The Filipino Primitive: Accumulation and Resistance in the American Museum 9781479887699

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The Filipino Primitive

The Filipino Primitive Accumulation and Resistance in the American Museum

Sarita Echavez See

NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York www.nyupress.org © 2017 by New York University All rights reserved References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. ISBN: 978-1-4798-4266-7 (hardback) ISBN: 978-1-4798-2505-9 (paperback) For Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data, please contact the Library of Congress. New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Also available as an ebook

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: Accumulating the Primitive

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Part I. The Archive: Dispossession by Accumulation 1. Progress through the Museum: Knowledge Nullius and the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History

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2. Foreign in a Domestic Space: Progressivist Imperialism and the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum

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Part II. The Repertoire of Dispossession 3. Lessons from the Illiterate: Carlos Bulosan and the Staged Wages of Romance 4. The Booty and Beauty of Contemporary Filipino/American Art: Stephanie Syjuco’s RAIDERS Conclusion: Accumulation Now and Then

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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About the Author

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Acknowledgments

I am indebted to Stephanie Syjuco, Lonnie Carter, and Ma-Yi Theater Company, especially Ralph Peña and Jorge Ortell, for their brilliant work, and I thank them for their kind forbearance as I have tried to do justice to their creations. For their generosity in spirit and time, I am grateful to the staff at the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, especially John Klausmeyer and Amy Harris; and the staff at the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum, especially Barb MacGowan and Bobbie Ramsey. I thank the Dean’s Office of the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the University of California Riverside for a timely grant that helped to fund book production. Special thanks to Joshua Sung, Jason Corañez Bolton, Dakota Lindsi Tu, and Alex Ratanapratum for their research assistance; Mark Gjukich, Matt Zugale, and Lynda Fitzgibbon for permission to reproduce their photography; Bradley Cardozo and the other members of the Ethnography As Activism Subgroup on Repatriation at the University of Michigan for their insistence on the merging of politics and research; and my colleagues in Media and Cultural Studies at U.C. Riverside, who make the day job a joyous challenge. Eric Zinner helped me see that there was indeed a there there before I could discern anything. Fred Moten, Bakirathi Mani, Lucy Burns, Karen Tongson, Thea Tagle, Alexandra Dalferro, and Chairat Polmuk kindly invited me to give talks at their respective campuses that helped me to develop the book. Paula Chakravartty, Denise da Silva, and Lorenzo Veracini provided excellent editorial feedback on earlier essay versions. Allan Isaac and again Denise da Silva provided feedback both generous and sharp at a later critical stage. Clare Counihan’s editorial acumen is wondrous and frightening and helped the chapters take on shape in ways that allowed me to despair less. I have the finest of writing companions, those who continue to believe in the importance and even primacy of talking about rather than merely reading one another’s work: Marie Lo, vii

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Sadia Abbas, David Lloyd, Kimberly Alidio, Nadine Naber, Jodi Kim, Karlyn Koh, and Christine So; the “Hangouts” Faye Chen, Anthony Ocampo, and Jason Magobo Perez; the FSP gang Lorena Llosa, Nicolas Zegre, Hall Bjornstad, and Joy Gayles; and the PTF gang of women professors at U.C. Riverside. Alan Krohn talked me into doing the writing. And Hiram Pérez has helped me keep hope alive all these years we’ve known each other by refusing to discuss the writing. For their love and support throughout, I am profoundly grateful to my parents, Anicia Echavez See and See Chak Mun, and my brother and sister-in-law, Gerald and Amy See. David Lloyd does it all—reads the writing, talks about the writing, doesn’t talk about the writing, walks away from the writing—and it is my luck to be able to learn daily from him how to give, so thoughtfully and unthinkingly.

Introduction Accumulating the Primitive

They must be soldiers or militiamen. They are armed white men. They must be readying themselves for frontier war or at the very least a skirmish with dangerous savages. But they are not soldiers. They are scientists. This is a portrait of a professor encircled by his students. In the 1870s the amateur naturalist Joseph Beal Steere left his home in Michigan and embarked on a circumglobal expedition that included the Philippines and that resulted in a donation of sixty thousand specimens—botanical, zoological, and anthropological—to his alma mater, the University of Michigan. This massive donation prompted the university to award Steere its first honorary doctorate and to build its first natural history museum building. In 1887, the year of this portrait

Figure I.1. Photograph displayed in the Philippine exhibit at the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor. Photograph by Mark Gjukich. 1

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with his students, Steere went to the Philippines for the second time and returned with even more animals, shells, and plants to donate to the university’s collection. Today, Steere’s accumulation of this material is known for constituting a significant part of the founding collection for the University of Michigan’s Museum of Natural History, and this portrait of Steere and his students is displayed in the museum’s Philippine exhibition. In this book, I understand the imperial archive as a mode of accumulation. More specifically, I understand the imperial archive as a mode of accumulating a special kind of capital—knowledge—and I contend that this accumulation of knowledge depends on the idea of the racial primitive. In the chapters that follow on Philippine exhibitions in the American natural history, anthropological, and art museum, I argue that nowhere can we appreciate so easily the intertwined nature of the triple forces of accumulation—capital, colonial, and racial—than in the imperial museum, where the objects of accumulation remain materially, visibly preserved. The 1887 portrait of Steere and his students shows how America’s scientific conquest anticipated its military conquest of the Philippines, from 1899 to 1913. Both modes of conquest were forms of extractive colonialism, and both modes of conquest were shaped and justified by the idea of the primitive Filipino. Primitivity first was used as a justification for scientific conquest, which preceded genocidal conquest. The settler colonial fantasy of terra nullius—empty land by way of the genocidal emptying of land—is accompanied by what I propose we call “knowledge nullius,” the American quest for knowledge that putatively was accrued about (rather than stolen from) Filipino primitives. I moreover propose that this concept of knowledge nullius demands that we reconfigure the study of representation. In this book’s examination of a range of ways of exhibiting the Filipino, I have had to turn away from the concern with misrepresentation—truth or fallacy—that typically informs the critical analysis of the racial subject so that I instead can bring to light this connection between the racial primitive and the processes of economic and academic primitive accumulation. This book is divided into two parts that speak to and against each other, “The Archive: Dispossession by Accumulation” and “The Repertoire of Dispossession.” In the pair of chapters that make up “The Archive: Dispossession by Accumulation,” I draw on my research on

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the Philippine collections and exhibits at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and at Harbor Beach, Michigan, the hometown of the last American governor-general of the Philippines. In the chapters “Progress through the Museum: Knowledge Nullius and the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History” and “Foreign in a Domestic Space: Progressivist Imperialism and the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum,” I demonstrate how the university and the museum forward the colonial project by taking the colonized as objects of accumulation, which then can be studied in the traditional disciplines and which are to this day displayed before the general American public. In the pair of chapters that make up “The Repertoire of Dispossession,” I countermand the accumulative mandate of the imperial archive by exploring how Filipino Americans traverse the space of empire and represent themselves as agents and not merely as objects. In the chapters “Lessons from the Illiterate: Carlos Bulosan and the Staged Wages of Romance” and “The Booty and Beauty of Contemporary Filipino/American Art: Stephanie Syjuco’s RAIDERS,” I examine visual, literary, and performative economies of anti-accumulation in Carlos Bulosan’s story “The Romance of Magno Rubio” and its contemporary theatrical adaptation and in Stephanie Syjuco’s art installation RAIDERS, a parody of Asian art museum collections. In my concluding chapter on Syjuco’s social media presence and her use of online crowdsourcing, I move out of the museum per se in order to consider the ramifications of the contemporary transformation of crafting, DIY, and making practices into trendy objects of consumerism—from Walmart’s sale of “craft” beer to Etsy’s touting of homespun sweaters—in the era of the digital. Across the chapters in The Filipino Primitive, I show that the imperial project attempts and fails to put in order its vast collection of materials.

The Arkhe of Accumulation Accumulation is a twinned phenomenon. More famously, it refers to the enclosure of land and resources that made what Karl Marx called the “primitive accumulation” of capital possible. Less famously, it refers to the developmental narrative from the primitive to the civilized that underpins the quest for accrued knowledge. Richard Halpern argues that accumulation contains “two histories: of the ‘primitive’ accumulation

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of capital, and of the ‘primitive’ accumulation of men” as labor.1 Ideological and intellectual wars have broken out over how to treat another set of twins, capitalist and colonial accumulation. Critiquing the teleological nature of Marxist theories of “primitive accumulation,” David Harvey came to the formulation “accumulation by dispossession” by foregrounding both Hannah Arendt’s insight about the “endless” (rather than originary) nature of capitalist voracity and Rosa Luxemburg’s insight about capitalism’s dependence on “something ‘outside of itself ’ ” in order to stabilize itself.2 In The Accumulation of Capital, Luxemburg argues that the “accumulation of capital, once it has started, automatically leads farther and farther beyond itself,” and she then contends that capitalism “needs other races.”3 Capitalism, Luxemburg implies, is innately colonial. Her central thesis, according to Joan Robinson’s introduction to The Accumulation of Capital, is that “it is the invasion of primitive economies by capitalism which keeps the system alive.”4 As an alternative to what he calls Marx’s “rigidly temporal framing” of primitive accumulation, Glen Coulthard has urged us to shift our emphasis from the subject position of the waged male proletariat to that of the colonized.5 According to Coulthard, it is high time to shift from a focus on capitalist relations to colonial relations and from proletarianization to dispossession.6 While Robinson’s commentary on Luxemburg implies a naturalization of the notion of the primitive and, therefore, of the developmental narrative of primitive accumulation, Coulthard crucially restores an indigenous perspective that is an alternative and not a precedent to capital. However, to the extent that Coulthard’s shift to dispossession still retains the outlines of a developmental narrative of capital, if from another perspective, Halpern valuably suggests that Marx’s account of primitive accumulation must be understood as a genealogy of capital relations and colonial relations, a “tale not of embryonic development but of a fundamental break between modes of production.”7 Halpern approaches primitive accumulation as a “genealogical discourse [that] signifies both a history to be written and the limits such a history must observe.” The “vocation” of primitive accumulation is to “provide not a conclusive narrative but a useful one.”8 The value of Marx’s narration of accumulation thus lies in its ability to “identify a space where a history ought to be.”9 Primitive accumulation is a problem of—and not simply about—history. During my research at the University of Michigan

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Museum of Natural History and the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum, I found that these museums and their collections are an instance of the archive as accumulation, and that their Philippine exhibitions constitute “a space where a history ought to be.” Both museums offer little to no context—historical or otherwise—about the appearance of the Philippines in the Midwest, and that is how the idea of the racial primitive fills that space so easily. Ironically, this epic failure in knowledge production takes place at the very site of knowledge acquisition. The Filipino Primitive is dedicated to offering an image of that counter-history that ought already to have been. Jacques Derrida notes, in a pun whose peculiar resonance in the Philippine context I will explore in later chapters, “It is thus, in this domiciliation, in this house arrest, that archives take place.”10 These museums are a signal example of the peculiar occlusion of the American conquest of the Philippines—what Dylan Rodríguez has called a “suspended apocalypse”—even as they reflect the Midwest’s history of institutional participation in the colonial governance of America’s first Asian colony.11 Derrida also reminds us that the etymology of the word “archive” reveals another set of twinned (or, more accurately, constantly fissuring) principles at work, the order of “commencement” and the order of “commandment.” According to Derrida, the arkhe of commencement refers to the “sequential” principle, which works “according to nature or history, there where things commence.” The arkhe of commandment refers to the “jussive” principle, which works “according to the law, there where men and gods command.”12 This is no simple set of twins, however. For Derrida, these two “orders of order: sequential and jussive” introduce a “series of cleavages [that] incessantly divide every atom of our lexicon.”13 For example, because the arkhe of commencement can refer to nature or history, a set of “belated and problematic” oppositions emerges, say, between nature and technology or between history and the law. The same fissuring complexity emerges within the arkhe of commandment. Nonetheless, all of these problems are waved aside and forgotten. Derrida notes that forgetting is embedded in the very idea of the archive: “The concept of the archive shelters in itself, of course, this memory of the name arkhe. But it also shelters itself from this memory which it shelters: which comes down to saying also that it forgets it.”14 The American archive constitutes just such a shelter for its Philippine collections: It offers

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shelter for its Philippine collections in ways that shelter itself from the memory of genocidal conquest, benevolent assimilation, and what I call “progressivist imperialism” (which I elaborate in chapter 2, on the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum). There is something about the collection and display of the Filipino that requires the erasure of the history of its presence. As Nerissa Balce has pointed out in her study of American war and photography, the visible representation of the Filipino in American culture paradoxically has secured the erasure of the circumstances surrounding that visibility.15 However, in order to take up Derrida’s invitation to participate in the “deconstruction in progress” of the archive, I must exert pressure on his concept of the citizen in ways that complement, I think, the aforementioned critiques of Marx’s privileging of the proletariat over the colonized. In naming the jussive and sequential meanings invoked by the arkhe, Derrida argues that the former precedes the latter. The arkhe of commandment precedes—it is “even earlier” than—the arkhe of commencement.16 Accordingly, Derrida spends significantly more time explaining the “jussive” meaning of the word “archive” and its association with the law, “a house, a domicile, an address, the residence of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded.” The archons are “citizens” who wield power as the “guardians” of the documents that they physically collect, protect, and hermeneutically control. The archons are “accorded the hermeneutic right and competence.” Hence, “entrusted to such archons,” the documents come to “speak the law.”17 But where there are citizens, there are slaves. Nowhere in Derrida’s account of the jussive arkhe of commandment can we detect the presence of the slave in the house of the archon-citizen. Nowhere can we find the trace of what Fred Moten has called the para-ontological, the force exerted by the object of possession onto the subject.18 What is lacking is the history that ought to be. When we turn our attention to the sequential arkhe of commencement, we find that Derrida associates it with “the originary, the first, the principial [sic], the primitive.”19 Though Derrida clearly is referring to the temporal primitive, might the temporal primitive also be racial? Throughout this book I argue that the temporal primitive is a racial primitive.20 Our understanding of origins is always already racial. By engaging with the history of Marx’s idea of “primitive accumulation”

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and juxtaposing it with an analysis of the processes of “accumulating the primitive,” I join with Coulthard and others in understanding the temporal, especially the cumulation and the developmentalism of capital, as racial. Hence, as I elaborate in the first two chapters on the American museum, the acquisition of the racial primitive in the collections of the imperial archive—what the curator-critic Jan Bernabe has called the “archive imperative”—must be analyzed in conjunction with the acquisition of epistemological capital.21 When it comes to the American museum, the Philippine exhibition constitutes a space where a history ought to be. This book intervenes in that space free of history. I take up with hope Derrida’s proposition that the violence of the shelter provided by the archive is not easy to contain: “Contrary to the impression one often has, such a concept [of the arkhe] is not easy to archive.”22 But I take up Derrida’s proposition by picking up the pen—by writing—and in the rest of this introductory chapter, I address the politics of penmanship, the modes of freedom as well as enclosure that writing unleashes.

