Julian Go. American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures in the Philippines and Puerto Rico during U. S. Colonialism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008, xi + 377p (original) (raw)
Related papers
Prologue: Pasts and Futures of E. San Juan, Jr
Kritika Kultura, 2016
In this synthetic introductory essay, I consider the places of E. San Juan, Jr. as gleaned from the contributions to this special section: from San Juan's childhood in Manila and early education at the University of the Philippines at a time when veterans of the 1898 Revolution were still alive and peasant-based insurgency was on the rise; to his implicit contribution to the study of popular culture in the Philippines in the context of the emergence of nationalist struggle in the 1960s; to his turning point as a materialist literary critic who wrote the study on Bulosan which coincided with his own decision to stay in the United States; to his participation in anti-Marcos organizing as an exile devoted to the radical future of his homeland; to his maturation as a theorist of race and racism in American institutions of higher education; to his contributions to the development of Filipino Critical Theory and environmental activism; to his systematic critique of Western capitalist modernity as a major scholar from the Third World; and finally, to his attempt to vernacularize international solidarity. I argue that San Juan's body of work constitutes a decolonizing archive that records the unfulfilled projects of liberation struggles from the last century. I also suggest that such an archive is noteworthy because it reveals the direction of Third World revolutionary critique from decolonization to the crisis of globalization today.
LeRoy’s The Americans in the Philippines and the History of Spanish Rule in the Philippines
Philippine Studies Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints, 2013
Contents may not be copied or sent via email or other means to multiple sites and posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's written permission. Users may download and print articles for individual, noncommercial use only. However, unless prior permission has been obtained, you may not download an entire issue of a journal, or download multiple copies of articles.
The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America
History: Reviews of New Books, 2018
Osterhammel takes pains to nuance the oversimplified vision adopted by a good number of scholars and critics in the wake of Edward Said's massively influential Orientalism, published in 1978. While Clarke's complaint was that Said's book dealt little if at all with the "far" East (East Asia), Osterhammel's thesis rests less on geography than on the significant chronological distinction between the 18 th and 19 th centuries. In short, many European "orientalists" of the 18 th century, nurtured by the empiricism, humanism, "polycentric" cosmopolitanism, and (a better sort of) universalism of the European Enlightenment, took a balanced and, at times, a surprisingly positive view of Asia. This was a more positive conceptualization in its constituent parts and as a wholethough part of the argument is that the better critics avoided the temptation to offer generalizations about Asia or "the orient" (393-394). According to Osterhammel, this would change by the early 19 th century, when, for a number of complex reasons, the discourse about Asia became much more negative and simplified, colored by new ideas of racial hierarchy as well as a growing sense of the West's "manifest destiny" to subdue (and simultaneously "liberate") the world. And, he argues, we in the early twenty-first century still tend to read the entire history of East-West relations through 19 th-and 20 th-century Western "cultural imperialism" (and correspondent Asian cultural nationalisms). Osterhammel spends a fair number of pages discussing the concept of the "high" traveler, who, while appealing to "elevated outlooks and firmer principles", may in fact be the prototype for the 19 th-century colonist; i.e., one who aims to conquer new realms for science, religion, and civilization. And yet, Osterhammel wants to hold on to at least a few of these "high" travelers, such as Anquetil-Duperron (1731-1805), Carsten Niebuhr (1733-1815), the Comte de Volney (1757-1820)-as well as to "armchair theorists" such as Montesquieu (1689-1755), who is here praised as the "the creator of a general framework of a general social science" (386). These individuals, in his estimation, came closest to attaining the Enlightenment ideal of the "philosophical" observer (185-86). This is, then, a story of decline and, perhaps, also one of missed opportunities. And here the critic might raise some hackles, for Osterhammel verges on overstating his case, as important as it may be. In addition, by virtue of its detail, this book comes close to the "pointless prolixity that irritates the reader through a profusion of minutiae" lamented by one connoisseur of overseas travel literature (216). Having said that, the chapter on "Encounters" is, to this reader, the most poignant of the book, as when Osterhammel waxes lyrical on the "transcultural regularity of play" that helped in some cases to loosen the "entanglements of objective of casting "a light on the last decades of the Spanish Empire in North America and on the role of Spain in the American Revolutionary War by bringing to life the world of Bernardo de Gálvez" (8), there is hardly a central thesis in the study. The reader is thus responsible for interpreting the significance not only of many of Gálvez's actions but also, in the end, of his extraordinary life. An exploration of the 200 pages of endnotes explains this problem of exposition and methodology. The author draws most of his evidence from an impressive, painstaking review of practically all that has been written and published about Gálvez since the eighteenth century. Other authors' works drive the narrative of certain sections of the book, partially eclipsing Quintero Saravia's own voice and his equally impressive and valuable original research. Among the study's most interesting findings is that, early in his life, Gálvez became a sort of expert in North American Indian affairs, one who contributed to changes in imperial policies and regulations. On the whole, the specialist reader will find that this book has a lot to tell us about the Spanish Enlightenment, colonial administrative reform (the so-called Bourbon Reforms), imperial borderlands, and military history.
