Revising the Colonialism-as-Romance Metaphor

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Faye Caronan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Literary Representations ◽  
Movie Stars ◽  
Global Power

This chapter examines how Esmeralda Santiago's América's Dream and Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters represent the rape of Puerto Rico and the Philippines through scattered references to United States bases, commodities, movie stars, and news. Although literary representations of rape in a colonial context often represented only the fear of foreign intrusion and the reality of conquest and colonialism, the chapter argues that Santiago and Hagedorn rewrite this narrative to capture the complexity of neocolonialism in Puerto Rico and the Philippines and to capture how global power has been rearticulated in the neocolonial era. Their novels also challenge the gendered assumption at the heart of this metaphor: women are the property of men.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Faye Caronan
Keyword(s):  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Cultural Representation ◽  
Racial Stereotypes ◽  
Filipino American ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
Global Power ◽  
The U.S

This book explores how Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican cultural critiques are delegitimized and obscured by U.S. imperialism and global power. Drawing on Raymond Williams's dual definitions of culture as both the experience of everyday life within a society and the cultural productions that circulate within society, the book analyzes the ways that Filipinos and Puerto Ricans have been represented to affirm narratives of U.S. exceptionalism in the early twentieth century and today. It considers how recent Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican cultural productions across multiple genres critique these justifications, and how the U.S. cultural market contains these critiques to reaffirm revised narratives of U.S. exceptionalism. This introduction provides an overview of the institutionalized narrative of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines and Puerto Rico, the politics and economics of Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican cultural representation, and hegemonic narratives of racial stereotypes in the United States.

6. The Doldrums and The New Navy (1865–1900)

2018 ◽  
pp. 57-67
Author(s):  
Craig L. Symonds
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
The U.S

‘The doldrums and the new navy (1865–1900)’ describes the period after the end of the Civil War: an era of swift retrenchment with little forward progress. When the Civil War ended, the U.S. Navy boasted 671 warships, yet within a decade, all but a few dozen had been sold off, scrapped, or placed in ordinary—mothballed for a future crisis. The concept of a peacetime standing navy was finally embraced with Congressional approval for new battleships in 1890. The war with Spain in 1898 also resulted in the United States assuming significant authority on Cuba and gaining control of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and Wake Island.

The Imperial Republic: A Comparison of the Insular Territories under U.S. Dominion after 1898

2002 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 535-574 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lanny Thompson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Legal Status ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
The Body ◽  
European American ◽  
Military Government ◽  
The U.S

The doctrine of incorporation, as elaborated in legal debates and legitimated by the U.S. Supreme Court, excluded the inhabitants of Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam from the body politic of the United States on the basis of their cultural differences from dominant European American culture. However, in spite of their shared legal status as unincorporated territories, the U.S. Congress established different governments that, although adaptations of continental territorial governments, were staffed largely with appointed imperial administrators. In contrast, Hawai'i, which had experienced a long period of European American settlement, received a government that followed the basic continental model of territorial government. Thus, the distinction between the incorporated and unincorporated territories corresponded to the limits of European American settlement. However, even among the unincorporated territories, cultural evaluations were important in determining the kinds of rule. The organic act for Puerto Rico provided for substantially more economic and judicial integration with the United States than did the organic act for the Phillippines. This followed from the assessment that Puerto Rico might be culturally assimilated while the Phillippines definitely could not. Moreover, religion was the criterion for determining different provincial governments within the Phillippines. In Guam, the interests of the naval station prevailed over all other considerations. There, U.S. government officials considered the local people to be hospitable and eager to accept U.S. sovereignty, while they largely ignored the local people's language, culture, and history. In Guam, a military government prevailed.

Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart White
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
Spanish American War ◽  
Guerrilla War ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The Us ◽  
Santiago De Cuba

The Spanish-American War is best understood as a series of linked conflicts. Those conflicts punctuated Madrid’s decline to a third-rank European state and marked the United States’ transition from a regional to an imperial power. The central conflict was a brief conventional war fought in the Caribbean and the Pacific between Madrid and Washington. Those hostilities were preceded and followed by protracted and costly guerrilla wars in Cuba and the Philippines. The Spanish-American War was the consequence of the protracted stalemate in the Spanish-Cuban War. The economic and humanitarian distress which accompanied the fighting made it increasingly difficult for the United States to remain neutral until a series of Spanish missteps and bad fortune in early 1898 hastened the American entry to the war. The US Navy quickly moved to eliminate or blockade the strongest Spanish squadrons in the Philippines and Cuba; Spain’s inability to contest American control of the sea in either theater was decisive and permitted successful American attacks on outnumbered Spanish garrisons in Santiago de Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Manila. The transfer of the Philippines, along with Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam, to the United States in the Treaty of Paris confirmed American imperialist appetites for the Filipino nationalists, led by Emilio Aguinaldo, and contributed to tensions between the Filipino and American armies around and in Manila. Fighting broke out in February 1899, but the Filipino conventional forces were soon driven back from Manila and were utterly defeated by the end of the year. The Filipino forces that evaded capture re-emerged as guerrillas in early 1900, and for the next two and a half years the United States waged an increasingly severe anti-guerrilla war against Filipino irregulars. Despite Aguinaldo’s capture in early 1901, fighting continued in a handful of provinces until the spring of 1902, when the last organized resistance to American governance ended in Samar and Batangas provinces.