Writing and Accumulation I: Penmanship, Enclosure, and the Coming of Style Though my itinerary might seem erratic, I propose that in order to arrive at the possibility of a decolonial study of the Philippine collection and exhibition in the American museum, one must take a detour through the history of the Western act, scene, and product of writing, which I argue fundamentally are intertwined with capitalist accumulation. In the following sections, I address these basic questions: What is the nature of the relationship between writing and accumulation? How might the study of this relationship allow us to unschool ourselves and interrupt the mastery of knowledge? I try to answer these questions by describing the political and ethical stakes of studying the relation between writing and accumulation. I argue that there is an intimate union, a marriage, between writing and accumulation. I first offer a condensed political history of that relationship, starting with the idea of penmanship as an act of stylistic enclosure that coincides with land enclosure, population transfer, and capitalist accumulation in early Renaissance Europe. I then analyze the relationship between the novel as a genre and property, specifically between the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel and

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the themes of marriage and inheritance. From this account of the literary representation of shifts in modes of accumulation, I turn to theorists of color who challenge this marriage between writing, accumulation, and capital. In so doing, these variously minoritized scholars turn our attention to the possibility of the rewriting of debt. They propose that living in accumulated debt, normatively understood as a negative thing, is a positivity. They dare to ask what a general commitment to “disownership,” in Fred Moten’s phrasing, would look like in a world destroyed and made over more and more rapidly by accumulation.23 Who would do or who does such a foolish thing? By the end of this book, I will have argued that we need to listen to the foolish in order to unlearn the habit/us of capitalist accumulation, and I pay special attention to the foolishness of the illiterate. Though the illiterate usually are deemed limited by their incapacity to read, the illiterate must and do create alternative practices of coding and decoding untutored by the strictures of colonial education. Take, for example, Betty Grable’s character Loco in the classic Hollywood comedy How to Marry a Millionaire. Even as she gamely joins a husband-hunting scheme, Loco berates a would-be target when he decides to disinherit his daughter for marrying against his wishes. Loco says to him, “No matter how much money my mother didn’t have, she would never disinherit me.”24 It is Loco, the crazy and stupid one, who makes nonsense of the values of the rich, defends the values of the poor, and envisions a world without disinheritance. One cannot disinherit someone if one has no money: That is precisely Loco’s point. No one can disinherit anyone if no one has money. Like Loco, illiterates are unschooled, and that can be a positive quality. Though we are trained to value literacy and the literary as universal markers of intelligence and respectability, with each chapter in this book I offer a reading practice (paradoxically, I realize) that allows for more imaginative listening to the illiterate and the alternative knowledge generated by critical literalism. In chapter 3, on the writer Carlos Bulosan, I argue that his illiterate, low-born character Magno Rubio produces a highly literalist approach to words and, hence, to the world of debt peonage he inhabits. Magno Rubio can expose systemic structures of exploitation and violence with much more acuity than can his more educated coworkers. This form of literalism is discernible in visual art

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too. Chapter 4, on the artist Stephanie Syjuco, argues that Syjuco’s way of sticking to the surface—in her nearly two-dimensional sculpture— recalls and renovates Karl Marx’s insistence that a critique of capitalism must begin not with the fantasy of the origin or the concrete base of the economy but rather with phenomena like money that we see immediately on the surface of society. In the concluding chapter, I focus on Syjuco’s social media and online crowdsourcing practices. Stepping out of the museum proper, I discuss contemporary practices of accumulation in order to provide a critique of the recent, presumably anticapitalist trend of consuming craft practices—from homemade soap to DIY carpentry to so-called back-to-the-land homesteading. But what do I mean when I say that there is an intimate union between writing and accumulation? Let us take up the pen. In his study The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital, Richard Halpern argues that the rise of different writing—penmanship—styles in early Renaissance England coincided with massive political, socioeconomic, and cultural upheavals in the wake of enclosure, population transfer, and capitalist accumulation. Writing capital has everything to do with “breeding capital,” in Halpern’s phrase, and we can trace that relationship through the surprising link between the figure of the beggar and the figure of the schoolboy.25 According to Halpern, during this era of tremendous displacement and dispossession, the truancy of the wandering vagrant was transformed—schooled, as it were—into the truancy of the absentee pupil. From there, Halpern outlines how this transformation was both reflected and effected by the pedagogy of penmanship and the stylistic enclosure of schoolboys. Before focusing on the graphological pen, Halpern first accounts for the geographical penning in of people and land. Rather than replicate Marx’s controversial emphasis on the enclosure movement as the principal factor in the transformation of agrarian England, Halpern emphasizes more broadly the use and direction of force in both feudal and protocapitalist economies. For Halpern, the period of the transition to capitalism oversaw the “reversal of the direction of force” from the centripetal to the centrifugal.26 In late feudal England, the landowning class directed force inward in a “centripetal” direction that compelled the maintenance of the “unity of peasant and land,” thus “binding” the peasantry to land-based extrication of dues and services.27 With the

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transition to the early modern period, some landowners began to direct force outward in a “centrifugal” and “expulsive” direction.28 The nature of peasant struggle accordingly shifted. As Halpern notes, “Force became expulsive rather than binding, centrifugal rather than centripetal, and on the other side the small peasantry now tried to secure its place on the land, whereas before it had struggled to free itself from villeinage.” The Tudor and Stuart eras thus came to be defined by an “explosion in the size of the vagrant population, . . . who lost their domestic, social, and cultural habitations along with their means of subsistence.”29 What makes Halpern’s analysis of “breeding capital” particularly illuminating is his account of how the “vagrant” became “errant.”30 In an era when cultural, religious, and institutional traditions of hosting visitors and the poor came under extreme pressure—“the beggars, it seemed, were always coming to town”—the word and idea of the “truant” shifted such that its original denotation as a “vagabond or sturdy beggar” came to be applied in the sixteenth century to “lazy or absent schoolboys.”31 In this new “essentially sedentarizing regime,” wherein vagrancy was deemed “not as a class condition but as a moral or disciplinary failing,” the Tudor schoolhouse became a site for the anxious pedagogical warding off of vagrancy even as actual vagrants were excluded from the schoolhouse.32 Halpern then cites penmanship as an especially compelling example of how “ideological, literary, and pedagogical matters could clearly intersect.”33 How students wrote was as important as what they wrote about. In their copybooks, Renaissance students practiced forming letters by imitating the ideal models and reproducing them over and over again, carefully staying within the gridded boxes: “Penmanship as copying thus emerged from a striated or ‘ruled’ space (in every sense of the word).”34 If the pen can be understood as an instrument of stylistic enclosure, penmanship was a means of developing one’s individual style. (I recall with fondness my own copybook and my ability to replicate perfect lines and curves when I learned cursive writing during my primary school education in 1970s Australia.) Halpern describes the two stages of teaching penmanship, beginning with letter production and then advancing to line production. While the former required students to imitatively copy letters, the latter demanded the mastery of the flow of ink such that students produced lines that no longer were confined by the

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ruled space. Students were introduced to the “art of the flourish.”35 Thus, an opposition and then an “unstable union” emerged between letter production as a “disciplinary and sedentarizing regime” and line production as a “fluid and nomadic one.”36 The pedagogy of graphology in Tudor England reflected how anxiety about vagrancy shaped the containment of wandering, nomadic elements, and the emergence of controlled fluidity. Stylistic enclosure was enabled first by lined, gridded paper and then followed by the emergence of the art of the flourish penned by a “free hand” capable of regulating the flow of ink. I take this set of contradictions to be a harbinger of the Romanticist ideal of the sovereign individual. The coming of style anticipated the freedom of the Romantic subject, a freedom rooted in enclosure. How does this history of freedom rooted in enclosure translate to the scene of American colonialism in the Philippines? The genocidal conquest of the Philippines was accompanied by a massive displacement of people from the land, which led to their migration to the United States, an accumulation by dispossession that followed the same logic as enclosure. Thus, Halpern’s account of an earlier enclosure in Europe helps us to detect a similar logic at work in the later movements of accumulation in post-Spain, American-occupied Philippines. Halpern’s thesis about stylistic enclosure sharpened my attention to the politics of Filipino manipulations of epistolary style. During my research for the chapter on the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum, I came across a sheaf of letters, handwritten in English, by Filipinos to Marguerite Murphy Teahan, who served as the bachelor Frank Murphy’s “first lady” during his tenure as U.S. governor-general in the Philippines.37 Virtually every letter contained a combination of exaggerated flattery of the first lady followed by a concrete plea or demand, ranging from requests for a souvenir picture of Teahan to assistance obtaining a job or housing. For example, Simplicio Laude of Cebu opened his letter in 1934 to Teahan thus: “Standing in the shadow of your sympathy, I am addressing you this letter on a matter that vitally affects the condition of my living. I am at present suffering the great depression that ocurred [sic] in the Philippine Island [sic].”38 In the same year, thirteen-year-old Caridad Camacho, a student at Philippine Women’s College, wrote to Teahan and, after thanking the first lady for “all [her] sacrifice” for the Philippines, noted, “I have read too about

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Figure I.2. First page of a letter from Patrocinio Hernando to Margaret Murphy Teahan, September 17, 1934. Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

the charitable institutions which cares [sic] for my poor fellowmen, especially the children.”39 Also in 1934, Patrocinio Hernando from Ilocos Norte opened her letter to Teahan with this flourish: “It overwhelms me to write a great lady such as you; more so when I face the fact that I am asking of you a favor.”40 As I explain further in chapter 2, enwreathed in ornate flattery, these requests constitute a demand for compensation that does not follow the logic of “progressivist imperialism” and that contains the trace of Southeast Asian values that demand recognition of the obligation that leaders have to provide for their people.

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Writing and Accumulation II: The Marriage between the Novel and Property Let us put down the pen for now and take up the novel. How might we extend the insights of literature proper, especially the novel, to our understanding of accumulation? I argue that the novel offers different perspectives on accumulation. In the telescoped but productive readings of Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope that follow, I show that the novel depicts shifts in modes of accumulation, particularly the shift from what we might call a “fixed” mode of accumulation in Austen’s portrayal of the landed gentry to a speculative mode of accumulation in Trollope’s portrayal of gamblers. It is by now almost clichéd to draw attention to the intimacy between the novel and property. In its association with the developmentalism of the bildungsroman, heteroreproductive romance, the idea of national literature, and the West’s land grabs, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European novel wields enormous power as the genre—understood as the convergence of ideological pressures rather than as a static category—that repeatedly teaches the ideological lesson of marriage and property. The ultimate happy ending, the marriage between man and woman, achieves the legitimate heteropatriarchal and racial transfer of property from present to future owners and ensures the naturalized reproduction of the caste system. The apparently biological nature of woman’s destiny and duty to reproduce the next primogenitor works powerfully and insidiously to affirm class, religious, sexual, and racial hierarchies. In his tour-de-force book on Jane Austen, gender and sexuality studies scholar D. A. Miller notes that if, for the girl reader of Austen, the discovery that “Austen meant Woman” compels the girl to “be a good girl,” for the boy reader, the “same discovery . . . made the boy all wrong.”41 The novel amplifies its naturalization of extant power relations by deploying the pedagogical power of realism in the making of the modern subject.42 While the function of marriage as happy ending is by no means unique to the genre of the novel, the sequential, realist nature of the novel lends an inexorability to the drive toward the ending. The affinity between the genre and various modes of possession—of land, women, labor, and other resources necessary for the reproduction and expansion of capitalist accumulation—has been fortified in the last

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decade or so by a remarkable resurgence in the popularity of Austen and especially her novel Pride and Prejudice. Loose and stodgy versions of Pride and Prejudice can be found in the form of films, televised serials, YouTube videos, pulp fiction (with vampires, werewolves, detectives, or the afterlives of characters in sequels like The Independence of Mary Bennett), and even collectible toy sets complete with Austen doll, miniature desk, and writing quill. Who, after all, can resist the coupling of Elizabeth Bennet’s sparkling wit and Fitzwilliam Darcy’s monied ineptness? Let us take a closer look at the famed first two sentences of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighborhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.” Austen sums up the basic boymeets-girl story that structures the genre of the novel. The story turns out to be triadic rather than dyadic in nature, however. Boy does not merely meet girl. Primogenitor meets property, the possession of which demands the coupling with girl if the boy heir is to become a real man of property, a man capable of passing on the property to his own boy heir.43 Darcy, the most privileged and propertied of literary characters, turns out to be the rightful property of “some one or other.” In other words, to have is to be had. At the same that Austen’s Pride and Prejudice naturalizes this well-worn story of gendered, propertied heteroreproduction, it also naturalizes a story not so much of coming-of-age as of coming-into-self-possession. Austen’s novel of propertied heterosexual romance dramatizes how one comes to possess oneself. The real romance turns out to be an affair with the “self.” Both Elizabeth and Darcy learn to define their personality traits—pride and prejudice—as their own. They learn to believe that they own themselves even as their “selves” turn out to be an effect of the structure, as the work of Louis Althusser implies. Elizabeth’s bewitching self-confidence, her primary trait, is itself a story of self-possession.

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Writing and Accumulation III: The Novel, Chance, and Speculation From Austen’s portrayal of the landed aristocracy, we turn to Anthony Trollope’s portrayal of gamblers and finance capitalists. We shift from landed, “fixed” accumulation in Austen to high-risk, speculative modes of accumulation left to chance in Trollope. For example, in Trollope’s novel The Claverings, the shift from property to finance is encapsulated by Captain Boodle’s reference to betting in his advice to Archie Clavering to pursue the wealthy widow Lady Ongar: “He never surrendered a bet as lost, till the evidence as to the facts was quite conclusive, and had taught himself to regard any chance, be it ever so remote, as a kind of property.”44 In the wake of a series of fiscal scandals that rocked nineteenth-century Europe, chance—from the roll of the dice to betting on the stock market to real estate speculation—became a form of property.45 If Austen’s novels in the era of waning landed property perform the subjectivity of possession, Trollope’s novels in the era of finance capital and high imperialism perform the subjectivity of debt, and the double meaning of forgiveness drives several of his plots. We read to find out whether a character’s moral transgression or violation of codes of respectable behavior will be forgiven. We read to find out whether and how a character will pay off a monetary debt. Fiction can work powerfully to reveal the fictitiousness of capital, and none so rivetingly as Trollope’s world of debt, gambling, primogeniture, social ambition, and usury as his characters traverse the politics of the living room, the church, and Parliament. At his best, Trollope manages to make fascinating the most boring people and phenomena. The Last Chronicle of Barset is about a twenty-pound check. The Eustace Diamonds is about a necklace. Framley Parsonage is about an IOU. The eight-hundredpage novel Can Your Forgive Her? turns on Alice Vavasor’s inaction, her refusal until the inevitable end to marry and cede control over her income to her husband. Gambling and speculation emerge as a thematic across much of Trollope’s oeuvre. In novels like Can You Forgive Her? and The Way We Live Now there are scenes involving card or dice play in gentlemen’s clubs or in notorious resort and casino towns like Baden and Lucerne. Morally opposed to and socially barred from the vice of gambling, upper-class women characters use gambling as a

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metaphor for love. In The Last Chronicle of Barset, Lily Dale says of her love for Adolphus Crosbie: “If it were simply myself, and my own future fate in life, I would trust him with it all tomorrow, without a word. I should go to him as a gambler goes to the gambling-table, knowing that if I lost everything I could hardly be poorer than I was before.”46 Most infamously, in The Way We Live Now the enigmatic financier Augustus Melmotte takes gambling to its highest form of fiscal speculation: gambling with nothing, that is, empty assets. Trollope’s portrait of Gentile gambling tends to be gentlemanly. Near-penniless aristocrats gather at the card table in their exclusive London clubs and gamble with IOUs. But when it comes to Melmotte, who is rumored to be a Jew, the practice of gambling with debt occurs on a monumental scale. Melmotte takes London by storm with outrageously lavish parties, a demure and marriageable daughter, and a dazzling shareholding scheme that would fund the building of a railway from Utah to Mexico. Along the way, we learn about all the practices of swindling, cheating, and forgery that were endemic to the era but conveniently condensed in the racialized figure of the Jew. Trollope’s anti-Semitism lays the blame for fiscal fraud on the figure of the Jew. If we read Melmotte’s crimes of forgery and deception against the grain, however, we see that his falsification of signatures brilliantly reveals the scandalous fictitiousness of capital itself, a phenomenon that has manifested time and again in our own era. As David Harvey argues in his account of the dot-com bust that began in 1999, the resultant economic collapse “soon spread to reveal that much of what passed for finance capital was in fact unredeemable fictitious capital supported by scandalous accounting practices and totally empty assets.”47 In contrast, characters like Lady Carbury turn to fiction and nonfiction as a way to survive the transition to speculative and finance capitalism. Widowed and pursued by creditors, Lady Carbury turns to writing as a source of income to support herself and her children. (The character of Lady Carbury is an autobiographical reference to Trollope’s mother, who also turned to writing as a means of survival for her and her children.) Titled and privileged as she is, the number of respectable paths toward survival is extremely limited. Indeed, her story yet again ends in marriage, this time to an editor. Her attempt at an independent profession becomes merely a means of attaching herself to a man and regaining the position of dependence through marriage. What else

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is a lady to do? Austen answers this question by mystifying property relations and transactions as relations of love and moral self-discovery, while Trollope literalizes the mystified Austenian relations of capital in the novel of financial capital. The gendered nature of Lady Carbury’s personal financial troubles signifies the generalized loss of autonomy and increased anxiety that characterize an economy now in the hands of the financier and massive corporate entities. I turn now to alternative responses to non-autonomy, other ways of gambling with debt and gambling with words. As I outline in chapter 3, on Carlos Bulosan’s fiction, the character of Magno Rubio embraces his non-autonomous status as a non-immigrant, noncitizen, illiterate seasonal laborer in Depression-era California. Magno Rubio does not care about being autonomous. Magno Rubio does not care that he has accrued an amount of debt impossible for him to ever pay off. What happens, Bulosan implicitly asks, when we see debt as a positivity and gambling as a necessity?

