively separate their intentions from their words. Speaking in English to praise the Japanese emperor and the greater East Asia co-prosperity sphere meant they were using someone else’s words to express someone else’s ideas. The art of disguise and travesty extended beyond language: Vicente Rafael’s book carries a wonderful photo of Don Mariano Ponce, a Filipino nationalist sent to Japan to plead the cause of independence in 1898, dressed in a traditional kimono while the young Sun Yat-sen, sitting next to him, wears a Western suit. What is startling about this photograph is the manner in which it reproduces the uncanny permeability of emergent nationalist identities at this time. It was as if nation-building was a game of cross-dressing, for which both Japan and the West could provide the outside appearance.

Disguise and cross-dressing extended beyond the colonial era. White Love carries a reproduction of a painting figuring Ferdinand Marcos as the mythic figure of Malakas, showing his nude athletic body emerging from a forest of bamboo stalks. Imelda Marcos similarly had herself portrayed as Maganda, the feminine figure of the ancient Philippine creation myth. Politics in the Philippines was heavily sexualized. Imelda was Ferdinand’s “secret weapon”: she helped him convert politics into spectacle, and his rule into patronage. Acting together on the stage at political rallies, they turned their private lives into public spectacles, staging a stylized version of their intimacy. The eleven-day courtship in Bagiou was made into legend, and the passionate devotion to his wife of the erstwhile philanderer served his political career as much as his own physical charm and stentor voice. The term that came to designate her, the bomba star, also referred to a wave of soft-core pornography in print media and movies that swept the Philippines during this period. Bomba movies often featured the rape of a woman; but their commercial success was also a story of female ambition and boldness, and nobody exemplified this drive better than Imelda Marcos. Seeing her in her signature terno dress with butterfly sleeves as in the hyperrealist painting of Claudio Bravo summons a life removed from the world of politics and imbued with a dreamlike quality. But, as Vicente Rafael reminds us, these stagings took place over a backdrop of political assassinations, student protests, and the imposition of martial law. Consigned outside the structures of political institutions, youths took to the streets in a movement that offered an alternative to existing conceptions of authority and submission.

Discarding the epic in favor of the episodic

Vicente Rafael emerged from this generation of unruly students under authoritarian rule. He received his B.A. in history and philosophy from Ateneo de Manila University in 1977 and then moved to the US to get his Ph.D. in history at Cornell University in 1984. He writes from a position within US academia, a position halfway between the disciplinary tradition of area studies, which focuses on nation-states and remains tainted by its Cold War origins, and the more loosely defined discipline of cultural studies, which is more attuned to our present era of globalization and mixed identities. Vicente Rafael distances himself from nationalist historiography, which tells the grand narrative of the Philippines as a replay of the Passion of the Christ—the suffering, death, and resurrection of the Filipino nation. He doesn’t offer an epic story of imperialism, nationalism, and post-colonialism in which each event or character would find its place in an orderly fashion. Instead, he chooses to write in a minor mode that has antecedents in the work of cultural anthropologists probing colonial archives (such as Ann Stoler) or in the newspaper columns of cultural critics such as Ambeth Ocampo. The anthropologist working among historians, or the journalist among scholars, brings an attention to the mundane and to everyday details that are often omitted from more conventional narratives. To be sure, the author is well versed in the classic forms of history, and he refers to canonical works authored by Filipino and American scholars in the endnotes and the bibliography. But he doesn’t share their taste for chronologies, historical certitudes, and well-defined identities. He is more interested in minor episodes, literary rhetoric, and the shifting affiliations of transnational subjects. This is why, although Vicente Rafael’s departure from his homeland may have been linked to the political context of the dictator years that he chronicles in one chapter, he doesn’t write from a position of exile, as “exile brings to mind the epic possibilities of heroism and the longing for redemption for oneself and one’s people.”

According to Claude Levi-Strauss, “history organizes its data in relation to conscious expressions of social life, while anthropology proceeds by examining its unconscious foundations.” Vincent Rafael’s anthropological history is built upon unconscious material, and includes expressions such as rumors and desires that fall outside the purview of consciousness. The book draws from the archives bits and pieces of information that may have escaped the attention of the conventional historian but that, taken together, tell a story that complements in a minor mode the grand narratives of national history. It discards the epic in favor of the episodic. White Love and Other Events in Filipino History is composed of disparate elements that constitute an archive of the everyday: the punch cards of the national census; the letters sent home by the wives of US colonial officers; the dedications to loved ones written on the back of photographic portraits; the formulaic speeches delivered by collaborators during the Japanese occupation; the commissioned portraits of the presidential couple; the satirical cartoons of Nonoy Marcelo written in Taglish; the movie stars instantly recognizable by a mass public; the figure of the bakla, the petit bourgeois male homosexual; etc. These miscellanea are the foam of empires and nations, like the shells carried by the tide and left to rest on the seashore. They operate under the level of consciousness to reveal the most intimate thoughts of past figures and to alter our representations of history in subtle ways. Listening to these seashells, lending an ear to the echo they make, conveys an image of the ocean that is as valid as a photo picture or a text description.