The other day I was having a discussion with a fellow Filipino scholar, and he was criticizing what he called "the Filipino American obsession with the Filipino-American War" -- that there was, as he put it, "a Fil-Am orthodoxy of 'I am Pinoy and I feel the pain of the American colonial period.'"
I didn't necessarily disagree with him. Previously I had, somewhat unfairly, criticized in print a couple of my colleagues in Filipino American Studies for, shall we say, obsessing over the subject. (I'm biting my tongue hard here, and any more dropped hints or blunter comments would be imprudent.) Suffice it to say that I saw this phenomenon as well, but wasn't as puzzled about it as I was before. My friend, in any case, had "gotten over it," meaning the colonial period and the war, and recommended that others should move on and get along with their lives as well.
What I couldn't explain to him at the time was that the political dynamics of Filipinos in the U.S. were very different from those in the Philippines. First of all, the former is a minority, in almost every sense of the word, and with everything that that entails. And for Filipino Americans to seemingly keep rehashing the subject -- why, it was new to many of them, after all, and even if it only served to personally deepen some sort of grievance -- well, there was something there too. (I didn't add, either, that at least someone was remembering it; centennials came and went, but it's never clear that, say, Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo actually "got over it" and "moved on" from something and was now able to declare undying friendship with the U.S. government. Selective memory is a wonderful and fearsome thing.)
Just the other day as well I was carrying on an e-mail conversation with another fellow Southeast Asianist who asked why it was necessary for there to be a "center" of "civilization" at all. (He was referring to my entry on Angkor Wat, where I wrote that it served as a reminder that not all "civilization" was centered in the West.) My response to him was that it was important because most American schoolchildren are taught otherwise, i.e., that at heart curricula, from elementary on up, are still very much Eurocentric. And he wrote: "Still?" And I wrote: "Still."
Still, indeed. Yesterday there was a little flurry of articles on the Philippines on my browser's home page (My Way), and Madeline pointed out to me one I had neglected -- a little article, serving as a bit of a primer, if you will, from the Associated Press (!) called "Philippine Facts and Figures." Here's an excerpt from the "history" section:
HISTORY: Spanish colony from 1521 to 1898, when U.S. Navy defeated Spainish [sic] fleet at Manila Bay. Americans crushed Filipino rebels in six-year war. Japan occupied islands in World War II. Independence granted in 1946.So now you see why we must remember still. Posted by the wily filipino at July 28, 2003 06:57 AM
For what reason? And aren't you among the obsessed?
I suppose Fil-Ams are in a double bind. The Fil-Am War, for all the obsessiveness of a few Fil-Ams, remains way below the hierarchy of grievances aired daily by minorities in the US. And if Fil-Ams decide to eschew victimology and opt for the self-affirmation route, then -- as many Filipino intellectuals have reminded us -- they can never invoke their own glorious center of civilization like other minorities can. How then can they be taken seriously when neither their sufferings nor their triumphs are glamorous enough?
Posted by: on July 28, 2003 12:29 PMBut such is the double bind of identity politics in general, I think; one has to constantly walk the middle ground between victimhood and self-affirmation or else leave oneself open to criticism.
Am I among the obsessed? The topic certainly holds much fascination for me, but more in terms of forgetting and memory. Why was the war relegated to a historical blip in the American historical narrative -- or, for that matter, in Filipino popular consciousness? It was, after all, a war that the U.S. won. Was it so counter to America's vision of itself? Doubtful, particularly since one could argue that America's originary moment as an empire -- excepting the overall westward expansion, invading the Southwest, overthrowing the Kingdom of Hawaii, etc. -- had its beginnings in the Philippines.
So, yes, I'm probably obsessed as well -- but not to the point of internalizing some form of colonial trauma; I'm more interested in how its forgetting was carried out ideologically, and how it keeps resurfacing in its sanitized, insurrecto-populated version (as we see in the AP press release).
Posted by: the wily filipino on July 28, 2003 02:23 PM