The Stakes of Gambling with Words What is the context for asking these questions about debt and gambling? This book is an essay against both economic accumulation and accumulation in the university. It is an attempt to undermine the rationale for accumulation during a renewed, intensified cycle of raiding what is left of the public good—the commons—in the United States in the form of the university. Across the chapters that follow, I argue that “primitive accumulation” can and must be understood as a process that describes not only material entities like land and labor but also knowledge production, and the university and the archive are the ideal sites for the analysis of that process. Even and especially in the face of the urgent call for increasingly defensive and rearguard action to protect what little is left, I want to insist that that act of protection must be expansive, ambitious, and generous, as impossible as it is to conceptualize generosity and abundance in a moment of (manufactured) scarcity.48 I ask what the academic intellectual might have to learn, in such a moment, from those who always have been exploited by the processes of accumulation, the latest versions of which now target a university that was once the alibi of accumulation. Turning to key sentences by Black and Filipino scholars

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in the rest of this chapter, I track anti-accumulative thought and writing precisely at a time when such work is seen as frivolous and extravagant play, a nonproductive, morally questionable activity not unlike gambling, which moreover dissolves the boundary between leisure and toil. What is at stake in taking up this all too rare opportunity to pause, to think, and to play with words is the possibility of imagining a nonpropertied space of decolonial knowledge production. We study, teach, write, and organize in order to train ourselves to study not only the objects of analysis we have in view. We prepare ourselves in anticipation of objects of analysis that we can barely imagine let alone grasp today. Fred Moten asks (of) us, “Is there knowledge in the service of not knowing, study as unowning knowledge?”49 Cedric Robinson asks (of) us, Where is a university that we can imagine, let alone build, in the West that would foster the “preservation of the ontological totality granted by a metaphysical system that had never allowed for property in either the physical, philosophical, temporal, legal, social, or psychic sense”?50 Let me step back for a minute. What is involved in word play? What are the stakes of gambling with words? Discussing the “infinite postponement of meaning” associated with Derrida’s theory of différance in his 1990 article “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” Stuart Hall usefully warns us that Derrida’s disciples have transformed the French critic’s insights about the play of words into a “celebration of formal ‘playfulness,’ which evacuates them of their political meaning.”51 Hall goes on to contend that “if signification depends upon the endless repositioning of its differential terms, meaning, in any specific instance, depends upon the contingent and arbitrary stop—the necessary and temporary ‘break’ in the infinite semiosis of language” even as meaning “continues to unfold, so to speak, beyond the arbitrary closure which makes it, at any moment, possible.”52 At issue in the neoliberal austerity regime’s assault on the university is how we grasp and apply the idea of that temporary break and that contingent stop as a means of rethinking the intellectual and institutional syntax of our work in the academy. Here is another way to put this in the form of questions: How might we contend with the tension between, on the one hand, the intransigent insistence on impermanence and fluidity that characterizes the fields of cultural studies, ethnic studies, feminist studies, and decolonizing studies and, on the other hand, the university’s emphasis on monumentality and permanence in

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the very process of institutionalizing emergent fields, a process that both calcifies and conserves these new fields of knowledge production? In the face of this new cycle of defunding, theft, and privatization, how might we continue to insist—ethically, politically, and intellectually—on the urgency of opening up rather than shutting down the spaces for nonrationalized forms of knowledge production, even and especially for those forms that thrive under conditions of impermanence and ephemerality rather than (institutionalized) permanence? How might we abide by the precepts outlined in the “Guide to Samoan Studies,” published in 2005 in the first issue of the Journal of Samoan Studies, which include tenets like the following: 1. Keep the topics open and flexible 2. Don’t be afraid to do it your way and avoid addiction to any one approach to research or publication 3. Study what and publish what you in and of Samoa need to publish, not what someone else might consider appropriate 4. Results get resources rather than the other way around53 In thinking about the de-propertied, decolonial university from my vantage as a scholar affiliated with cultural studies, ethnic studies, and postcolonial and empire studies, I keep returning to three sentences that allow me to think about the possibilities of an unpropertied, antiaccumulative relation to words, ideas, and knowledge. Sentence Number 1: “We are here to write the sentences that have never been written and that will never be written again.” Ruminating and riffing on Frederick Douglass and the “unmeaning jargon” of slave songs at the 2008 conference “Campus Lockdown: Women of Color Negotiating the Academic Industrial Complex,” Fred Moten reminded us of our obligation and pleasure as scholars of color to forge new sentences as part of the longer traditions of meaning making within our various communities, even as those syntactical structures and forms of improvisation are dismissed and pathologized as so much nonmeaning and nonsense.54 In other words, we must write words that run amuck/amok.55 Sentence Number 2: “Everything I am about to say in this essay has already been said.”56 In his 2005 Social Text essay “You Can Have My Brown Body and Eat It, Too!” Hiram Pérez takes on the “queer

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illuminati”—establishmentarian, elite, white queer studies scholars—in the wake of the 2003 “Gay Shame” conference (or “fiasco”) that he attended, the sole scholar of color asked to speak at the conference. Pérez’s focus on repetition and the oldness of what he says calls into question the academy’s focus on critique’s “originality”: “The professional pressure to produce ‘originality’ is really a call to make property claims demarcating intellectual territory and thus an appeal to privatism and individualism.” Instead Pérez calls for queer studies to “interrogat[e] its capacity to listen imaginatively.”57 Sentence Number 3: “Such a practice . . . might turn up new soil on old ground.”58 At a 2005 American Studies Association panel on the work of Hortense Spillers, Nahum Chandler delivered a paper on Spillers vis-à-vis Du Bois, published three years later in Criticism as an essay titled “Of Exorbitance: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Thought.” And again, this question of the relation between the old and the new emerges. Especially in my analyses of the writer Carlos Bulosan (chapter 3) and the artist Stephanie Syjuco (chapter 4), this book seeks to explore the productive tension—the syncopated rhythm, perhaps—between Pérez’s trenchant critique of (propertied) originality and Moten’s embrace of (nonpropertied) singularity. Drawing from the experience I have had to garner as an organizer for social change within the imperial American academy, I am interested in the tension between deep listening and the composition of “unmeaning jargon.” Indeed, I would suggest that that tension might constitute the praxis of knowledge production in a de-propertied, decolonial university—of “turn[ing] up new soil on old ground.” But how and why did knowledge get commodified? I turn to the law and the law school by way of an answer. I began to think about the commodification of words—and, from there, the commodification of knowledge and education—while taking a seminar as a graduate student with Patricia Williams when we all were excited about this new phenomenon of critical race theory. While Williams is now widely known as a columnist for the Nation as well as a law professor, it is crucial to remember that Williams is a contracts scholar, thus or thence her influential 1988 essay in Signs titled “On Being the Object of Property.”59 I remember grappling with what was to me the new knowledge that the structure—not merely the content—of case law itself reproduces the

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enslaveability of personhood. We read all these cases testing the legal and ethical repercussions of new (at the time) reproductive technologies such as surrogacy, and we learned that the contracts governing surrogate motherhood drew upon precedents in the laws governing the trade in cattle and then the purchase and sale of human chattel. But it was not only the content of slavery in the law that I understood to be the problem. As I began to read Williams’s groundbreaking work—new soil on old ground—I paid attention to its storytelling style of anecdote upon anecdote upon anecdote, the meshed complexity of its chain of signification. I was struck by its rhetorical resistance to citation. In other words, it is very hard to quote Williams. It is difficult to lift a passage from Williams’s work and quote it in your own work because, out of its own context, the quotation loses its meaning so quickly and begins to approximate nonsense or “unmeaning jargon.” And I think that the politics of her style has everything to do with her ruminations on “being the object of property.” Indeed, as a number of critical race scholars have pointed out, the ethical subject of Western thought, the subject that forms the epistemological ground for the imperial university, in fact turns out to be an economic subject. In the 1991 essay “Race under Representation,” David Lloyd characterizes the innately racialized nature of the universality— that is to say, the transcendence of particularity—attached to the European as a “Subject without properties,” a phrase and concept that are very much in dialogue with Denise da Silva’s description and elaboration of the “subject of transparency” in her 2007 book Toward a Global Idea of Race.60 In other words, the Subject without properties is the subject of property and ownership. Noting the close proximity between people of color—in Silva’s phrase, the subjects of affectability—and the very idea of content, Hiram Pérez writes in the aforementioned essay, “Colored folk perform affect but can never theorize it.”61 Indeed, brown bodies “must never improvise on their brownness. Whiteness experiences such improvisations as the theft of something very dear: its universal property claim to the uniqueness of being.”62 Together these scholars remind us, as I will elaborate in chapter 1, that the objectivity belonging to the universal subject of critique in fact constitutes a masked and particular subjectivity: the European subject of transparency who possesses a monopoly on the capacity for thought and judgment.

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Even more, these scholars remind us that if we cannot “have” a space in the university, we must create a temporary space—a contingent stop— for unowned knowledge that sees no contradiction between Moten’s call for singularity and Perez’s reminder about unoriginality. It is a stop or a pause, rather than a space. It has to be. We have to be okay with being on the move. We have to abandon the seductions of belonging and settling. We have to roll the dice for the riskier yet deeper pleasures of the rhythm of temporary shelter in a world overwhelmingly but not totally devoted to the habits of accumulation by dispossession.

1

Progress through the Museum Knowledge Nullius and the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History

The giant canoe stands still. The small child is shy. She approaches the canoe. Carved by Jim Pashegoba (Ojibwe) in the 1890s, the dugout canoe is landlocked on the floor of the anthropology gallery in the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History (UMMNH). Located in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the museum is visited by about eighty thousand people every year, including twenty thousand schoolchildren.1 Pashegoba’s canoe stretches across the length of the museum’s anthropology gallery and divides the Native American display cases along one side of the room from the Philippine display cases along the other side. Nothing stops the child from walking up to the canoe. There is no glass partition. No ropeoff stands. She knows she is not supposed to touch anything here. She knows she is not supposed to run or shout. This is a museum. But her arm cannot help stretching forth. Her fingers point at the boat that in turn points itself forward. The grownup standing beside her reads aloud from the sign posted high above her head: “Please sit carefully in the dugout canoe. Have fun!” The grownup nods, and the child clambers into the canoe. She runs her fingers wonderingly across the wood. Touch. Do Not Touch. Desire and prohibition. These are the two drives that confront and divide the school-age children who are the typical visitors along with their families to educational museums today like the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History. The first drive consists of a desire to touch what they see. The second drive consists of a prohibition against that desire. Children repeatedly are schooled in the lesson of not touching and of successfully suppressing their desires, especially in institutional spaces. But on the UMMNH’s fourth floor, in the anthropology room, Pashegoba’s dugout canoe provides children

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with a rare release from that prohibition. During my several visits to the museum, I have witnessed the sheer joy of children clambering into the deep canoe, momentarily freed from the rules and etiquette that typically govern the display of things, animals, and people in the natural history museum. The children’s delight stems from the absence of the glass screen that usually serves as partition, dividing them from objects in display cases. Even as Pashegoba’s canoe offers to children a momentary freedom from the museum’s rules of exhibition, it embodies the museum’s crisis of representation about the politics of its collections and their display. Made over into a child’s plaything, the canoe becomes an example of how indigenous cultures or first nations are made to “last” for others, as Jean O’Brien has put it, an instance of what Gustavo Verdesio calls “epistemic violence.”2 The museum, moreover, provides little to no context—historical or otherwise—for the appearance of the Philippines in proximity with Native America. It has no narrative to account for the American conquest of the Philippines, let alone the university’s role in founding and administering the colony.3 The proximity between the Native and the Filipino is left entirely unexplained by the museum. But the spatial design of the exhibition speaks volumes. As it is experienced by the museum’s visitors, the canoe comes to mark the boundary and proximity between the Native and the Philippine and the Child. Sitting in the canoe, the child mediates between the Indian and the Filipino.4 If we understand the child as a kind of primitive within the family, as yet untutored in the mores of civilized behavior, she triangulates the primitives in the anthropology room. But if the child ever asked her grownup about the relationship between herself, the Ojibwe canoe, and the Visayan burial items, neither child nor grownup would receive help from the museum. The relationship between the museumgoer and the exhibitions that they have come to see and learn about is left unexplained. This lack of explanation indexes the museum’s larger crisis of representation about the politics of its collections, even as this lack also allows the racist and colonial ideology of the backward or disappeared primitive to occupy that space and thus become self-evident, a form of unquestioned common sense. This chapter addresses the museum’s crisis of representation by addressing two questions: What is the nature of the relationship between

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Figure 1.2. Sign posted in the anthropology room at the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor. Photograph by Mark Gjukich.

these two instances of the racial primitive, the Native and the Filipino and, hence, between these two instances of primitive accumulation, the material, literal collecting of artifacts and the ideological collecting of knowledge? I propose that the university is an exemplary site for the investigation of the politics of knowledge production and that the literal and ideological foundations of knowledge production are most visible

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in the university’s museum. I focus on the collection and display of the Filipino in the university museum, and I take up this problematic of the proximity of the Filipino to the Native to show how these primitive proximities—and the distinct kinds of colonial and settler colonial structures of domination that they index—play a crucial role in facilitating how the university advances its commitment to knowledge. These kinds of primitive proximities are created by the university museum’s commitment to two processes of accumulation: the material and the epistemological. The material accumulation of the backward or disappeared primitive forms the epistemological foundation of Western knowledge production. In pedagogical spaces like the UMMNH’s anthropology exhibition, the collections of the “primitive” symbolize both the racial origins that (white European) Man has transcended and the ideological origins of the accumulative drive toward power/knowledge. In short, the literal accumulation of the primitive instantiates an accumulative epistemology, the endless and violent quest for accrued knowledge. As I elaborate toward the end of the chapter, the colonial fantasy of terra nullius—the creation of empty land by the genocidal emptying of land—is accompanied by what I call “knowledge nullius.” The university’s commitment to knowledge turns out to be rhetorical cover not only for the construction of accumulative epistemology as knowledge but also for the will to power.

