Conclusion

This concluding chapter returns to the work of the Filipino American artist Stephanie Syjuco in order to focus on the potentialities and limitations of the artist’s process of accumulating knowledge in the digital era. By focusing on the social media dimensions of Syjuco’s artistic and textile craft practices, the book concludes by moving out of the museum per se in order to consider the ramifications of the contemporary resurgence of crafting, DIY, and making practices, which challenge capitalist accumulation even as they are part of an era increasingly defined by the rise of so-called sharing and platform economies that mimic and appropriate these alternative anti-accumulative ecologies.

Progress through the Museum

The Philippine exhibit and archive at the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History forward the colonial project by taking the colonized as objects of accumulation that then can be studied in disciplines like anthropology and archaeology and exhibited as a means of educating and improving the general public.

Introduction

By focusing on the colonial origins and practice of Philippine archival collection in the American museum and university, this chapter reinvigorates scholarly debates in Marxist and post-Marxist theory over the primacy of economic versus colonial processes in the critique of capitalist accumulation. The chapter introduces the concepts of “knowledge nullius” and “accumulating the primitive” in order to underscore the epistemological and aesthetic dimensions of colonial, capitalist accumulation and to call attention to scholars and artists of color who have called for anti-accumulative theories and practices of knowledge production.

The Booty and Beauty of Contemporary Filipino/American Art

This chapter turns to the site of the art museum and examines the work of the Filipino American artist Stephanie Syjuco, which parodies the accumulation and exhibition of Asian artifacts in the Western civilizational museum. Syjuco critically uses strategies of mimesis and plagiarism in order to expose the museum’s history of raiding non-Western cultures and its racialized objectification of non-Western peoples.

Lessons from the Illiterate

Carlos Bulosan’s story “The Romance of Magno Rubio” is about the plight of an illiterate Filipino field worker in Depression-era California going deeper and deeper into debt in order to woo a white American woman. This chapter argues that the story and its contemporary staged adaptation powerfully subvert accumulative values while also introducing a Filipino American alternative economy based on reciprocity and non-accumulation. The illiterate character Magno Rubio shows us how to read.

Foreign in a Domestic Space

This chapter introduces the concept of progressivist imperialism through the figure of Frank Murphy, the mayor of Detroit during the Great Depression and then the last American governor-general of the Philippines, who transposed his earlier work on the New Deal into the Philippine colonial context. This chapter focuses on his and his sister Marguerite Murphy Teahan’s accumulation of Philippine souvenirs and tribute collected in the family’s house-turned-museum, and it also examines Filipino responses to American progressivist colonial governance.