scholarly journals Transcolonial Influences on Everyday American Imperialism: The Politics of Chinese Domestic Servants in the Philippines

2012 ◽  
Vol 81 (4) ◽  
pp. 511-536 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Martínez ◽  
Claire Lowrie
Keyword(s):  
The Philippines ◽  
Domestic Labor ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
American Imperialism ◽  
Old World ◽  
Chinese Exclusion ◽  
Domestic Servants ◽  
American Occupation ◽  
Filipino People

From the first years of the American occupation of the Philippines, the American colonial elite ran their households with the help of Chinese servants. The preference of government officials, including Governor William Howard Taft himself, for Chinese domestic labor was in flagrant disregard for the policy of Chinese exclusion as well as the principle of “benevolent assimilation,” according to which the Americans claimed to be “uplifting” the Filipino people by providing them with the opportunity to experience the dignity of labor. In opting for Chinese rather than Filipino domestic labor, elite Americans were replicating the traditions of the “Old World” colonizers, particularly the British in Asia.

scholarly journals Chance long-distance or human-mediated dispersal? How Acacia s.l. farnesiana attained its pan-tropical distribution

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 170105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen L. Bell ◽  
Haripriya Rangan ◽  
Manuel M. Fernandes ◽  
Christian A. Kull ◽  
Daniel J. Murphy
Keyword(s):  
The Philippines ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Old World ◽  
South Central ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Pacific Ocean ◽  
Spanish Explorers ◽  
The Tropics ◽  
Old World Tropics

Acacia s.l. farnesiana , which originates from Mesoamerica, is the most widely distributed Acacia s.l. species across the tropics. It is assumed that the plant was transferred across the Atlantic to southern Europe by Spanish explorers, and then spread across the Old World tropics through a combination of chance long-distance and human-mediated dispersal. Our study uses genetic analysis and information from historical sources to test the relative roles of chance and human-mediated dispersal in its distribution. The results confirm the Mesoamerican origins of the plant and show three patterns of human-mediated dispersal. Samples from Spain showed greater genetic diversity than those from other Old World tropics, suggesting more instances of transatlantic introductions from the Americas to that country than to other parts of Africa and Asia. Individuals from the Philippines matched a population from South Central Mexico and were likely to have been direct, trans-Pacific introductions. Australian samples were genetically unique, indicating that the arrival of the species in the continent was independent of these European colonial activities. This suggests the possibility of pre-European human-mediated dispersal across the Pacific Ocean. These significant findings raise new questions for biogeographic studies that assume chance or transoceanic dispersal for disjunct plant distributions.

Annona muricata (soursop).

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marianne Jennifer Datiles ◽  
Pedro Acevedo-Rodríguez
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Fruit Trees ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Home Gardens ◽  
South East Asia ◽  
Annona Muricata ◽  
Old World ◽  
Evergreen Tree ◽  
Tropical America ◽  
Dark Green

Abstract A. muricata is a small evergreen tree up to 9 m tall. It is native to tropical America but is widely planted in home gardens in South-East Asia. In Brazil, several small commercial plantations are in operation (about 2000 hectares are planted) with more planned. It was one of the earliest fruit trees introduced to the old world, brought to the Philippines by the Spanish. It is valued chiefly for its edible fruits, which are large (> 1 kg), heart-shaped and dark green in colour. The flesh is tart, desirable for ice creams and drinks, fruit jellies and sweetcakes. In the Philippines, young fruits with seeds still soft are used as a vegetable.

scholarly journals Tropical Imaginings and Romantic Nostalgia: 75 Years of Giliw Ko and the Colonial Gaze

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy Forbes
Keyword(s):  
The Philippines ◽  
Cultural Constructs ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
Filipino People

In 1998, Australia restored the 1939 film musical, Giliw Ko, the earliest extant film ever produced in the Philippines. Through its National Film and Sound Archive, Australia presented the film as a gift to the Filipino people to mark 100 years of independence. Celebrating its 75th year of production next year, the film as gift is ironical as it can be argued that the Philippines never gained independence, at least not from the strong colonizing effects of over 50 years of US rule. Giliw Ko tackles themes of a people’s infatuation and confusion over Hollywood images and what it means to be cultured and Westernized. In this essay, I explore American cinema’s historical and cultural constructs as a natural continuation of the colonialist project that is based on binary oppositions of West/East, civilized and uncivilized, conqueror and conquered. Utilising the film Giliw ko, I examine these constructs that are carried to the present day in Philippine cinema.