Journal of Arizona History, 2019
Osterhammel takes pains to nuance the oversimplified vision adopted by a good number of scholars and critics in the wake of Edward Said's massively influential Orientalism, published in 1978. While Clarke's complaint was that Said's book dealt little if at all with the "far" East (East Asia), Osterhammel's thesis rests less on geography than on the significant chronological distinction between the 18 th and 19 th centuries. In short, many European "orientalists" of the 18 th century, nurtured by the empiricism, humanism, "polycentric" cosmopolitanism, and (a better sort of) universalism of the European Enlightenment, took a balanced and, at times, a surprisingly positive view of Asia. This was a more positive conceptualization in its constituent parts and as a wholethough part of the argument is that the better critics avoided the temptation to offer generalizations about Asia or "the orient" (393-394). According to Osterhammel, this would change by the early 19 th century, when, for a number of complex reasons, the discourse about Asia became much more negative and simplified, colored by new ideas of racial hierarchy as well as a growing sense of the West's "manifest destiny" to subdue (and simultaneously "liberate") the world. And, he argues, we in the early twenty-first century still tend to read the entire history of East-West relations through 19 th-and 20 th-century Western "cultural imperialism" (and correspondent Asian cultural nationalisms). Osterhammel spends a fair number of pages discussing the concept of the "high" traveler, who, while appealing to "elevated outlooks and firmer principles", may in fact be the prototype for the 19 th-century colonist; i.e., one who aims to conquer new realms for science, religion, and civilization. And yet, Osterhammel wants to hold on to at least a few of these "high" travelers, such as Anquetil-Duperron (1731-1805), Carsten Niebuhr (1733-1815), the Comte de Volney (1757-1820)-as well as to "armchair theorists" such as Montesquieu (1689-1755), who is here praised as the "the creator of a general framework of a general social science" (386). These individuals, in his estimation, came closest to attaining the Enlightenment ideal of the "philosophical" observer (185-86). This is, then, a story of decline and, perhaps, also one of missed opportunities. And here the critic might raise some hackles, for Osterhammel verges on overstating his case, as important as it may be. In addition, by virtue of its detail, this book comes close to the "pointless prolixity that irritates the reader through a profusion of minutiae" lamented by one connoisseur of overseas travel literature (216). Having said that, the chapter on "Encounters" is, to this reader, the most poignant of the book, as when Osterhammel waxes lyrical on the "transcultural regularity of play" that helped in some cases to loosen the "entanglements of objective of casting "a light on the last decades of the Spanish Empire in North America and on the role of Spain in the American Revolutionary War by bringing to life the world of Bernardo de Gálvez" (8), there is hardly a central thesis in the study. The reader is thus responsible for interpreting the significance not only of many of Gálvez's actions but also, in the end, of his extraordinary life. An exploration of the 200 pages of endnotes explains this problem of exposition and methodology. The author draws most of his evidence from an impressive, painstaking review of practically all that has been written and published about Gálvez since the eighteenth century. Other authors' works drive the narrative of certain sections of the book, partially eclipsing Quintero Saravia's own voice and his equally impressive and valuable original research. Among the study's most interesting findings is that, early in his life, Gálvez became a sort of expert in North American Indian affairs, one who contributed to changes in imperial policies and regulations. On the whole, the specialist reader will find that this book has a lot to tell us about the Spanish Enlightenment, colonial administrative reform (the so-called Bourbon Reforms), imperial borderlands, and military history.
Imperialism is one of the major reasons why the numerous generations of people are deprived of their own identities. It is demonstrated through controlling their minds and planting new perceptions to their thoughts; however, there were people that fought this ideology and they exhibited different ways to show their disagreement and support for the sovereignty of their own nations. Furthermore, this paper will tackle the lives of some famous anti-imperialist revolutionaries such as Simon Bolivar, Jose Marti, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Ho Chi Minh and will associate it with the heroes of Philippine Independence.
This paper asks a familiar question--what is the relationship among religion, empire and revolution?--but does so within a specific context, the American colonial Philippines. It examines the early writings of the most celebrated Filipino Jesuit intellectual, Fr. Horacio de la Costa, SJ (1916-1977), best known for his magisterial book, The Jesuits in the Philippines, 1581-1768 published in 1961, based on his doctoral dissertation at Harvard. But while only 23, however, Fr. De la Costa wrote The Light Cavalry on the even of the Japanese invasion in 1941--a sweeping and polemical account of the Jesuit mission in the Philippines from the Order’s return in 1859. Largely ignored among scholars of Philippine and Church histories alike, it offers a set of wide-ranging reflections on colonialism and Christianity from the latter half of the Spanish period through the Revolution and US occupation. Reading it closely, one gets a sense of how Catholic, specifically Jesuit, pedagogical practices in the 1930s were mobilized for a kind of religious war aimed at engaging the “Masonic” contaminations of the Revolution, the Protestant power of American imperialism, and the “irreligious” corruptions of the Commonwealth. Feeling besieged by the “pagan” secularism of the colonial public schools, Fr. de la Costa fashioned a history that was at once counter-colonial and cosmopolitan, steeped in the conservative elitism of his milieu.
PASTS AND FUTURES OF E. SAN JUAN, JR.
In this synthetic introductory essay, I consider the places of E. San Juan: from his childhood in Manila and early education at the University of the Philippines at a time when veterans of the 1898 Revolution were still alive and peasant-based insurgency was on the rise; to his implicit contribution to the study of popular culture in the Philippines in the context of the emergence of nationalist struggle in the 1960s; to his turning point as a materialist literary critic who wrote the study on Bulosan which coincided with his own decision to stay in the United States; to his participation in anti-Marcos organizing as an exile devoted to the radical future of his homeland; to his maturation as a theorist of race and racism in American institutions of higher education; to his contributions to the development of Filipino Critical Theory and environmental activism; to his systematic critique of Western capitalist modernity as a major scholar from the Third World; and finally, to his attempt to vernacularize international solidarity. I argue that San Juan's body of work constitutes a decolonizing archive that records the unfulfilled projects of liberation struggles from the last century. I also suggest that such an archive is noteworthy because it reveals the direction of Third World revolutionary critique from decolonization to the crisis of globalization today.