Filipino Foundations The contemporary display of Philippine things and peoples in the UMMNH serves as a powerful allegory and a “real” case of the primitive accumulation subtending imperial knowledge. The University of Michigan established its natural history and anthropology collections in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by sponsoring circumglobal zoological, archaeological, and ethnographic expeditions with a special focus on the Philippines. These collections formed the material and epistemological foundation of the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology as they emerged at Michigan’s flagship public university. According to Carla Sinopoli, the director of the Museum of Anthropology and the Museum Studies Program at the University of Michigan, there is “no denying that the anthropology museum and department are direct products of United States colonialism.”5

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Three Michiganders are associated with these founding collections: the explorer Joseph Beale Steere (1842–1940), the anthropologist Carl Guthe (1893–1947), and the zoologist and colonial administrator Dean Conant Worcester (1866–1924). Their biographies provide us with the tale of how accumulation takes place. A graduate of the University of Michigan’s law school, Joseph Beale Steere collected about sixty thousand specimens—botanical, zoological, and anthropological—during a circumglobal expedition that included the Philippines in the 1870s and then an expedition solely to the Philippines in the 1880s.6 These expeditions were sponsored by the University of Michigan, and they make up a significant part of the founding collection for the university’s natural history museum.7 In a 2012 lecture about Steere, the curator of the University of Michigan’s herbarium described the explorer as a “great old man, as it were, of the university museums.”8 Much of the museum’s rhetoric about Steere’s expedition follows a narrative of adventurous discovery and the accomplishment of firsts and foundations. Steere’s bronze bust stands in the entrance to the UMMNH, and the bust’s inscription and other informational posters about him note that Steere received the university’s first honorary doctorate and that his donation of over sixty-two thousand specimens “prompted U-M to build its first natural history museum in 1881.” Indeed, a display case about the museum building’s history informs us that the erection of the museum building was the “first for any public university in America.” The didactic—the museum label with historical, interpretive, and narratological material—about Steere adds that he collected “representatives of a multitude of plant and animal species and human cultural artifacts previously unknown to science” (emphasis added).9 Here we see the museum making an explicit connection between exploration, accumulation, discovery, and knowledge. Ironically, the proclamation constitutes a confession that what is being discovered is not so much the unknown non-Western world as the Western scientific way of knowing. Far from building knowledge about the Filipino, the accumulation of the Filipino enabled the American university to establish and legitimate its epistemology of science, or what Sylvia Wynter has called the “overrepresentation” of Man. The UMMNH founding collection exemplifies how, as Wynter phrases it, a “present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man . . . overrepresents

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itself as if it were the human itself ” even as it also creates a “secular slot of Otherness as a replacement for the theocentric slot of Otherness.”10 Moreover, Steere’s achievement is not that the non-Western world becomes known to science, but rather that Western science no longer is “unknown to science.” Science can become known to itself. Science can

Figure 1.3. Bronze bust of Joseph Beal Steere by sculptor Carlton W. Angell, on display in the rotunda of the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor. Photograph by Mark Gjukich.

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discover itself, but only at the price of discounting non-Western epistemology and value systems.11 One of Steere’s undergraduate students, Dean Conant Worcester would go on to establish himself as one of the few Philippine experts in the United States at the time, a reputation based on his publication of highly popular books about the Philippines.12 Worcester first traveled to the Philippines as a member of Steere’s second 1887 expedition, also sponsored by the University of Michigan. In the 1890s Worcester headed his own expedition to the Philippines, sponsored by the Minnesota Academy of Natural Sciences. Upon returning to the United States, he taught zoology at the University of Michigan and published a number of scholarly and popular books about the Philippines during the U.S. conquest. Worcester then transitioned to service as a colonial administrator in the Philippines with positions on the first and second Philippine Commissions and then, for over a decade starting in 1901, as secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior, which included governance over non-Christian tribes and peoples. After resigning from colonial governance, Worcester remained in the Philippines to pursue lucrative agribusiness interests, which included the development of large tracts of land he previously had acquired as secretary of the interior and investments in coconut products and cattle. Worcester’s influence in the United States has lived on to the present moment because of the monumental size and controversial nature of his collection of photographs of the Philippines. Worcester was a zealous amateur photographer who also eventually turned to the movie camera. According to Mark Rice, during his years in the Philippines, Worcester took more than fifteen thousand photographs and more than two miles of film footage with the singular goal of authorizing and disseminating a particular “truth” about Philippine incapacity and the resulting need for a strong civilizing American presence.13 Nerissa Balce has argued that Worcester’s portraits of partially or entirely unclothed women in the Philippines established what she calls an “erotics of empire” that further reinforced the American perception of the Philippines as a fascinating and docile colony.14 Today the University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology houses more than five thousand of Worcester’s original negatives and lantern slides, an archive that Rice calls “perhaps the largest collection of original negatives of officially sponsored colonial

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photography found in the United States.”15 Rice also points out that the distinctiveness of this archive lies in how much power was concentrated in and wielded by a single individual: “Despite the different photographers included, the collection of photographs that the archive represents was conceived, collected, and organized by Worcester.”16 A current-day special collections curator at the University of Michigan has said of Worcester’s pursuit of photography, “He was collecting. Forgive me for the metaphor but he was collecting humans.”17 Even as he transitioned from colonial administrator to businessman in the Philippines, Worcester continued to correspond with University of Michigan administrators. By the 1920s, several decades after Steere’s inaugural expeditions to the Philippines, Worcester had convinced the University of Michigan to sponsor a major archaeological expedition to the Philippines. By that time, the university had decided to create a separate anthropology museum, and it appointed the anthropologist Carl Guthe to direct the expedition. Guthe’s appointment shows how a network of midwestern academics became the basis for a network of colonial rule. Guthe

Figure 1.4. Reconstructed burial cave with objects from a mortuary site in Bohol, Philippines, that Carl Guthe excavated in 1923–1924. University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor. Photograph by Mark Gjukich.

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had earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Michigan and his archaeology doctoral degree from Harvard. He had specialized in the archaeology of the Americas and had no expertise in Asian archaeology, but his name was “known to Worcester” because he also had attended the University of Michigan as an undergraduate.18 When Guthe arrived in the Philippines, Worcester loaned Guthe the use of his yacht. As manager of the Visayan Refining Company’s factory in Cebu, Worcester also created a “laboratory space” in the factory for Guthe’s use.19 With this support from Worcester and the university, Guthe oversaw the acquisition of thousands of objects from sites in the southern Philippines from 1922 to 1925. Guthe’s expedition yielded what became the founding collection of the Museum of Anthropology and what current-day scholars of the collection have called “arguably the most important collection of Philippine archaeological materials and Asian trade ceramics in the United States.”20 Carla Sinopoli also is the current-day curator of the Guthe collection, and she cites the collection’s size as the primary reason for its importance. The collection is “remarkable in the sheer number of sites explored” and “impressive in its breadth.”21 Sinopoli lists the data associated with Guthe’s fieldwork, and the numbers seem to speak for themselves. She notes that “materials from 485 sites were packed into 285 shipping crates” and sent to Ann Arbor; and “13,000 discrete objects [were] catalogued . . . under some 5300 catalog numbers.”22 Those objects included “3732 glass, shell, and stone beads . . . 76 iron implements, 83 shell bracelets . . . 8000 ceramic vessels . . . 500 skeletal elements [and] numerous human teeth.”23 Today, the university pays tribute to Guthe’s expedition with the display in the UMMNH’s anthropology room of the reconstruction of one of the burial caves that Guthe excavated. That is to say, this accumulated material is narratively spatialized in the museum’s Philippine exhibition. Any walking tour of any museum exhibition tells a story, and this exhibition tells a story of primitive accumulation. (I provide a more detailed tour, so to speak, of the exhibition later in the chapter.) Most of the objects in Guthe’s collection were offerings to the dead collected from mortuary sites. According to the accompanying didactic, the display includes “a range of materials common to mortuary sites throughout the Philippines” and “a page from one of Guthe’s field notebooks, dated February 1924.”24 But Guthe’s “period of gathering the

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material,” as he called it, also included the amassing of human remains.25 In a 1927 article about the expedition that he published in the journal American Anthropologist, which is the flagship journal of the American Anthropological Association, Guthe wrote that “several old burial grounds were dug by the writer” and that his “tremendous collection of material” included ninety-five human skulls.26 All of this ceramic, shell, stone, metal, glass, textile, and skeletal material was packed into crates and shipped to Ann Arbor, where, upon his return to the United States, Guthe became the Museum of Anthropology’s first director. The university’s first attempt at anthropological knowledge was built upon a foundation, literally, of the dead, and, in undertaking the task of founding the university’s anthropology museum, Guthe configured himself as the author-cum-undertaker of knowledge.27 When it comes to the Philippine collections at the University of Michigan, the establishment of knowledge as an acquisitive and expansionist practice proceeds through the “dispossession by accumulation” of the exhumed Filipino. The university museum is a mass grave.28 The rational scientist—and not the savage Filipino—turns out to be the headhunter. Guthe’s account of his fieldwork shows no self-conscious reflection about the routinization of the desecration of indigenous graves. Instead, Guthe was concerned about any damage to the sites that would hamper his collection and preservation of material for future research, and he literally and figuratively swept aside evidence of ongoing reverence for the dead. For example, he noted that, because flooding caused the “greatest destruction of evidence,” “repeatedly, masses of sherds, bones, and ornaments were found washed into a pocket, or into a depression in the floor, then partly covered with earth” (emphasis added).29 Guthe uses the passive voice here: the human remains and offerings are “then partly covered with earth.” Rendering invisible the grammatical subject of the sentence, Guthe’s elision leaves the indigenous or local people unmarked in a way that affirms their primitivism while it renders the American scientist unmarked in a way that affirms Guthe’s objectivity. Guthe goes on to refer to “native shamans” and to blame them, along with animals and the weather, for the “havoc” he found at the sites: “Animals and native shamans added to the havoc created by the elements. Empty half shells of cocoanuts, remains of candles and palmleaf torches, and small offerings of money and ornaments gave ample evidence of the

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recent use of many caves.”30 Here Guthe documents evidence of what contemporary archaeologists have identified as ongoing indigenous traditions characterized by the open and collectivist nature of interment. Mortuary sites were used by “generations of native peoples to bury their dead.”31 The open-air graves and burial caves that Guthe excavated were “likely used and added to over multiple generations.”32 However, rather than honor or at least investigate the potentially sacred nature of these sites, Guthe relegated the presence of indigenous belief systems to the status of nature by cataloging indigenous shamans with animals and the climate, forces of nature that have no respect for or concept of preservation. Moreover, Guthe is implying that indigenous mortuary practices disrupt the study of those very same practices. Shaped by the idea of the Filipino as racial primitive, Guthe’s method is grounded in a fairly breathtaking series of logical fallacies that exemplify an American epistemology of primitive accumulation: Not only is the Filipino capable of being only the object and never the source of knowledge, Filipino practices hamper the study of those practices. Guthe did note that “locals” expressed “fear” of the burial sites: “As a rule they stand in fear of the spirits of the dead, a fear which is occasionally strong enough to cause the abandonment of fertile farming land.”33 But he dismissed this evidence that the sites were sacrosanct by concluding that any pre-Christian traditions or beliefs had disappeared from memory: “The Filipinos have been under Christian influence for such a long period that all recollection of pre-Spanish inhumations has passed. They vaguely associate bones and vessels found in the course of plowing and excavating, with ancestors, but never in a personal sense.”34 Perceiving the primitive as outside time, Guthe feared that, “due to foreign influences, the data are gradually disappearing” and would “in a few years be entirely non-existent unless trained ethnologists do field work in this area.”35 He concluded that this “period of gathering the material” would yield “abundant opportunity” for future research, but during the expedition, “little more than keeping the field records in order could be accomplished.”36 This anxious rhetoric of loss and disappearance functions to justify the accumulative nature of the expedition. What really was at stake for Guthe was the establishment of knowledge in the form of the museum and the academic department. Guthe stated that his research goal was “gathering additional data upon [sic]

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the commercial relations between the Filipinos and Asiatic civilizations.”37 But he imposed conditions on his agreement with the University of Michigan that make explicit the connection between primitive accumulation and the founding of American academic institutions like the museum, the department, and the journal. Guthe agreed to direct the expedition only if the University of Michigan promised to create an anthropology museum and an academic department of anthropology, promises that apparently “sustained Guthe throughout his fieldwork” and that were fulfilled upon his return to the United States.38 A decade later, in 1935, Guthe became one of the founders of the Society for American Archaeology and its flagship journal, American Antiquity.39 The Guthe collection exemplifies how the period of “gathering” material— again, what I am calling primitive accumulation—may announce itself in the language of research, but in fact functions to legitimate the founding of academic institutions. So while it is now commonplace to speak of discourse as constituting its objects, I instead am showing here how the discourse or the discipline literally has to accumulate its objects first, and then figure out how to order them discursively. Moreover, the “establishment of the archive,” as Mark Rice puts it, instantiates an accumulative epistemology, an unceasing and foundationally violent quest for accrued knowledge that unceasingly disavows its foundational violence.40 The university’s Philippine archive exists as a result of a series of scientific conquests, so to speak, beginning with Steere’s 1870s expedition, that preceded the military conquest of the Philippines. In her work on the Smithsonian National Museum’s preservation and display of Native Americans as primitive and disappeared peoples, Jacqueline Fear-Segal argues that “these ‘memorials’ not only contributed to the sequence of the evolutionary narrative, but also to the creation of a system of knowledge that legitimated the national political structures on which the institution rested.”41 As I outlined in my introductory chapter, following Derrida’s reading of the Greek roots of the word “archive,” we see that the Guthe collection exemplifies how the archive stands for both commencement and commandment, the beginnings of the University of Michigan’s anthropology museum and department and the authorization of these institutional entities’ power to rule. American academic institutions and scholars have shown little capacity for recognizing or reflecting upon the epistemological, political,

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or ethical ramifications of the process of establishing the archive. Any self-consciousness about the origins of the colonial archive is a fairly recent phenomenon. Historians and other scholars are “relative latecomers in questioning the objectivity of colonial archives,” as Mark Rice puts it.42 The Guthe collection proves no exception. As I already have noted, Guthe showed little capacity for self-reflection about his fieldwork methods and ethics, and this failure to interrogate the colonial origins of the archive continues to shape contemporary scholarship on the Guthe collection. For example, a 2013 special issue of the journal Asian Perspectives is devoted to the Guthe collection, including an introduction by Carla Sinopoli, who has been the curator of the Guthe collection since 1993. The issue’s goal was to “scrutinize old museum collections with new research questions.”43 Yet the colonial conditions that fundamentally shaped the establishment of the Guthe collection are, at best, briefly mentioned in passing. As I mentioned earlier in the chapter, on the first page of her introduction, Sinopoli writes that “like many early archaeological projects around the world, the history of the University of Michigan’s Philippine Expedition Collection is a part of the history of colonialism, specifically U.S. colonialism in the Philippines.”44 But this fundamental fact has no impact on the historical narrative or conceptual framework of the essay that follows. The only limitation to the Guthe collection that Sinopoli mentions has to do with how “cursory” Guthe’s agents’ fieldnotes were.45 Another scholar who studied the skeletal material in the Guthe collection admits that Guthe’s goal was the “recovery of exotic material” and that the “excavation techniques [Guthe] employed may not be entirely acceptable by today’s standards.”46 Again, this kind of brief reference to the highly problematic nature of Guthe’s methods and goals—not to mention the larger context of American colonialism— does not have any impact on the contemporary scholar’s research goals, methods, and findings. In fact, both Guthe and the contemporary archaeologist come to the same tautological conclusion that the open and collectivist nature of indigenous burial practices constitutes an impediment to the study of those very practices. As I mentioned above, Guthe noted in the 1927 report that he published in American Anthropologist that “recent use” of the burial caves by “native shamans”—their open and collectivist burial practices—created “havoc” and interfered with his attempt to preserve

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and gather material for the future archive. Nearly ninety years later, in the aforementioned 2013 special issue of Asian Perspectives, two scholars agree with Guthe. One scholar notes that the “open nature of cave burials . . . poses a challenge for chronological control.”47 The other regretfully concludes, “The practice of collective burial often results in loss of information about the primary treatment of individual burials . . . as earlier remains are distributed by later burials and commemorative ritual acts. . . . As a result, it is not possible to ascribe particular goods to particular individuals.”48 For both Guthe and the contemporary archaeologist, the preservation of individual remains is crucial for their gathering and processing of information, and ongoing Filipino collectivist and open practices contribute to the scientists’ failure and the “loss of information.” Of course, one instead might think that the collectivist practices that Guthe inadvertently documents constitute the beginning of significant research findings. But neither “old” nor “new” research questions allow for deviation from the emphasis on the individual as the basis for accurate or complete preservation. Both old and new approaches to the burial material in the Guthe collection show how these scholars’ accumulative epistemology hampers rather than enables the acquisition of knowledge about the ostensible object of research. The object of American knowledge turns out to be not so much the Filipino as accumulation in and of itself. Sinopoli concludes that the contemporary scholarship affirms the “enduring value of old museum collections for shaping our understandings of ancient Southeast Asia.”49 With that conclusion, Sinopoli unwittingly underscores the epistemic conservation of power/knowledge that is part of the colonial project. Both the “old” and the “new” research share an investment in the principle of preservation. At first glance the archaeologist’s goal of preservation is commendable: The scientist attempts to preserve everything before it all disappears. The act of preservation constitutes the scientist as a scientist and not a looter. Guthe was concerned about how forces of nature—including “native shamans”—were creating “chaos” at his chosen sites and disrupting the preservationist principle of his fieldwork. The contemporary archaeologist is concerned about time and the difficulty of establishing chronology. For both Guthe and the contemporary archaeologist, the implication is that local or indigenous peoples are incapable of appreciating what they have.