Aspects in Church–State Relations in Puerto Rico, 1898–1900

1963 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-304
Author(s):  
Edward J. Berbusse
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
United States Military ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Colonial Empire ◽  
Church State Relations ◽  
State Relations ◽  
The Church

In 1898 the United States fought Spain, terminating her colonial empire in the Americas and in the Pacific. With this conquest came problems for the United States in Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. From October 18, 1898, to May 1, 1900, United States military governments controlled the island of Puerto Rico; and on April 12, 1900 the President of the United States approved the organic act (Foraker Act) which Congress had passed as the first civil government for Puerto Rico. The study of Church-state relations in this period is an interesting one, since it represents the conflict of two widely different conćepts: a residue of Spanish patronage which fostered the Church and its schools while confining the activity of the Church because of paternalism, anti-clericalism and a trend toward the philosophy of positivism; and Yankee-Americanism that was dominantly Protestant and wedded to the proposition that the Church must be separated from the state. It was a rugged wrenching that brought the Puerto Rican Church from a position of dependency to that of autonomy and self-support. The Church, moreover, had to engage in a political and legal fight for the retention of such properties as schools, churches, and cemeteries. Into the fray came such interested competitors as a United States Commission sent by President McKinley to report on the conditions in Puerto Rico, a small but vocal group of anti-clerical Puerto Ricans, three military governments, and the first civil governors.

President Taft and the Puerto Rican Appropriation Crisis of 1909

1969 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 152-170 ◽  
Author(s):  
Truman R. Clark
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Puerto Rican ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
American Empire ◽  
Theodore Roosevelt ◽  
American Imperialism ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Secretary Of War

William Howard Taft was a central participant at the birth of American imperialism. He won praises for his work with the Philippine Islands, first as head of the commission created to restore the Islands to a peaceful state, then as the first civil governor. He gave up this office to become Secretary of War under President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905. In his position in the Cabinet Taft had direct or indirect oversight over most of America's scattered empire.By March, 1909, when Taft succeeded Roosevelt in the Presidency, the constitution of the American empire had largely been formulated, even if strictly speaking, it had not been formalized. Civil governments had been set up in Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the Philippine Islands. The “insular cases” of 1901 had defined the limits of claims of the dependent peoples upon the Constitution of the United States; the new possessions were neither foreign nor domestic, and thus even though the Constitution did not follow the flag, tariffs might. The only armed resistance to American control—in the Philippines—had long since ended. It was then to the surprise and dismay of President Taft that tiny Puerto Rico immediately presented a hostile challenge to his new administration, the constitutional rebellion known as the appropriation crisis of 1909.

Legitimizing Empire

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Faye Caronan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
American Military ◽  
Cultural Productions ◽  
Performance Poetry ◽  
Global Welfare

When the United States acquired the Philippines and Puerto Rico, it reconciled its status as an empire with its anticolonial roots by claiming that it would altruistically establish democratic institutions in its new colonies. Ever since, Filipino and Puerto Rican artists have challenged promises of benevolent assimilation and portray U.S. imperialism as both self-interested and unexceptional among empires. This book interprets the pivotal engagement of novels, films, performance poetry, and other cultural productions as both symptoms of and resistance against American military, social, economic, and political incursions. Though the Philippines became an independent nation and Puerto Rico a U.S. commonwealth, both remain subordinate to the United States. The book's juxtaposition reveals two different yet simultaneous models of U.S. neocolonial power and contradicts American exceptionalism as a reluctant empire that only accepts colonies for the benefit of the colonized and global welfare. Its analysis, meanwhile, demonstrates how popular culture allows for alternative narratives of U.S. imperialism, but also functions to contain those alternatives.

Changes in Perceptions of Filipino Immigrants about Themselves and of Americans Before and After Coming to the United States

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gremil Alessandro Naz
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Symbolic Interaction ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Philippines ◽  
Appraisal Theory ◽  
American Values ◽  
The Us ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Symbolic Interaction Theory ◽  
Filipino Immigrants

<p>This paper examines the changes in Filipino immigrants’ perceptions about themselves and of Americans before and after coming to the United States. Filipinos have a general perception of themselves as an ethnic group. They also have perceptions about Americans whose media products regularly reach the Philippines. Eleven Filipinos who have permanently migrated to the US were interviewed about their perceptions of Filipinos and Americans. Before coming to the US, they saw themselves as hardworking, family-oriented, poor, shy, corrupt, proud, adaptable, fatalistic, humble, adventurous, persevering, gossipmonger, and happy. They described Americans as rich, arrogant, educated, workaholic, proud, powerful, spoiled, helpful, boastful, materialistic, individualistic, talented, domineering, friendly, accommodating, helpful, clean, and kind. Most of the respondents changed their perceptions of Filipinos and of Americans after coming to the US. They now view Filipinos as having acquired American values or “Americanized.” On the other hand, they stopped perceiving Americans as a homogenous group possessing the same values after they got into direct contact with them. The findings validate social perception and appraisal theory, and symbolic interaction theory.</p>

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