Who is My Contemporary? Woolf, Mansfield, and Their Servants

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Labor ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Domestic Servants ◽  
Modernist Fiction

This chapter argues that Virginia Woolf’s female contemporaries include not just fellow writers like Katherine Mansfield but also domestic servants, whose work enables writerly creation. The chapter focuses on representations of domestic servants in Mrs Dalloway and “The Garden Party” and in Woolf’s and Mansfield’s private writings. The chapter compares Woolf’s and Mansfield’s texts to demonstrate different ways of depicting and understanding servant labor and to show the centrality of servants to the form of modernist fiction. It suggests that servants are too often marginalized in analyses of modernist narrative innovation, and argues for a broader examination of the significance of domestic labor to better understand modernist fiction.

You're a Better Filipino than I Am, John Wayne: World War II, Hollywood, and U.S.-Philippines Relations

2002 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 389-414 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles V. Hawley
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Power Relationship ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
World War ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject

Between 1939 and 1945 several Hollywood studios produced significant films set in the war-torn Philippines, including Bataan (MGM, 1943), So Proudly We Hail (Paramount, 1943),and Back to Bataan (RKO,1943). Although these films immediately preceded Philippines independence in 1946, they do not position the Philippines as a soon-to-be autonomous nation. Instead, these films reaffirm, and even celebrate, the unequal colonial power relationship that marked the history of U.S. occupation of the archipelago. A careful reading of these films, which is the subject of this article, reveals the stamina of this colonial ideology (colonial uplift, tutelage, and nation-building) that legitimized U.S. colonial rule in the Phillapines and dates back to the turn of the century. What the perpetuation of this ideology suggests is the postwar neocolonial relationship between the two nations that U.S. government officials anticipated. This revised neocolonial ideology is expressed through the racialized and gendered images of Filipino characters and their interaction with U.S. American characters. The U.S. government attempted to control such images as part of its wartime propaganda, but had to rely on the voluntary compliance of the major Hollywood studios. While the Filipinos in films like Back to Bataan, made at the war's end, appear to challenge the racist stereotypes of prior films, they are re-inscribed by a neocolonial form of U.S. supremacy—— framed as wartime U.S. guidance and Filipino dependency.

The Work of Mothering

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harrod J. Suarez
Keyword(s):  
The Philippines ◽  
Domestic Labor ◽  
Reading Practice ◽  
Jessica Hagedorn ◽  
Filipino Diaspora ◽  
Carlos Bulosan ◽  
The World ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
Alternative Practices ◽  
The Relationship

The Work of Mothering: Globalization and the Filipino Diaspora argues for a strict relationship between the world-historical situation of the Philippines under empire, nationalism, and globalization and the phenomenon of overseas domestic labor, drawing on the contours that inform the latter but arguing that it is part of a much larger framework of nurture, care, and service structuring the relationship between the postcolonial Philippines and the world. It analyzes maternal figures in novels by Carlos Bulosan, Jessica Hagedorn, and Brian Ascalon Roley; short stories by Nick Joaquin and Mia Alvar; poems by Luisa Igloria; and a film by Kidlat Tahimik. By developing incisive readings of subtle, passing moments in these texts, The Work of Mothering opens up narratives within which the cultural, political, and economic logics of overseas Filipina/o migration, especially but not only domestic labor, emerges. It does so by advancing an archipelagic reading practice that addresses diasporic literatures and cultures without reinscribing them either within nationalist or global paradigms. In doing so, it draws crucially on debates within the sociology of globalization and cultural studies, offering a critical and innovative vantage point that identifies alternative practices of the maternal, pushing up against the historical and political conditions that manage Filipina/o identity for nationalism and globalization.

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