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Book
Review:
E.
San Juan, Jr.,* After Postcolonialism: Remapping Philippines-United States
Confrontations. New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000.
After Postcolonialism reminds us
that there is nothing “post” about colonialism. Countries like the
Philippines have been transformed into neocolonial appendages supplying the
First World with the bulk of cheap labor.
BY
ANNE E. LACSAMANA, Ph.D.**
Bulatlat.com
On
21 December 1898 U.S. President William McKinley issued his “Benevolent
Assimilation” Proclamation declaring that Americans were coming to the
Philippines “not as invaders or conquerors, but as friends” (Constantino
217). Less than two months later the Filipino-American War began, culminating in
the deaths of over one million Filipinos and establishing the U.S. as the new
colonial master of the Philippines. Throughout fifty years of colonial rule, the
political, social and economic terrain of the country was radically altered.
What McKinley’s “Benevolent Assimilation” doctrine translated into was the
establishment of an elaborate U.S. ideological and cultural program geared
towards “de-Filipinizing” Filipinos. To put it another way, one of the most
crucial components of U.S. imperial conquest in the Philippines depended upon
converting and re-creating the colonized into the image of colonizer.
While
successful to inculcating a “colonial mentality” among Filipinos (the
overwhelming majority of the population speaks English as a result of U.S. based
education, the July 4th celebration of Philippine “independence”
day, and the idolization of anything and everything “American”), U.S.
imperialism has had an overwhelmingly disastrous impact on the country. Today,
the Philippines has the distinction of being one of the most impoverished
countries in the region with Filipinos ranking among the most malnourished in
the world even though it is a leading producer of food and other important
exports. To compensate for a sagging economy and unrelenting immiseration, over
eight million (ten percent of the population) Filipinos find themselves
scattered throughout the world as “overseas contract workers” (OCWs)
employed in low-paying, labor-intensive jobs. Although 1946 marks the official
end of U.S. colonization, U.S. hegemonic rule continues to be the most salient
feature of contemporary Philippine life. Of course, not everyone sees it this
way. A substantial amount of scholarship exists, devoted to understanding the
alleged “special relations” between the Philippines and the United States.
However, the bulk of this work, produced primarily by U.S. academic, as ignored
the role U.S. intervention has played in the development and evolution of
Philippine society. Instead, these apologists for U.S. empire blame the failures
and problems currently plaguing the country on Filipino “culture” and their
inability to fully absorb the lessons of their colonial master. After
Postcolonialism: Remapping Philippines-United States Confrontations by E.
San Juan Jr. is a radical departure from the aforementioned apologist texts. In
one of the most thorough, hard-hitting, perspicacious analyses on the subject,
San Juan dismantles the myths surrounding U.S.-Philippine relations and lays
bare the harsh realities U.S. imperialism has wrought on its former “showcase
of democracy.”
What
differentiates After Postcolonialism from
other commentaries is San Juan’s emphasis on understanding Philippine history
from a nationalist perspective. After being colonized for 400 years by Spain and
another 50 years by the United States, Filipino society is best understood as a
“historical-political construction. It is a product of mercantile capitalism
that happened to be inserted into the Spanish Empire in the sixteenth century
and later into the domain of imperialism, a phase of finance or monopoly
capitalism” (2). Thus, while Filipinos share some similarities with other
Asians, they are distinguished by the fact that their “country of origin was
the object of violent colonization and unmitigated subjugation by U.S. monopoly
capital” (13).
Unfortunately,
however, over half a century of U.S. tutelage has resulted in instilling a
sanitized view of U.S.-Philippine relations – one that is characterized as
“special” and somehow equal. The challenge for those interested in forging
new and emancipatory possibilities for Philippine life is to unlearn and
transcend the limiting historical framework provided by U.S. (neo)-colonial
education. Changing one’s historical perspective is an essential component to
liberating one’s self from colonial domination. This point was crystallized
for me on a recent Sunday afternoon while reading the New
York Times. In the “Arts and Leisure” section, I was surprised to see
photographs of the recent theatrical production of Dogeaters
by Jessica Hagedorn, dominating the front page. Accompanying the photographs was
an article praising Hagedorn for, among other things, bringing her successful
novel to the stage. Since it is not often that Filipino artists receive much
attention for their work in this country, I was quite happy to finally see a
Filipino cultural worker receive recognition. And then, it hit me. Why was
Hagedorn and her 1990 novel about the turbulent Marcos years so successful? Why
had she become such a media darling for U.S. audiences? The answer, again, can
be found in history. The Manila of Hagedorn'’ imagination is a pastiche of
colliding images and postmodern identities tat obfuscates the violence of U.S.
