This epilogue reflects on the author's experience while serving as a supporting participant in a grant project known as the Philippine Youth Leadership Program (PYLP). In the closing days of the program, all Filipino participants came together to perform a “Philippine Culture Night.” A conversation between the author and an observer revealed the supposed ubiquity of American culture around the world. If “American” culture is so ubiquitous, then Americans are in no need of discovery, definition, or exhibition, by themselves or by others. This creates an uncomfortable lack of reciprocity in which the dynamics of cultural exhibition are reduced to an asymmetrical “you dance for me, but I never dance for you; I discover, observe, define, and preserve the things of this world, but I am not subjected to those processes by others.” Yet this notion betrays a certain postcolonial cultural narcissism in which the legacies of empire often loom larger in the minds of former colonizing nations than they do in the minds of nations formerly colonized. It cannot be forgotten that “live exhibits” and cultural performers are ultimately agents unto themselves, choosing and participating in representations that are independent of how observers may attempt to objectify them. This was certainly the case for the Moros at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition.
Report of the Iowa Commission to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis, 1904