"Wurfel presents a full examination of the island republic from independence to the present, placed in the context of the Philippines' long and rich history. . . . [He] has taken advantage of new research and publications, and has devoted more than a third of the study to the Marcos and Aquino administrations. . . . This is an important book--a study no student of Philippine politics and society can ignore."--Choice
When the United States took control of the Philippines and Puerto Rico in the wake of the Spanish-American War, it declared that it would transform its new colonies through lessons in self-government and the ways of American-style democracy. In both territories, U.S. colonial officials built extensive public school systems, and they set up American-style elections and governmental institutions. The officials aimed their lessons in democratic government at the political elite: the relatively small class of the wealthy, educated, and politically powerful within each colony. While they retained ultimate control for themselves, the Americans let the elite vote, hold local office, and formulate legislation in national assemblies. American Empire and the Politics of Meaning is an examination of how these efforts to provide the elite of Puerto Rico and the Philippines a practical education in self-government played out on the ground in the early years of American colonial rule, from 1898 until 1912. It is the first systematic comparative analysis of these early exercises in American imperial power. The sociologist Julian Go unravels how American authorities used “culture” as both a tool and a target of rule, and how the Puerto Rican and Philippine elite received, creatively engaged, and sometimes silently subverted the Americans’ ostensibly benign intentions. Rather than finding that the attempt to transplant American-style democracy led to incommensurable “culture clashes,” Go assesses complex processes of cultural accommodation and transformation. By combining rich historical detail with broader theories of meaning, culture, and colonialism, he provides an innovative study of the hidden intersections of political power and cultural meaning-making in America’s earliest overseas empire.
“The people” famously ousted Ferdinand Marcos from power in the Philippines in 1986. After democratization, though, a fault line appeared that split the people into citizens and the masses. The former were members of the middle class who engaged in civic action against the restored elite-dominated democracy, and viewed themselves as moral citizens in contrast with the masses, who were poor, engaged in illicit activities and backed flawed leaders. The masses supported emerging populist counter-elites who promised to combat inequality, and saw themselves as morally upright in contrast to the arrogant and oppressive actions of the wealthy in arrogating resources to themselves. In 2001, the middle class toppled the populist president Joseph Estrada through an extra-constitutional movement that the masses denounced as illegitimate. Fearing a populist uprising, the middle class supported action against informal settlements and street vendors, and violent clashes erupted between state forces and the poor. Although solidarity of the people re-emerged in opposition to the corrupt presidency of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo and propelled Benigno Aquino III to victory in 2010, inequality and elite rule continue to bedevil Philippine society. Each group considers the other as a threat to democracy, and the prevailing moral antagonism makes it difficult to overcome structural causes of inequality.
International institutions (United Nations, World Bank) and multinational companies have voiced concern over the adverse impact of resource extraction activities on the livelihood of indigenous communities. This volume examines mega resource extraction projects in Australia, Bolivia, Canada, Chad, Cameroon, India, Nigeria, Peru, the Philippines.
In 1899 the United States, having announced its arrival as a world power during the Spanish-Cuban-American War, inaugurated a brutal war of imperial conquest against the Philippine Republic. Over the next five decades, U.S. imperialists justified their colonial empire by crafting novel racial ideologies adapted to new realities of collaboration and anticolonial resistance. In this pathbreaking, transnational study, Paul A. Kramer reveals how racial politics served U.S. empire, and how empire-building in turn transformed ideas of race and nation in both the United States and the Philippines. Kramer argues that Philippine-American colonial history was characterized by struggles over sovereignty and recognition. In the wake of a racial-exterminist war, U.S. colonialists, in dialogue with Filipino elites, divided the Philippine population into "civilized" Christians and "savage" animists and Muslims. The former were subjected to a calibrated colonialism that gradually extended them self-government as they demonstrated their "capacities." The latter were governed first by Americans, then by Christian Filipinos who had proven themselves worthy of shouldering the "white man's burden." Ultimately, however, this racial vision of imperial nation-building collided with U.S. nativist efforts to insulate the United States from its colonies, even at the cost of Philippine independence. Kramer provides an innovative account of the global transformations of race and the centrality of empire to twentieth-century U.S. and Philippine histories.
This clear and nuanced introduction explores the Philippines’ ongoing and deeply charged dilemma of state-society relations through a historical treatment of state formation and the corresponding conflicts and collaboration between government leaders and social forces. Patricio N. Abinales and Donna J. Amoroso examine the long history of institutional weakness in the Philippines and the varied strategies the state has employed to overcome its structural fragility and strengthen its bond with society. The authors argue that this process reflects the country’s recurring dilemma: on the one hand is the state’s persistent inability to provide essential services, guarantee peace and order, and foster economic development; on the other is the Filipinos’ equally enduring suspicions of a strong state. To many citizens, this powerfully evokes the repression of the 1970s and the 1980s that polarized society and cost thousands of lives in repression and resistance and billions of dollars in corruption, setting the nation back years in economic development and profoundly undermining trust in government. The book’s historical sweep starts with the polities of the pre-colonial era and continues through the first year of Rodrigo Duterte’s controversial presidency.
This volume is a manifestation of the continuing interest of scholars at the University of Michigan in Philippine studies. Written by a generation of post-colonial scholars, it attempts to unravel some of the historical problems of the colonial era. Again and again the authors focus on the relationship of the ilustrados and the Americans, on the problems of continuity and discontinuity, and on the meaning of “modernization” in the Philippine context. As part of the Vietnam generation, these authors have looked at American imperialism with a new perspective, and yet their analysis is tempered, not strident, and reflective, not dogmatic. Perhaps the most central theme to emerge is the depth of the contradiction inherent in the American colonial experiment. [vi-vii]