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The scientist’s goal of material preservation turns out to be an alibi for accumulation, which in turn is a euphemism for looting and imperial adventure. Sinopoli explicitly if briefly refers to the history of “looting” in Southeast Asia in a very curious fashion. She argues that the Guthe collection is “remarkable . . . because it was made several decades before extensive looting of archaeological sites had become widespread across Southeast Asia.”50 Here, the curator at once confesses and denies that there is a fundamental problem with “looting.” On the one hand, Sinopoli acknowledges the massive problem of the “looting” of Southeast Asian archaeological sites. On the other hand, she does not seem able to grasp the possibility that archaeological fieldwork itself—and especially Guthe’s exhumation of mortuary sites that showed evidence of ongoing veneration by indigenous peoples—might be an act of looting. Accumulative epistemology shows itself and then conceals itself behind the alibi of archaeological discovery and preservation. In both Guthe’s and Sinopoli’s writings, the principle of preservation disguises what turns out to be an intersection between the idea of the racial primitive and accumulative epistemology.

Headhunters Guthe and Sinopoli exemplify how an archaeologist writing in 1927 and a curator writing in 2013 can share a lack of awareness about the political and ethical ramifications of their research. What divides the civilized European from the “primitive” is this capacity or incapacity to produce self-reflective knowledge. The capacity for thought demarcates the boundary between the rational “heads” and the savage headhunters, and this division permeates the study of the social sciences and the arts in the West. In her capacious assessment of the rise of the social sciences in the West, Denise da Silva has argued that this racialized difference between mind and body must be understood as a spatialized organization of the human, rather than simply a question of biological racism, such that the world is mapped into zones occupied by what Silva calls the subject of transparency and the subject of affectability.51 David Lloyd focuses on the ramifications of this division in the arena of aesthetics, and he has distinguished between what he calls the “Subject without properties” and the racial, colonial subject.52

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The UMMNH Philippine exhibit reinforces this boundary between the rational white American “head” and the Filipino headhunter, and visitors to the museum—children and adults—absorb and reiterate this difference. During one of my several visits to the Philippine exhibit, I was studying one of the display cases when a group of two men, one woman, and a child entered the gallery. Since it is a rather small space, I could not help overhearing their conversation. They probably were Michiganders visiting from out of town and apparently were white. Led by the boy’s curiosity, the group paused in front of a display case entitled “The Deadly Tools of a Warrior,” which includes several weapons from Mindanao and northern Luzon along with a “warrior’s necklace” made of boars’ teeth. The boy exclaimed, “Look at that cannibal necklace!” The adults murmured confusedly. Then the group shuffled along to the next gallery, with an exhibition entitled “Explore Evolution” that opened with placards explaining that humans and chimpanzees are “cousins in life’s family tree.” I do not think that anyone in the group had paused long enough to read the exhibit labels, which contain references to wartime practices of “headhunting.” For example, the “warrior’s necklace”

Figure 1.5. Display cases E3–E8, Philippine exhibit at the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor. Photograph by Mark Gjukich.

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Figure 1.6. “The Deadly Tools of a Warrior.” University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor. Photograph by Mark Gjukich.

is described as “worn by warriors in ceremonies that followed successful head-hunting raids,” while the label accompanying the display case’s main theme, “The Deadly Tools of a Warrior,” explains that “small groups of warriors” sometimes “took the heads of victims as trophies.”53 But they contain no reference to cannibalism.

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Figure 1.7. Detail of boars’ teeth necklace next to a photograph of Ibilao men. University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor. Photograph by Mark Gjukich.

Nonetheless, the child visitor absorbed and voiced the message of cannibalism told by the exhibition’s juxtaposition of objects and images, which in turn affirm larger and pervasive myths of the savage cannibal. To child and adult visitor alike, the visual story unfolding before their eyes is that of nearly naked brown men wielding crude weapons and hunting other human beings for their flesh and teeth, the proof of which lies right in front of them. How so? The necklace is displayed at the bottom of the display case that reaches the lowest to the floor, and so it is perfectly positioned to capture the attention of shorter and presumably younger children. (In contrast, in each of the display cases, the text explaining the main theme is positioned at the eye-level height of a standing adult.) To the right of the boars’ teeth necklace is a photograph of Ibilao men with shields and spears; the accompanying caption explains, “Warfare was a part of most men’s lives.” An actual spear, shield, ax, and kris are displayed above the necklace, looming above the child’s head. To the left of the boars’ teeth necklace, in the adjacent display case labeled “The Body Adorned,” is a black box containing eight human teeth nestled in white padding.54 Along with photographs of a tattooed man and

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Figure 1.8. Floor plan of the fourth floor of the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor. Image courtesy of John Klausmeyer.

a grinning man showing decorated teeth, the eight teeth provide material evidence of the practice of cosmetic bodily ornamentation. There is, once again, no reference to cannibalism. But the juxtaposition of these images and objects conveys to the visitor a message about cannibalism, the most barbaric and depraved practice of all. The teeth pivot between victim and predator. On the one hand, the teeth easily can be interpreted as the leftover souvenirs from the victim of a flesh-eating manhunt. On the other hand, in the photograph of the man with a toothsome smile, the bared teeth easily can be taken as a sign of aggression. This message of cannibalism is reinforced by the anthropology gallery’s architectural and lighting design. Primitivism is built into the very architecture of the museum’s fourth floor. The curved shape of the gallery—calling to mind a kidney or a digestive tract—marks it off from the rectilinearity of the previous rooms. Its brown wood fixtures and furnishings contribute to a basic theme of roundness and brownness, which together evoke a sense of the organic and the seamless and thus reinforce the idea of the primitive. Only the apertures of the exhibit cases are rectilinear and white, thus declaring that this is the way to see into the display and to make sense of the people and objects on exhibit. In other words, this is how the museum’s accumulation of the primitive works to create Western power/knowledge. A hodgepodge of objects greets the eye: a large ceramic urn, human teeth, spears, bracelets, and burial items.

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Alongside late nineteenth-century photographs of gun-toting University of Michigan faculty and students conducting zoological research in the Philippines, these artifacts narrate the daily life of the eternal primitive. These artifacts are visually accessible behind “transparent but impregnable partitions.”55 As I noted earlier, the visiting schoolchildren know that they are not allowed to touch. They get the message: Look but don’t touch. Indeed, the act of “seeing into” the display enables the replacement of the tactile by the visual. This substitution is reinforced by the way that some of the glass partitions cant forward—rather than stand vertical—thereby inviting the viewer to lean forward and almost touch these things from another world. (By contrast, some of the informational posters cant backward, indicating that they are designed for the taller, standing—and presumably adult—museum visitor.) But even before visitors reach the Philippine exhibit, the museum has prepared them for the sight of savages. The UMMNH is a gray, fourstory building, and the Philippine exhibit is tucked away in a corner of the top floor. Visitors enter the building on the ground floor and find themselves in a quite elegant if miniaturized rotunda. The miniaturized

Figure 1.9. Display case exhibiting extinct and endangered animals. University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor. Photograph by Mark Gjukich.

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grandiosity of the rotunda echoes the architecture of national monuments, and this aura of monumentality is accentuated by the installation of the busts of six white men, including Steere’s, associated with the founding of the museum or its collections. Climbing up the staircase from the ground floor, visitors glimpse the very big and very small fossils inhabiting the Hall of Evolution on the second floor, and then the feathery and leathery skins of “Michigan wildlife” suspended behind glass on the third floor. A display case devoted to extinct or endangered animals stands on the landing between the third and fourth floors. The stretched, parched skins of various non-extant creatures thus form the prelude to the fourth floor, which used to display a series of fourteen Native American dioramas, including one devoted to Pocahontas. (I discuss the controversy surrounding the dioramas and their subsequent removal toward the end of the chapter.) Before the dioramas were moved into storage, visitors climbing up to the fourth floor moved from a display case about extinct animals to a series of Native American dioramas to the glittering rocks and minerals in the geology room before finally arriving at the Philippine exhibit in a corner of the anthropology room. The logics of extinction and petrification are thoroughly enmeshed with that of primitivism. In ways reminiscent of the spatiality of the 1904 World’s Fair, Filipinos are demarcated from the indigenous peoples of the Americas, yet primitiveness flows through the entire floor. But who are the real primitives? Who are the real headhunters? As it turns out, the white American scientist is the real headhunter. As I discussed earlier, Carl Guthe exhumed burial grounds in the Philippines and collected, packed up, and transported human skeletal material back to the United States as part of the founding of the university’s anthropology collection. This foundational act of headhunting is indicated by the six busts displayed in the museum’s rotunda. While the busts of these six white American men are meant to represent intellectual and epistemological achievement, I argue that they also are a sign of American academia’s dependence on primitive accumulation. These six heads depend on the collection of Filipino skulls in order to tell a powerful story of invidious difference between bodies that can think and bodies that cannot think. The UMMNH also primes its visitors with what Mieke Bal calls “museumtalk” about its collections and collecting.56 “Museumtalk” refers to the self-referential, museological messages that the museum, especially

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the large museum, conveys to its visitors. By paying attention to the “discourse of museum discourse,” in Bal’s phrase, we can learn about how the museum defines the purpose and goal of its collections and justifies the act of collecting, meta-messages that contribute to a larger discourse and common sense about accumulation.57 For example, during the 2009–2010 academic year, the University of Michigan’s twelve museums coordinated a range of programming open to the public that celebrated collections and collecting as part of its theme that year, “Meaningful Objects: Museums in the Academy.”58 Banners that advertised the UMMNH’s exhibition Collecting for Science: Collections, Science, and Scholarship flapped atop flagpoles all around campus.59 The exhibition highlighted collections research at the museums of anthropology, zoology, and paleontology, and at the herbarium. In its promotional material, the UMMNH justified and celebrated collections and collecting as a source of scientific reliability with museological claims like the following: “Museum specimens substantiate collecting events and provide a basis for scientific research.”60 The 2009–2010 exhibition echoed the permanent didactics on the UMMNH ground-floor rotunda that introduce visitors to the different collections—again, by anthropology, zoology, paleontology, and the herbarium—with pronouncements like the following: “Modern collecting is responsible collecting,” “Museums are MORE than just storage facilities,” “The U-M Museums contain vast amounts of information,” “Museum collections document changes,” and “The collections support research.” These kinds of claim exemplify what I have been calling the accumulative epistemology that subtends the colonial project, not only in terms of the past (for example, Guthe’s foundational expedition to the Philippines), but also in terms of the representation of “specimens” in the museum today. In the case of the Philippines, the accumulated objects serve to “substantiate”—both materially and ideologically—the “collecting events” and “scientific research.” Seen through the lens of primitive accumulation, “foreign” objects are transported to and domesticated as evidence of racialized primitivity. And this is all for the educational benefit of children, who themselves are configured as another kind of primitive who must undergo a process of learning and transformation from an ignorant, uncivilized subject into a knowing, civilized subject who understands how to behave—do not touch! do not run! do not

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shout!—in a museum. Progress through the museum—literally walking through the exhibitions—is part of the museum’s museological and pedagogical meta-discourse about taming the child.

Knowledge Nullius and the Pivotal, Flexible Filipino How might we consider the white American academic’s act of headhunting as a corollary to the settler colonial fantasy of terra nullius, empty land by way of emptied land? I propose that the relationship between the American headhunter and the Filipino skull should be understood as part of a broader phenomenon that we might call “knowledge nullius,” which precedes and accompanies the logic of terra nullius. That is to say, the development of an accumulative epistemology depends on the precept of knowledge nullius. The investigation of the phenomenon of “accumulating the primitive” requires grappling with what Aileen Moreton-Robinson calls an epistemological “possessiveness” on the part of the white settler.61 In her work on “White possession” and its circulation as a “regime of truth” in the Australian context of Aboriginal studies, Moreton-Robinson implies that the precept of terra nullius works hand in hand with the precept of “knowledge nullius.” According to Moreton-Robinson, the “White fantasy of terra nullius and the disavowal of Indigenous sovereignty are fundamental to the narration of Australian identity and nation-building.”62 Moreton-Robinson further argues, “Whiteness operates through the racialized application of disciplinary knowledges and regulatory mechanisms, which function together to preclude recognition of Indigenous sovereignty or Indigenous knowledge.”63 These presuppositions about vacancy subtend the materiality and territoriality of settler colonial expansion—vacancy serves as a euphemism for evacuation—and they are intimately intertwined with the epistemological. While the study of settler colonialism has focused on the settler’s myth of terra nullius, we also need to examine knowledge nullius, and what Lorenzo Veracini has called the “idea that indigenous knowledge is ultimately unowned.”64 Note that there are two notions of “unownership” in play here that are connected but distinct: being unowned, which amounts to collective ownership, and being “not knowledge,” or empty of knowing. Knowledge does not count as such until it is individuated and appropriated.

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When it comes to knowledge nullius and the Philippines, the Philippine material collected by the University of Michigan served as a foundational “first” that subsequently lost its value and, for the most part, has been forgotten.65 As I discussed earlier, Guthe’s account of his fieldwork shows the workings of American knowledge nullius because the American anthropologist configured native shamans not as sources or bearers of local knowledge but rather as obstacles to the scientific preservation of knowledge. The University of Michigan’s herbarium provides another important example. The vast majority of the plant specimens from Steere’s foundational collection from the 1870s and 1880s were ferns, and a huge percentage of those were from the Philippines. Today, the University of Michigan’s herbarium owns a total of 1.7 million specimens, with several tens of thousands of specimens from the Philippines scattered throughout the collection. However, according to the herbarium’s current-day curator, only a tiny fraction of the Philippine collection actually is databased, and most is not easily accessible. The herbarium prioritizes what it calls its “New World” collection, and, massive as the Philippine collection is, it is classified as part of the less important “Old World” collection. The herbarium’s curator has admitted, “While we do plan to database all of our holdings including everything from the Old World, no plans are set yet for the Old World material, except for types.”66 What is the purpose or value of this act of accumulation? What motivates the university to preserve a collection that it implicitly acknowledges is, at best, increasingly irrelevant? There are several ways to answer these questions, but I would argue that this archive is an expression of the way capitalism is innately colonial. As Steere’s Philippine fern collection exemplifies, the university’s archive and colonial capitalism, grounded as both are in the act of accumulating specimens from “primitive economies” around the world, transform the habit of “primitive accumulation” into power/knowledge. Note, however, how the professor’s habit of “primitive accumulation” constitutes the obverse of the capitalist ethic of abstention. This time, the “great old” professor’s act of collection, as opposed to the capitalist’s act of abstention, is made to be virtuous. For the sake of knowledge—knowledge for knowledge’s sake!—Steere heroically traveled and combed the world.

