Becoming a Problem: Filipinos and America's Imperial Fixations

• In Event: Postcolonial Epistemologies and Transnational Social Justice: Knowledge, Power, and Difference

Abstract

Purpose
This paper examines the United States’ first colony in Asia in order to trace an important historical relationship between empire and education (Coloma, 2013). Using the Philippines in the early 1900s as a case study, it explores the following questions: How were Filipinos as colonial subjects depicted? And, how did their portrayal impact the education provided to them? By asking these questions, the paper tracks postcolonial epistemologies from the vantage point of U.S. educational brokers in the metropole and the colony.

Theoretical Perspectives
Drawing on Michel Foucault’s (1991) analytics of governmentality, the paper mobilizes “imperial fixations” as a key concept in the confluence of empire and education. It employs the concept of fixation in two ways: first, to have an intense interest; and second, to repair or reform. The Filipino problem – or, the question of what the United States ought to do with its colonial subjects in Asia – became a focal source of US fixations in the early twentieth century. When the US gained possession of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War in 1898, the newly-acquired colonial subjects posed a significant problem to the rising global power (Karnow, 1989; Kramer, 2006). Debates on annexation versus independence, underpinned by concerns regarding self-governance and protection from other foreign powers, set the stage for the emergence of Filipinos in the US transnational imaginary and control through empire.

Methodology
The paper derives from transnational archival research (Stoler, 2010) in the United States and the Philippines, which accounted for government, education, media, and personal materials. Key sites for research include the Library of Congress, University of Michigan’s Bentley Library, and University of California’s Bancroft Library in the United States and the National Library and Archives, Ateneo de Manila University’s American Historical Collection, and University of the Philippines’ Filipiniana Collection in the Philippines.

Results
Analysis of transnational archives reveals an intensive and systematic depiction of Filipinos as uncivilized but not altogether incorrigible children. Ultimately, the paper argues that the United States constructed the Filipinos as primitive children in need of America’s benevolent tutelage for modernity and civilization and its governing defense for security. Determined to retain authority over the Philippines as a colonial outpost while dangling the promise of eventual independence, the US utilized public education to cultivate the intellectual, cultural, and moral development of Filipinos.

Significance
Compared to the former Spanish colonizers that provided private education only for the elites, the US colonial government developed a public school system across the country which radically transformed generations of Filipinos. Education, therefore, served as empire’s most pervasive tool of change and control, and remains as its most enduring legacy in the colony.

Author

• Roland Sintos Coloma, Miami University