imperialism. The view of Philippine life she offers can be packaged and
commodified by U.S. audiences – we can now see the Marcos years acted out on a
New York stage – totally removed from the widespread violence his
dictatorship, with the complete and total support of the U.S. government,
inflicted on the Filipino masses. Had her novel been written from a nationalist
historical perspective, it is doubtful that she would be such a “hit” in the
United States. Thus, it is no wonder why we hear so much about Hagedorn, but so
little about Carlos Bulosan, why I can find countless copies of Karnow’s In
Our Image, but have to special order Renato Constantino’s account of
Philippine history. The strength of San Juan’s work is his belief that Third
World scholars and artists can transcend the limits of historical possibility,
limits imposed by neocolonial dependency, and begin to reorient their work
towards the liberation of self-determination of the peoples involved. At this
particular juncture, when theoretical inquiries have all but abandoned trying to
understand the structural causes of oppression, his emphasis on historical
specificity is especially important.
By
understanding this lengthy history of colonial subjugation, one can also begin
to make sense of the complex set of factors surrounding Filipino identity. What
does it mean to be Filipino? Who does the term “Filipino” really designate?
Considering that over two million Filipinos currently reside in the United
States, what does it mean to be Filipino American? How does Filipino identity
factor into the overall space of “Asian America?” San Juan suggests that the
“colonized ward from ‘las islas Filipinas’ occupies a space between the
indigenous Indian and the ‘inscrutable Oriental’” (3). As a result,
Filipino identity (particularly for those born and raised in the United States)
cannot be easily reduced into the more general category, Asian American.
Commenting on scholarship promoting a pan-Asian framework, San Juan writes that
the diverse groups classified as “Asian American” manifest “more
discordant features than affinities and commonalities. The argument that they
share similar values (e.g., Confucian ethics), ascribed racial characteristics,
and kindred interests in politics, education, social services, and so on cannot
be justified by the historical experiences of the people involved, especially
those who came after World War II” (50). Acknowledging that U.S. Asians might
form coalitions and alliances from time to time, he maintains that the
insistence on pan-Asianism can “only obscure if not obfuscate the patent
problems of underemployment and unequal reward (the “glass ceiling”),
occupational segregation, underrepresentation, and class polarization” (50).
This is particularly true for Filipinos who often find themselves relegated to
low-paying jobs – despite attaining high levels of formal education.
Realizing
the shortcomings of the homogenous “Asian American” framework, some scholars
have begun promoting a postcolonial, hybrid, transnational model for analyzing
diasporic subjectivities. In this scenario, immigrants are conceived as
possessing “multiple identities” as a result of their fluid positioning in
and between nation-states. When applied to the lives of colonized subjects, San
Juan argues, the transnational model falsely assumes the “parity of
colonized/dominated peoples and the U.S. nation-state in contemporary global
capitalism” (54). Considering the far-reaching influence postmodernist/postcolonialist
thought has had on the academy, San Juan’s critique of its seductive potential
cannot be overstated. Favoring a historical-materialist approach, he pursues
further questions of identity and representation in several chapters focusing on
the literary and cultural production of Filipino artists.
The
centerpiece of this work is Chapter 3 “Spectres of United States Imperalism.”