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But there is something distinct about how knowledge nullius works when it comes to the display of the Filipino in the United States. As a number of scholars have shown, the visual display of the Filipino in the U.S. context historically is entangled with war and conquest, especially the Philippine-American War.67 Oscar Campomanes has analyzed the work of “invisibilization” and amnesia achieved by the Filipino in American imperial culture.68 Nerissa Balce importantly extends these insights when she points out that the visibility of the Filipino depends on disappearing the conditions for the emergence of that visibility.69 Building upon earlier scholarship on U.S.-Philippines relations and visual culture like Benito Vergara’s book Displaying Filipinos: Photography and Colonialism in Early 20th Century Philippines (1995) and Laura Wexler’s book Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (2000), Balce has traced a transmedia history of the technology of surveillance in her 2016 book Body Parts of Empire: Abjection, Filipino Images, and the American Archive. Balce brings to bear her twinned interest in the literary and the visual, and she shows that the concept of American surveillance emerges in novels of romantic colonial encounter set in the Philippines. Moreover, in the chapters that deal with American imperial photography in the Philippines, she argues that the science of the natural world was transformed into the science of militarized surveillance. These photographs then took on another life as they circulated in popular publications. Balce analyzes a range of the “objects left behind” as America transformed itself into a world power during and after its first transoceanic war, the Philippine-American War.70 She convincingly argues that the significance of this “shadow archive” of popular culture lies in its ability to hide the Filipino in plain sight.71 For example, five years after the publication of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippines,” about twenty million people visited the 1904 World’s Fair in St Louis, Missouri. With more than a thousand live Filipinos on display, the Philippine exhibit was the fair’s most popular attraction. But the spectacular nature of this imperial spectacle occluded the fact that in 1904 guerrilla warfare against the Americans was still ongoing in the Philippine countryside, even though the United States had declared the PhilippineAmerican War officially over in 1902.72 The visual display of Filipinos

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temporally as well as ideologically coincided with the military conquest of the Philippines, a brutal and brutally forgotten war that scholars recently have described as genocidal according to even the most conservative definitions of genocide.73 Filipinos are subject to what could be called a primitivizing Orientalism that is specific to the conquest, colonization, and stereotyping of Filipinos.74 Whereas East Asians, particularly Chinese and Japanese, tend to be stereotyped in the United States as perpetually alien and inassimilable because they have too much culture, Filipinos do not have enough culture. Rather, Filipinos are associated with excess embodiment, which can be traced to phenomena such as the display of live Filipinos in a World’s Fair over a century ago and the display of a university’s collection today. Thus, the idea that empire is tightly bound up with vision holds true for Filipinos arguably more so than for any other colonized subjects of the United States. Furthermore, the highly visible representation of the Filipino in popular cultural forms in the early decades of the twentieth century enables the erasure of the circumstances of the Filipino’s visibility. This phenomenon plays out in today’s American museum, wherein the display of the Filipino coincides with the disappearance of the conditions and context for that visibility. When it comes to the Philippine exhibition at the UMMNH, the founding of anthropology requires forgetting both a genocidal war and the role that anthropology as a discipline played in establishing the conditions of possibility—the racial primitivity assigned to the Filipino—for that war. The visibility of the body coincides with and enacts the forgetting of its history: This process of radical dehistoricization is the form of knowledge nullius specific to the Filipino. Filipino skulls facilitate the production of knowledge by American heads. Drawing on Jodi Byrd’s notion of how indigenous peoples provide a “transit” or conduit for Western epistemology as the objects—but never the makers—of knowledge, I am arguing that Filipinos in the American museum similarly serve as objects but never creators of knowledge.75 I would add that Filipino proximity to Native American presence in the American museum should be understood as fulfilling an important function of another kind of “transit.” Very broadly speaking, the conquest and colonization of the Philippines and Native American nations are both

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structured by benevolent assimilation, the rhetoric of friendship, and tutelage. Both are considered ahistorical and primitive. But I do not intend to make any easy comparison between the Philippine and the Native. As I discussed in the introduction, there is an important difference between the status of “foreign in a domestic sense” achieved by some colonies or territories like the Philippines and that of “domestic dependent nations” in the case of Native American nations. The former achieved a form of independence (although the neocolonial is embedded in the colonial), while the latter were consigned to “some sort of ‘lasting’ for others,” as Lorenzo Veracini puts it.76 I agree with Veracini and others that these are distinct if resonant modes of colonial subjugation. Yet the real point of comparison and connection is between two genocides that have to be erased from memory and history. When the museum does not account for the physical proximity between the Filipino and the Native by explaining their historical proximity, genocide is erased. The violence of accumulation is erased, a disavowal that, as I argued earlier, inheres in the disciplines that the museum founds. The too quick dismissal of the opportunity for comparison between colonialism and settler colonialism in the Philippine case also runs the risk of disappearing the crucial role that the Philippines plays. The American colonization of the Philippines provides us with a historical and paradigmatic example of the interconnectedness between settler and military colonialisms at the turn of the last century. The Philippines was and is a pivotally ambiguous formation that performs that crucial work of interconnection.77 The Filipino was and is pivotally proximate—in time and space—to the Native. The Philippine is pivotally proximate to the Native because the genocidal war of conquest requires the notion of the primitive for its legitimacy. Moreover, the Philippines is the pivotally ambiguous formation that marks the transition between settler colonialism in the United States, typified by the Indian wars of conquest and genocide, and a transoceanic imperialism that initially deployed the genocidal logic of the Indian wars even if in the end it substituted military occupation for settlement. By attending to the event that produced the Filipino as America’s “little brown brother,” we learn much about the supple structure of colonialism(s), both its material and epistemological dimensions. The Filipino is flexible, and colonialism is supple.

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The Freedom to Accumulate and the Museum’s Crisis of Representation Like colonialism, the university museum is supple. It responds to changing epistemological shifts and has a flexible capital of holdings to enable it to do so. The UMMNH has an explicit commitment to material accumulation as the foundation for epistemological accumulation, which requires what Rosa Luxemburg calls an “unlimited freedom of movement,” a freedom that both enables and justifies the acquisition of the Filipino by the American.78 The university’s freedom of movement requires and results in the dispossession of the colonized subject, who then becomes an enclosed, ocular object of display—in other words, dispossession by accumulation. But my main point here is that, in the case of the university museum, the expansive freedom to accumulate is admired and promoted because the university is associated with the expansion of knowledge, an endeavor that is taken to be a good in and of itself. The accumulative practices of the university museum are ideologically self-sustaining in ways that parallel Luxemburg’s argument about militarism as a “province of accumulation.”79 The military generally does not have to justify its existence and its reproduction, accumulation, or expansion of capital because it is associated with self-defense and patriotic duty. Similarly, the university generally does not have to justify its existence because it is associated with the pursuit of knowledge, a mission connected to virtue and service for the public and all humanity. The problem, of course, is, Who counts as human? The accumulation of knowledge by the American university effects and depends on the dispossession of the Filipino. Thus, the unassailable good associated with the university’s purported mission of education and the concomitant freedom to expand the horizons of knowledge turns out to be the basis for destruction, extrication, exploitation, and indenture. The university and the museum turn out to be devoted to the accumulation of knowledge by dispossession of those deemed subhuman or, in Denise da Silva’s phrasing, the transparent subject’s accumulation of knowledge by the dispossession of the affectable subject. Moreover, the museum not only accumulates but also enacts the distribution of the human between the primitive or the affectable and the developing transparent subject. The museum cannot narrate the Filipino because that would mean establishing an alternative narrative.

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It can only keep repeating the gesture that ties the racial, colonial primitive to the process of primitive accumulation. With this chapter, I have tried to show that the analysis of the misrepresentation of “primitive” civilizations in the museum must be understand not merely as a question of truth or fallacy but as a process and philosophy of primitive accumulation. In the UMMNH, what actually is on display is the museum’s inability to do anything other than simply possess its Philippine connection. The massive size of the actual collection stands in striking contrast to the smallness of the exhibit. It is, simply put, a cache. Moreover, the spatial, architectural, and textual features of the museum’s top floor indicate that the museum is at a loss as to how to narrativize and locate the Philippines, especially as regards the university’s relation to the Philippines and American imperialism. Indeed, the museum is invested in not telling the history of this relationship because to do so would require revealing the university’s direct involvement in the colonization of America’s first colony in Asia. Producing its own version of what Angela Miller calls America’s “confession and avoidance syndrome,” the museum tellingly lacks historiography when it comes to the Philippines and instead tells a Philippine lack of history.80 Yet the museum can change—or, more precisely, it can be forced to change. Following a series of protests and actions by Native Americans on and off-campus—including the Native Caucus, comprising indigenous graduate students, and the student-led group called Ethnography As Activism—the Native American dioramas in the UMMNH were relabeled and then, in 2010, removed and placed in storage. The Ethnography As Activism Subgroup on Repatriation collectively wrote a paper titled “A Case for Shared Ethics: Moving Forward on Repatriation at the University of Michigan,” in which they called for the immediate halt of all research on items subject to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), and they presented it at a 2010 graduate student anthropology conference.81 Later that year, NAGPRA was updated so as to clarify the repatriation of remains that are “not easily traced to a current tribe.”82 In 2012 the remains of 120 ancestors of the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan were repatriated from the University of Michigan and laid to rest at the Nibokaan Ancestral Cemetery on the Isabella Indian Reservation.83

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In the fall of 2012, a group of Philippine studies scholars that included Victor Mendoza, Deirdre de la Cruz, Christi-Ann Castro, and Joseph Galura contributed to the creation of an exhibit overlay entitled “Let’s Talk! The US in the Philippines: The Untold Story” in order to provide basic historical, political, and socioeconomic context for the Philippine exhibition and collection. According to the University of Michigan’s website, the exhibit overlay was “developed in response to the existing display, Philippine Photos & Finds: A Century of U-M Anthropology in the Philippines. The newly added labels explore some of the ways in which ideas of race informed the American colonial period in the Philippines.”84 As I write, the University of Michigan has announced that the UMMNH will be moved to a biological sciences building currently under construction and scheduled to open in 2018. The university’s zoology, paleontology, and anthropology collections are being moved to a new collections and research facility, while the future of the Ruthven Building, which houses the UMMNH, is unclear.85 Will the UMMNH be allowed to continue to disavow the relationship between the primitive and primitive accumulation, or will it be made to find and create museological alternatives that disallow that disavowal? * * * If, in 1901, the U.S. Supreme Court designated the Philippines and other new colonies “foreign in a domestic sense,” let us now consider another site filled with objects that are foreign in a domestic space. The Frank Murphy Memorial Museum, to which I turn in the following chapter, is filled with souvenirs transported from the Philippines and domesticated in the United States. The imperial museum functions much like a home. It encloses the foreign object—in this case, the Filipino—in a domestic and domesticating space. As America’s racial and colonial primitive, the Filipino fulfills the imperial capitalist state’s need for a doubled and paradoxical form of the “foreign.” But in the case of the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum, the museum does not merely mimic the kind of collecting of souvenirs, curios, books, furniture, and art practiced and prized by bourgeois households. The museum literally is a home. Let us turn from the university-museum to the home-as-museum.

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Foreign in a Domestic Space Progressivist Imperialism and the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum

In the introductory chapter, we saw how, in a photograph of a group of armed Michiganders exploring and studying the Philippines a few years before the Philippine-American War, fern hunters more closely resembled “Indian hunters.” In chapter 1, we saw what kind of destiny awaited these students and professors after they finished collecting zoological, anthropological, and botanical material and returned stateside. I described how an anthropologist like Carl Guthe established his academic career with the accumulation of material, including Filipino skulls, that he disinterred from burial sites in the southern Philippines. If, in the Philippines, the American colonizer transformed himself from frontiersman to scientific explorer, what came next? In this chapter I argue that the University of Michigan served as a site for the transformation of the American imperial mission in the Philippines from scientific collection to social improvement. America’s mission changed from the accumulation of plant and animal life—including “primitive” human life—in the name of science to the accumulation and application of social science expertise in the name of progressive social justice. The history of the transformation of America’s imperial mission is exemplified by the life and material belongings of the post–Progressive Era politician, colonial administrator, and jurist Frank Murphy (1890–1949). Rising to prominence as a result of his reliance on the expertise of University of Michigan academics, Murphy moved from local government in Detroit to his international post as governorgeneral in the Philippines before taking on national roles as Michigan’s governor and associate U.S. Supreme Court justice. He since has been credited with creating the early architecture, in Detroit, of what would become Franklin Roosevelt’s national New Deal program, and then with 55

Figure 2.1. Exterior, Frank Murphy Memorial Museum, Harbor Beach, Michigan. Photograph by Lynda Fitzgibbon.

Figure 2.2. Interior, living room, Frank Murphy Memorial Museum. Photograph by Lynda Fitzgibbon.

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Figure 2.3. Frank Murphy’s walking stick collection. Frank Murphy Memorial Museum. Photograph by Lynda Fitzgibbon.

transplanting the “little New Deal” to the Philippines. As I show in this chapter, Murphy deployed these progressivist ideals in order to contain rather than unleash the most radical and transformative potentialities of both the labor movement in the United States and anticolonial, land reformist struggles in the Philippines. Through Murphy’s career, we can track the transnational career of what I call “progressivist imperialism,” the emergence of the ideals of the New Deal in relation to the “little New

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Figure 2.4. Detail of cane made of Philippine mahogany. Frank Murphy Memorial Museum. Photograph by author.

Deal” and vice versa. Rather than rehearse the generic conventions and limitations of the biographies of great men, however, this chapter ultimately turns to the domestic sphere and an interdisciplinary method of material and visual cultural analysis in order to shed light not only on how progressivist imperialism facilitated the domestication of radical politics but how Filipinos negotiated and challenged that process. Murphy’s birthplace and family home in Michigan is now a museum that commemorates his arc of public service and achievement. The Frank Murphy Memorial Museum is filled with over eight hundred artifacts, including furniture, paintings, formal clothing, walking sticks, photographs, and other souvenirs collected during Murphy’s time in the Philippines. The museum is filled with tribute, a term that I argue is filled with colonial resonance. If, in 1901, the U.S. Supreme Court designated the Philippines and other newly acquired colonies “foreign in a domestic sense,” I argue that the Filipino objects in the Murphy Memorial Museum must be considered foreign in a domestic space. The imperial

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museum functions much like a home. It encloses the foreign object—in this case, the Filipino—in a domestic and domesticating space. While the Murphy Memorial Museum generally is considered and promoted as commemorative of Murphy’s public history, this chapter investigates the gendered nature of this domestic space by also paying attention to the legacy of Murphy’s sister Marguerite Murphy Teahan, who accompanied her bachelor brother to the Philippines and served as his official hostess in the role of first lady. With this focus on the sister’s domestic feminine imperialism, this chapter concludes by bringing to light an alternative economy of Filipino tribute that challenges American progressivist imperialism.

Who Was Frank Murphy? Murphy’s biography is a micro-history of progressivist imperialism. His was a life defined by enormous personal ambition and a powerful combination of secular and religious zeal that dovetailed nicely with Progressive Era ideals that saw advancements in knowledge and technology as a means of curing America of an array of social, political, and economic ills. A third-generation Irish American, Frank Murphy was born to a tight-knit Catholic family in Harbor Beach, Michigan, which was at the time a prosperous industrial and port city on the shores of Lake Huron. Murphy earned undergraduate and law degrees at the University of Michigan, where he was a member of the honorary society called the Michigamua. He then worked as an attorney in Detroit, a city whose boom was fueled by the meteoric rise of the automotive industry. He served as a U.S. army officer in Europe during World War I, after which he entered an educational program in postwar Europe designed for U.S. military officers. In 1919 he completed a postgraduate degree in Dublin, Ireland, where he consorted with leaders and advocates of the various (and eventually opposing) sides of the Irish cause. Returning to Michigan, he went back to his work as an attorney for a short while before launching his political career with his election as a criminal court judge in Detroit in 1923. First as an independent and then as a Democrat, Murphy attracted a voter base that included his fellow veterans, immigrant whites, labor organizations, and African Americans increasingly disenchanted with the Republican Party. He was elected mayor of that

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beleaguered city in 1930 during the Great Depression, and he spearheaded heretofore unheard-of emergency relief programs and policies that drew on the expertise of University of Michigan academics. These programs attracted the attention of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, established Murphy’s national reputation as a progressivist, and formed a precedent for what would become Roosevelt’s New Deal, a far-ranging, decade-long series of state-sponsored programs for creating jobs and reviving the economy.1 A Roosevelt appointee, Murphy then served as the last American governor-general of the Philippine colony and first high commissioner of the Philippine Commonwealth from 1933 to 1936. In the Philippines, he set up and ran what his biographers call the “little New Deal” and “New Deal colonialism.” Returning stateside, he was elected governor of Michigan in 1937. Finally, he served as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1940 until his death in 1949, an appointment and legacy distinguished by his dissenting vote in the 1944 Korematsu v. United States case that sent Fred Korematsu to prison for refusing the draft during the era of Japanese American incarceration. He died when he was only fifty-nine years old, thus ending the hopes of those—including Murphy himself—who saw Murphy becoming the first Catholic and first Irish American president of the United States. Murphy led a storied if foreshortened life. He was charismatic and extremely ambitious, and he characterized his work in government service as his “life’s vocation” and “in the light of a ministry.”2 To this day his name adorns the Murphy Hall of Justice building in downtown Detroit, yet Murphy’s legacy largely goes underacknowledged, especially when it comes to the combination of progressivism and imperialism that his biography, ideology, and policies exemplify. With renewed attention to his record, especially his service as the highest-ranking colonial official in the Philippines, we see that Murphy exemplifies the next stage in the evolution of the American colonizer: the reformer and improver. Murphy serves as an example of what I call the “progressivist imperialist,” which, as I will show, combines a progressive domestic political agenda with an ideology of racial colonial improvement.3 With the interpretive framework of progressivist imperialism, I attempt to contribute to the insights of the historian George Fredrickson, who argues that in the analysis of the connections between the Spanish-American War and the lynching horrors in the South in the 1890s, we must understand that

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the transoceanic imperialism that impelled the Spanish-American War was not motivated by extreme racism but rather by a return to benevolence and reform, what Fredrickson calls the emergence of the “new accommodationists.” According to the tenets of “accommodationist racism,” African Americans were considered “not as an incorrigible menace to white civilization, but as a useful and quiescent internal colony.”4 These new attitudes toward African Americans established attitudes and ideologies, like those of Frank Murphy, for dealing with the aftermath of the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars and the peoples of the new colonies. I draw on several sources for this chapter, including Frank Murphy’s biographers, his speeches in the Philippines, Marguerite Murphy Teahan’s journal and correspondence, the docents who volunteer at the Murphy family home-turned-museum in Michigan, and the rich collection of Philippine artifacts displayed in the museum. These are extraordinarily rich primary and secondary sources that show how the Philippines is made visibly invisible. For example, Sydney Fine’s threevolume biography of Frank Murphy, published in 1975, 1979, and 1984, is a monumental achievement, a thoroughly researched narrative account of Murphy’s uncanny gift for being present at epochal junctures in American and Filipino history. However, Fine’s analysis of the significance of Murphy’s governance in the Philippines is flawed because Fine does not take fully into account the central event of the American colonization of the Philippines. The historian Patrick Wolfe has argued that colonialism is a structure and not an event, and, like the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History’s Philippine exhibition, Murphy’s biographers and the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum are excellent examples of how badly things can fall apart when the structure of colonialism goes unrecognized.5 What connects all of these Philippine collections is this signal lack. As I indicated in the previous chapters, Oscar Campomanes has called our attention to the general “invisibilization” of the Philippines in American historiography, and in her study of American photography in the Philippines, Nerissa Balce has argued that the representation of Filipinos ironically secures the erasure of the circumstances of their visibility.6 I also have argued elsewhere that the case of American colonialism in the Philippines reveals the workings of “double disavowal,” or what Jenine Dallal calls American imperialism

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“UnManifest.”7 The inclusion of the Philippines in these archives and the appearance of the Philippines in these exhibitions and, even more generally, in the American heartland seem anomalous even though all of the reasons and evidence for that appearance are right there, hiding in plain sight. When it comes to the extraordinary persistence of the amnesia surrounding American colonialism in the Philippines, a doubled set of tasks awaits us. We have to insist on recognizing both the event and structure of colonialism; one way to do so is through the idea of progressivist imperialism.

America’s “Little New Deal” with Its “Little Brown Brother” Murphy first came to national prominence during his tenure as mayor of Detroit during the Great Depression because of his policies on unemployment and other forms of emergency relief and also because he organized the first national conference of mayors and became first president of the subsequent mayoral organization. Murphy passionately believed in the accumulation of knowledge as a means of improvement. His experience as a criminal judge and mayor in Detroit before and during the Depression laid the foundation for his belief in the value of the enlightened knowledge furnished by the social sciences. Regularly drawing on the expertise of public health and social welfare academics and practitioners, Murphy empowered the state to apply such knowledge in its efforts to ameliorate or correct social ills. According to the Detroit Times, Murphy’s appointments were “like a Michigan Who’s Who of scholarship and civic endeavor.”8 Armed with that expertise, Murphy attempted to respond to unprecedented demands for food and jobs in Detroit, and his relative success led to his appointment in the Philippines. However, much like the American scientists Joseph Beale Steere and Carl Guthe, whom I profiled in the previous chapter, Murphy lacked the training and qualifications for his post in the Philippines, especially given the panoply of problems that had crystallized around the question of Philippine independence: rural usury and caciquism, the rise of Japan as an imperial power, Moro resistance in the southern Philippines, a range of elite, middle-class, and peasant nationalist movements in the Philippines, and the mix of business, labor, and political interest groups in America pressing for withdrawal from the Philippines.

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Some specialists had serious misgivings at the time about Murphy’s readiness, including Murphy’s former professor Joseph Ralston Hayden, who had become Murphy’s “unofficial talent scout” for academic expertise.9 Hayden privately wrote of Murphy’s appointment that it was “an outrageous travesty upon every principle of good government and sound judgment that he should have been sent out there.”10 Nonetheless, Hayden, who had earned a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, where he also taught political science, accepted Murphy’s invitation to become his vice-governor in the Philippines.11 Murphy arrived in the Philippines with an “advance reputation as a reformer of ‘broad humanity,’ ” and he was an “instant hit” as soon as he arrived in Manila in 1933.12 In his inaugural address to the Philippine legislature, Murphy promised a “sociological program” that would correct “gross inequalities and social injustices” in the Philippines.13 According to a Filipino observer at the time, under Murphy “ ‘social justice’ [became] a household word” in the Philippines.14 Murphy went on to develop the “little New Deal,” a reformist agenda in the islands.15 In his 1965 biography of Frank Murphy, Richard Lunt admiringly explains the emergence of what he calls “New Deal colonialism” during Murphy’s governance of the Philippines. For example, Murphy created the National Emergency Relief Board, which responded to a series of devastating typhoons and floods. He formed the Citizens Unemployment Committee, just as he had in Detroit, in order to create jobs and a “new life for many.”16 According to Lunt, Murphy “had in mind bringing to the Philippines the concept of the welfare state; for the first time the insular government was to assume full responsibility for relief of distress due to any cause.”17 However, according to Sidney Fine’s biography, no deep or radical transformation ever took hold. For example, Murphy created the Rural Improvement Committee to disburse “tenant relief,” but the committee failed to focus on landlord-tenant relations. Overall, Murphy was unwilling to confront the Filipino elite and dismantle long-standing exploitative and repressive caciquism, land usury, and anti-sedition laws.18 Also, unlike its predecessor in Michigan, the Citizens Unemployment Committee’s public relief goals were intertwined with the government’s settler colonial objectives. Financed by the Philippine legislature, the committee sought to provide a “new life for many” by colonizing and

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settling land in the southern Philippines.19 Grounded in Murphy’s evolving ideology of progressivist imperialism, the central government created the foundational infrastructure for internal settler colonialism as “homesteaders” from the north began to migrate systematically to the southern Philippines.20 Lunt describes the committee’s disruption of local social structures and the imposition of settler colonial values: [The] citizens unemployment committee, a copy of his Detroit unemployment committee, spurred public interest in colonization and thereby provided an end to unemployment and a new life for many. The legislature appropriated 1,000,000 pesos to promote settlement of unoccupied public land on Mindanao. It was often difficult to persuade the Filipinos of the value of resettlement as they were wedded to their family, province, and barrio. But, like all people, the Filipinos would follow a road, and, using this lure, the government stimulated colonization by building roads into jungles.21

Here we see the direct connection between the progressivist ideals Murphy developed in Michigan and the settler colonial policies implemented in the southern Philippines. Progressivist goals associated with providing a “new life for many” depended on the availability of what Lunt calls “unoccupied public land.” Such phrases signal the workings of the precepts of terra nullius—empty land by way of emptied land. Progressivism here needs to be understood as an instrument, rather than opponent, of settler colonialism, which initially elicited resistance from Filipinos in the north, who were “difficult to persuade . . . of the value of resettlement.” The unemployment committee’s work is a fascinating instance of how this interdependence between progressivism and settler colonialism was cemented by a larger discourse of paternalism toward people of color. According to Sidney Fine, there was a “strong element of paternalism in Murphy’s view of black-white relationships.”22 On the duties of whites, Murphy shared his thoughts in a 1928 letter to his girlfriend Hester Everard: “Because of our color and our stirring Faith . . . we should long to be kindly and helpful to any who may suffer from that which is beyond their control.”23 Note that Lunt affirms rather than interrogates the unemployment committee’s paternalism when he implicitly characterizes

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Filipinos as a backward people who, like children or pets, had to be tricked by a “lure” into doing what ultimately was best for them. We see at work, once again, the notion of national progress through colonial domestication. When it comes to the study of United States-Philippines relations, racialized paternalism turns out to be a historiographical and not merely historical problem. Lunt’s own paternalism toward Filipinos is echoed by Murphy’s other biographers, who similarly recapitulate rather than analyze the perception that the governor-general was “helping the Filipinos to ‘grow up.’ ”24 Popular historians of the era who pay any sustained attention to the Philippines, like Stanley Karnow and Max Boot, naturalize rather than analyze this intertwining of progressivism and imperialism.25 As a result, the relationship between progressivist and radical movements during the era remains underanalyzed, especially when it comes to that relationship’s transformation as it traveled across the Pacific. Roger Possner’s cultural history of the Progressive Era provides a refreshing departure from this historiographical bias. In his 2008 Ph.D. dissertation, “Cultures of Militarism: Preparations for War in the Progressive Era,” which became the basis for the monograph The Rise of Militarism in the Progressive Era, 1900–1914, Possner argues that the “major lesson of the Spanish-American War” for the United States was that preparation for war was “essential.”26 In the wake of the United States’ first transoceanic war, the Progressive Era became dominated by a “manly middle-class worldview” characterized by a general longing for order and structure wherein social duty was more important than “private desire” and a general abhorrence of “vice and crime.”27 Though the Progressive Era is associated today with enlightened, far-reaching change and reform, Possner contends that Progressives wanted to “change people more than they wanted to change the fabric of society.”28 In short, Possner shows that there was “little in Progressivism that militated against imperialism” and that the Progressive Era was a “time favorable to the growth of militarism.”29 With the exception of Possner and Lunt, few historians have taken seriously the impact of the Philippines on the shaping of the New Deal. Murphy’s “little New Deal” with America’s “little brown brother” largely has been ignored by conservative and liberal Americanist historians

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alike. This diminution of Murphy’s reform efforts in the Philippines and the general lack of knowledge or curiosity about the impact of America’s “foreign” colonies on the formation of the “domestic” state symptomatize the elision of the Philippines and other colonies or territories from the narrative arc of American history. We moreover lose sight of the important transformation of the agenda of American colonialism from settlement or resource extraction to one of social and political improvement. This new agenda defined progressivist imperialism, for which the Philippines under Murphy became the model. To return to Frank Murphy’s biography, we see how the far-ranging ambitions of the politician-judge offer us the perfect opportunity to reflect on the domestic and international manifestations of this imbrication of progressivism, militarism, and imperialism. As a student at the University of Michigan, Murphy had urged his classmates to put “loyalty to the university ahead of loyalty to fraternities and other organizations,” because a “student without sentiment, without love for his college . . . is like a man without a country.”30 We also can ask whether progressivism, especially the kind of middle-class version championed by Murphy that put “country over class,” emerged in tandem with or in opposition to revolutionary movements. While this question merits a much lengthier study and exceeds the parameters of this chapter, I would note that Murphy’s and Teahan’s archives reveal how progressivism was the rationale and means for curtailing and suppressing radical political movements both in Michigan and the Philippines. For example, in a 1934 letter to the siblings, their sister-in-law Irene Murphy described how Murphy’s controversial progressivist policies as Detroit’s mayor had become “part of the gospel”: I laugh to think of the criticism that Frank’s valiant efforts toward securing decent relief for the unemployed got in the early years. His standards are all part of the gospel that is accepted by everyone now. . . . We get bulletins from Washington saying “it is more important to uphold the dignity of our unemployed than it is to catch someone who doesn’t deserve a little relief.” Can you imagine the uproar that would have ensued if that had been pronounced as a national policy in the Hoover administration? I even find myself growing a little conservative in this lush period of social work. It is grand of course, if it can last.31

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She then speculated about the reasons for the federal government’s newfound liberalism: “I often wonder why the Federal government is taking such a liberal policy. Is it really because they are convinced of high standards of relief; or is it because they are trying to distribute buying power through any feasible channel; or is it to avert revolution?”32 With this reference to “revolution,” Irene Murphy implied that the federal government’s embrace of Frank Murphy’s progressivist program was motivated by paranoia in general about anarchism and communism. Interestingly enough, Irene Murphy did not pose the same questions about her brother-in-law, though she should have. Even though he had a reputation as a civil libertarian, Frank Murphy was intensely suspicious of those he categorically and derogatorily called “Bolshevists” and “Bolsheviks.”33 During the height of the 1919–1920 Red Scare in Detroit and other cities around the country, the infamous Palmer raids sponsored by the Department of Justice and headed by Attorney General Palmer resulted in the search, arrest, and detention of thousands deemed “alien radicals.”34 While Murphy publicly decried the police’s brutality and gross violation of civil rights, he privately embraced the xenophobia that underwrote the Red Scare. In a 1919 letter to his mother after a series of raids in Detroit, he wrote, I sympathize deeply with down-trodden people and people of the lower classes. I am with them in all of their struggles for social and industrial uplift. But I have no sympathy with the foreigner who comes to this country and conspires to overthrow the government we Americans have set up for ourselves and want to live under. We must wipe out selfish foreigners trying to upset our government. If there is something wrong with our present system let Americans correct it intelligently. I can [see] nothing to the Bolshevik’s work in this country but greed and selfishness—a terrible desire to get what others have.35

One can see a similar contrast between Murphy’s public and private responses to a range of organized struggles during his tenure as governor-general in the Philippines. Murphy and the American colonial regime in general felt deeply threatened by movements like the pro-independence, land reformist Sakdalistas, which came under surveillance, infiltration, and criminalization by the state; the “Moro situation”