Here San Juan delivers one of the most thorough critiques of U.S. ideology and
its attendant knowledge-production industry. As I alluded to earlier, there has
been an immense amount of scholarship produced on the subject of U.S.
intervention in the Philippines. Stanley Karnow’s In
Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines (1989) is one of the most
celebrated and popular among the revisionist texts. Like others before him,
Karnow argues that Filipinos “’submitted voluntarily to their own
exploitation’” (72). In an account for the underdevelopment and corruption
plaguing the Philippines, Karnow resorts to blaming the cultural values and
“tribal texture” of Filipino life. Rejecting Karnow’s flimsy thesis, San
Juan exposes In Our Image for what it
really is: a mainstream apologist text. Taking his critique one step further,
San Juan indicts Karnow for being a “shrewd popularizer, a bricoleur of
hackneyed notions and received doxa culled from the researches of mainstream
scholars such as David Joel Steinberg, Peter Stanley, Theodore Friend, Glenn
May, and other ‘gatekeepers’ who guard the parameters of acceptable, safe
thinking on the problemative U.S.-Philippine encounters” (73). To be fair, San
Juan explains that Karnow’s analysis (one that purports to “objectively”
describe the “Filipino”) has its roots in a firmly entrenched tradition of
U.S. colonial discourse dating back to 1914 with the publication of Dean C.
Worcester’s The Philippines Past and
Present. For San Juan, this body of knowledge has been severely compromised
by the “reality of seemingly ineradicable social injustice, unmitigated
poverty of millions, rampant atrocities by the military, exploitation of women
and children, and widespread violation of human rights by business and
government” (73). Again, the importance of 1898 cannot be stressed enough when
assessing the current realities faced by Filipinos.
Although
I have discussed at length the subjugation of the Philippines by the United
States, it would be irresponsible of me to ignore the resistance and
revolutionary movements that colonialism has generated. Such movements
constitute the durable tradition of anti-imperialism embedded in the popular
culture of everyday life. San Juan devotes a chapter to examining the
possibilities of revolutionary transformation in the country by focusing on the
prospects and problems of the New People’s Army (NPA). As the only
Communist-led resilient insurgency in the world, the NPA has certainly suffered
a number of setbacks throughout its history. These inadequacies have led to wide
divisions of the Left, leading some to openly denounce Marxism-Leninism.
According to San Juan, the critique of Marxism being issued from a few renegade
“leftists” could be largely attributed to their current fascination with
postmodernist thought. He writes that “Foucauldian deconstruction substitutes
for historical specification and totalizing hypothesis, individualist cultural
politics for mass political struggle” (169). While I will not dwell on the
vacuity of postmodernist thought and its constant but dogmatic dismissal of
Marxism, I agree with San Juan when he convincingly argues that postmodernism is
a “pretext for celebrating the virtues of market liberalism and such formal
freedoms that have inflicted so much violence, torture, protracted misery, and
painful death to millions of Filipinos and other people of color” (170).
Embracing
Marxism does not translate into a crude economic reductionism as so many
suggest, but allows us to confront the massive social injustices brought about
by the rule of capital. In our present era of global economic restructuring, a
historical-materialist method of inquiry is absolutely necessary if we are to
understand the profoundly iniquitous relations between countries in the North
and those in the South. What we are witnessing at the beginning of the
twenty-first century, under the guise of “globalization,” is literally a
phase of capitalist accumulation gone berserk. Everyday, millions of the
world’s poor are sacrificed by transnational corporations, their instruments
for regulating trade (NAFTA, APEC, WTO, MAI), and international money-lending
institutions (International Monetary Fund and the World Bank). Despite this,
numerous scholars have chosen to replace a politics of revolution and
transformation with a discursive analysis of free-floating signifiers. Their
obsession with the “post-this and that” obscures the central relations of
power necessary to understanding our current globalized order. After
Postcolonialism reminds us that there is nothing “post” about
colonialism. Countries like the Philippines have been transformed into
neocolonial appendages supplying the First World with the bulk of cheap labor.
Confronting this stark reality head-on and understanding that what the United
States did to the Philippines in 1898 – what many consider the first Vietnam
– has a lasting legacy that continues to shape and inform the lives of
Filipinos as well as other people of color. The strength of
After Postcolonialism lies in San Juan’s passion and commitment to ending
the neocolonial subjugation of Filipino people as well as others suffering under
the dictates of U.S. hegemonic rule. Bulatlat.com
*E. San Juan, Jr. is
currently Director of the Philippine Cultural Studies Center and chairman of
the Department of Comparative American Cultures, Washington State University.
He received the 1999 Award for Achieved in Literature from the Cultural Center
of the Philippines.
**
Anne Lacsamana received her PhD from Bowling Green State University. She used
to be a Visiting Assistant Professor of Women's Studies at the State
University of New York (SUNY), Albany.
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