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and resurgent guerrilla warfare in the Muslim south; and the former general Emilio Aguinaldo’s political ambitions.36 The contrast between Murphy’s public and private responses to the Sakdalista uprising of May 2–3, 1935, is especially illuminating. Led by Benigno Ramos (1893–1946), the Sakdal mass movement—sakdal means “to accuse” in Tagalog—had gained a large peasant base by drawing on long-standing opposition to land tenancy and rural usury and had formed a political party by 1933. On May 2–3, 1935, the Sakdalistas had planned coordinated demonstrations and takeovers of municipal buildings in fourteen towns in central Luzon. But the rebellion was quickly crushed. In its wake, Ramos went into political exile in Japan, the insular government arrested over a thousand people, and the Sakdals were disbanded though they eventually merged later with the Socialists and Communists in a united front. Publicly, Murphy characterized the rebellion as local and not systemic, and he commended the actions of the Constabulary. But Murphy ordered a private—not public—inquiry into the Sakdalista uprising, and privately recommended that the Constabulary be given better training in riot and mob control.37 Indeed, a year prior to the Sakdalista uprising, Murphy already had begun to learn his lesson about how to contain the radical elements of labor struggle when four striking workers in Manila were killed during a 1934 cigar factory strike involving about eleven thousand workers across twenty-one factories. In response to an American Civil Liberties Union complaint about police conduct, Murphy equivocated when he wrote that he had done all that he could to prevent “this regrettable and unnecessary incident.”38 Murphy did order a fact-finding investigation into the cigar strike, which led to a slight increase in wages, the return of strikers to work, and, most significantly, a rift between the cigarmakers and the Communists. Indeed, Murphy’s regime oversaw a significant increase in labor union membership. Murphy’s secretary of labor, Ramon Torres—a Filipino appointee—promised to “not stop until the farm laborers in the most distant barrios and the logging man in the depth of the forest, can feel by their side as if it were their guardian angel, the protecting hand of the Government.”39 As I noted earlier, however, Murphy never challenged the Filipino elite nor undermined systemic forms of exploitation and repression. Rather, Murphy socialized extensively with the Filipino elite. In his 1968 biography of Murphy, J. Woodford Howard Jr. notes

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that although Murphy “worked successfully at setting an egalitarian public example, he hobnobbed with the rich.”40 Later, when he became Michigan’s governor, Murphy’s lessons from the labor and land reform struggle in the Philippines would have implications for his turn to this combination of public egalitarianism backed by the coercive power of the police, nonviolent arbitration, and fraternization with the automotive industry’s elite during the 1936–1937 General Motors sit-down strike and negotiations.41 In fact, Murphy used a pen that the Filipino statesman Manuel Quezon, president of the Philippine Commonwealth from 1935 to 1944, had given him to sign the negotiated 1937 agreement between the United Automotive Workers and General Motors.42 Fine concludes that Murphy’s conduct during the strike helped to “attract workers to their government rather than to alienate them from it and, thus, confirms the truism that labor became part of the ‘system’ during the New Deal era.”43 If we accept the premise that Detroit was the laboratory for the “little New Deal” that Murphy enacted in the Philippines, we can see that close attention to Murphy’s mode of colonial governance in the Philippines furnishes us with a way to fill in gaps in both mainstream and liberal accounts of America’s transition from partition—the Civil War—into a consolidated, transoceanic empire. Put crudely, we need better explanations as to why the annual rate of the lynchings of African Americans within its “domestic,” continental borders on the continent reached its peak around the same time that its reach as an “empire of liberty” became global.44 Murphy’s life furnishes us with the beginnings of such an explanation: The Philippines functioned as both the laboratory space and the pivotal moment for this transformation of the United States to take place. Murphy’s career provides us with an understanding of the ideology and workings of progressivist imperialism. We begin to grasp how a progressivist “little New Deal” could be accompanied in the Philippines by draconian sedition laws designed to suppress revolutionary and anticolonial activism. Murphy’s embrace of his progressivism and his passion for what he repeatedly called “social justice” enable us to understand that the apparent contradictions associated with the presentation of the United States as a source of freedom and justice even as it imposed in the Philippines some of the most repressive anti-sedition colonial laws in the history of Western colonialism are not contradictions

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at all. Murphy’s own personal transformation from a liberal criminal court judge into a progressivist mayor and then into a colonial governor who oversaw the transition from colony to commonwealth shows us that there is no contradiction between America’s emergence as a global imperial power and its self-conception as a source of freedom and social justice. The Philippines functioned as a laboratory for generalizing and extending a New Deal model of progressivism that embedded colonial and racial hierarchy within its narrative of improvement. This transformation of both Frank Murphy and the United States leads us to turn from a consideration of Filipino primitivity in the previous chapter to white domesticity in this chapter.

The Order of (the Collection of) Things What did the event and structure of colonialism look like under Frank Murphy’s regime? If “progressivist imperialism” can be understood as the conceptual structure for the type of liberal colonial ideology shaped by Murphy, I now turn to the material objects that were part of Murphy’s official and everyday life, including the objects belonging to his sister Marguerite Murphy Teahan, who served as his first lady. The siblings’ possessions are now on display at the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum in Harbor Beach, Michigan, which has been open to the public since 1960 and run by a small but dedicated group of local volunteers. I offer a reading practice of material culture as a way of rendering visible a colonial structure that otherwise has been “invisibilized,” as Oscar Campomanes has put it. Amassed and displayed in their family hometurned-museum, the siblings’ paintings, furniture, clothes, stationery, walking sticks, crockery, books, and other artifacts make manifest the fantasy and reality of the aristocratic lives they led as the great man and the first lady of the land. In a letter to Frank and Marguerite thanking them for their hospitality during her visit to Manila, their sister-inlaw Irene described how difficult it was for her to adjust to life back in Detroit after sampling the luxuries of life at the governor-general’s Malacañang Palace: “It sounds perfectly spineless to say it, but, at first you get in a perfect panic when you see the multiplicity of household and personal tasks to be done and realize that the ‘doing’ is all up to you and not to a staff of silent, smiling houseboys. You don’t realize how

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Figure 2.5. Frank Murphy hosting a dinner in the Philippines. Frank Murphy Memorial Museum. Photograph by Lynda Fitzgibbon.

dependent you get on personal service until you get back here.”45 Murphy’s biographers confirm that he liked being treated “like a king” and had a “love of pomp and the panoply of office.”46 To all appearances, the siblings not only were served by Filipinos, they were, like nobility, worshiped and adored by Filipinos. Ordinary Filipinos who wrote to the governor-general and the first lady sometimes explicitly described them as nobility. For example, writing in 1934 to ask for a souvenir photograph of the first lady, Mita Retizos from San Pablo, Laguna, explained her reasons for her request by directly addressing Teahan thus: “I have been a constant follower of yourself in pictures taking there your story, the story of yourself, for surely I say persons of the highest standing as yourself have a way of showing the people of their dignity, of their rank that is in a word aristocratic.”47 Retizos explained that the requested photograph would function as a moral “guiding star,” reminding her to be a “follower” of Teahan’s “story” and behavior.48 I in turn would like to become a follower of Retizos’s reading practice of transforming photographs into stories and vice versa. The basic challenge before any “reader” of museum collections lies in how

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to situate material objects critically within the larger narratives that, as my previous chapter argued, the museum itself cannot produce. However, rather than reinforce Teahan’s “story” of aristocratic munificence, I would suggest that the material objects in the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum tell a story of tribute that combines progressivism and imperialism and that integrates freedom with authoritarianism. Upon arriving in the Philippines, Murphy wrote to one of his brothers, “I’m going to set these people free.”49 The siblings were in a position of absolute authority, which they clearly saw as a political and moral mission of beneficence and social justice. When it comes to claims about the significance of the material objects collected by the siblings and now displayed in the Murphy Memorial Museum, it is by now a truism that such collections embody the spirit of imperialist accumulation. The Murphy siblings amassed a minor treasure trove of personal and official artifacts from their time in the Philippines: paintings by minor and major artists, signed photographs of dignitaries, a copy of the 1935 Philippine Constitution, framed

Figure 2.6. Framed display of the governor-general’s official stationery, flanked in the background by photographs of Murphy. Frank Murphy Memorial Museum. Photograph by Lynda Fitzgibbon.

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Figure 2.7. Detail of stationery. Frank Murphy Memorial Museum. Photograph by Lynda Fitzgibbon.

economic maps of the Philippines, flags with the crest of the governorgeneral, official stationery, an extensive book collection, furniture, and formal dress. The memorabilia range from the exquisite to high kitsch. If one joins the tour of the museum, one learns that the block and gavel that Frank Murphy gave his brother George Murphy—also a judge—are made of “very heavy Camagon Wood from Philippine Islands [sic].” An engraved silver horseshoe was presented to Murphy “when he scored his

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first goal and captained his Polo team to victory” in 1936 in Manila. In one of the oddest depictions of the siblings in Philippine costume, a pair of framed “caricature” portraits shows each sibling clothed in a collage of cut-up postage stamps. What is important to remember is that this museum also is a home. Rather than assimilated into a greater whole like a large museum, these artifacts are displayed in the space of the domestic, bourgeois home. In his essay “A Collector’s Model of Desire: The House and Museum of Sir John Soane,” John Elsner argues that the “private house, . . . with its collection intact, is memorialized in situ like a museum. It thus embodies and freezes for posterity the moment at which collecting (and redeploying a collection) ceases, the moment when the museum begins.”50 In the previous chapter, I showed how the University of Michigan’s Museum of Natural History deploys a rhetoric of museal metacommentary in order to justify its collection and existence as an act of public good; here I will discuss how the Murphy Memorial Museum explicitly stages the family’s act of collecting in the form of what Elsner calls the “synecdochic cult of the fragment.”51 These artifacts cumulatively convey the aristocratic, high-society tenor of their governance in the Philippines, which would seem at odds with their progressivist commitment to social justice and the “little New Deal.” The hallway entrance to the family home displays Murphy’s collection of walking sticks and canes, crafted out of materials like bone, “native” Philippine wood, tusk, bamboo, ebony, silver, and gold. The siblings’ Filipino formal clothing is carefully arranged and displayed on mannequins in several rooms of the house, both downstairs, where the family received guests, and upstairs in the bedrooms. Murphy’s formal barong shirts are made of intricately embroidered, finely woven piña cloth. Lavishly decorated with sequins, rhinestones, and embroidered flowers, Teahan’s terno gowns are made of silk, lace, and piña cloth. Framed photographs of the siblings document how their fashion choices would have been immediately recognizable as Philippine national costume during the round of official dinners and events that they hosted or attended. The display of the siblings in colonial drag, as it were, signifies that the so-called universality of the colonizer is such that they can be anywhere and assume local forms without losing the authority of their

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Figure 2.8. Barong shirt made of fine piña cloth. Frank Murphy Memorial Museum. Photograph by Lynda Fitzgibbon.

essential (white) selves. The primitive, on the other hand, is always a mere hybrid or a laughable mimic when s/he assumes Western garb. Alongside these “native” costumes, the Murphy Memorial Museum includes and displays paintings by Fernando Amorsolo (1892–1972), one of the most widely recognized artists of the Philippines and the country’s first designated National Artist in the Visual Arts.52 Amorsolo

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Figure 2.9. Philippine-made gown. Frank Murphy Memorial Museum. Photograph by Lynda Fitzgibbon.

was dean of the University of the Philippines Fine Arts School during Murphy’s governance in the Philippines. However, there is a significant difference between how visitors who recognize Amorsolo’s paintings value the artwork and how the museum itself values its own property. Though the staff have been apprised of Amorsolo’s renown by visitors who are experts in Filipino art history and language, they still seemed to me dubious about the value of the paintings when they gave me a

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Figure 2.10. Portrait of Marguerite Murphy Teahan and Frank Murphy. Frank Murphy Memorial Museum. Photograph by Lynda Fitzgibbon.

tour of the museum. I suspect that their skepticism is part of a broader bemusement about the presence of the Philippines in their town and in the Midwest. The all-volunteer museum staff are material cultural historians in their own right, and their immersive, detailed knowledge is impressive, as are their hospitality toward museum visitors and their dedication to the museum. I did find that the docents have integrated

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their own feelings of initial bewilderment about the Philippines into the narrative of the tour. For example, during my first visit to Harbor Beach in the fall of 2009—I have visited the city twice—one of the staff selfdeprecatingly told me at least three times during her tour that the staff had had no idea how to arrange Teahan’s terno gowns until they consulted local Filipinos. This fascinating presentation of innocence also shaped the museum staff ’s attitude toward Amorsolo’s paintings. During my second visit, in October 2010, another docent showed me a 1942 letter she recently had discovered that referred to Amorsolo’s painting of the “native girl,” as she put it. Frank Murphy’s brother George Murphy had written the following to Marguerite Murphy Teahan: “I have the painting of the Filipino girl here, but I don’t like to ship it to Washington or entrust it to anyone for fear of having it damaged. If you are coming soon it would be best to have you take the painting, pictures, a clock vase and few other things back with you. Love, George.”53 Indeed, in a 1993 appraisal of the Murphy properties, the appraiser misspelled Amorsolo’s name and erroneously recorded the signature as “F. H. Morsolo,” a mistake that indicates that the appraiser had no idea how well-known Amorsolo is and, hence, how valuable the painting is. The range of the appraiser’s 1993 valuation of the four Amorsolo paintings was from $200 to $1,500.54 The appraiser’s ignorance symptomatizes the larger problem with the museum, which has an incomplete grasp of the significance of its collection, not merely of the monetary value of Amorsolo’s paintings but of the historical import of the archive as a whole. Without a basic grasp of the colonial relationship between the United States and the Philippines, the museum’s tour narrative is necessarily incomplete, despite the admirable, Herculean efforts of the volunteer staff. Rather than belabor the problem of gaps or incompleteness in museal narrative, which is an issue that confronts any museum, I want to focus attention on the accumulative ideology driving the order of the collection of things, to riff on Foucault’s title The Order of Things. The Murphy siblings’ collection emblematizes the stockpiling associated with imperial and capitalist conceptions of time. To put it crudely, both the siblings and the museum collect things because they may need them in the future.55 This is of course no new or innovative claim. We see how the imperial museum’s practice and philosophy reinforce the kind of temporal fixity and cultural regression that are so essential to the making of

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the racial primitive. In short, the developmental structure of museum collections inaugurates an invidious distinction between the civilized and the primitive and between the human and the subhuman. The curatorial process reproduces historical amnesia, just as the natural history museum of the previous chapter does. The existence of that amnesia is indicated by the incoherence of the didactics provided by these museums. In a sense, these are orphaned objects, bereft of history. There are at best incidental references to the racial colonial relationship between the Philippines and the United States. Hence, the placed-ness of the exhibitions is reduced to the status of exotic curiosity. Visitors to the exhibitions are given little opportunity to understand the connection between places like the Midwest and the Philippines because it is precisely the history of colonialism that provides that relationality. A global phenomenon, colonialism must be understood as innately comparative and interdisciplinary. How might we interpretively “revalue” Amorsolo’s paintings today and perhaps address or even redress this gap between value and knowledge?

Figure 2.11. Ferdinand Amorsolo, portrait of Frank Murphy, oil on canvas, 1946. Frank Murphy Memorial Museum. Photograph by author.

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I would like to offer a reading of Amorsolo’s 1946 oil painting of Murphy, in which the appraiser describes Murphy as “standing on a stone foundation against a cloud-filled sky.”56 Let us examine Amorsolo’s manipulation of the basic elements of portraiture (pose, gesture, expression, costume, and background). In this full-length, free-standing profile portrait, Murphy stands poised atop what look to be the ruins of a stone foundation built on the summit of a hill. His hands clasped before him, he meditatively gazes out and down upon the pastoral scene below him. The leader is caught in a moment of self-reflection. He is at rest and passive, a moment of non-action. Because Murphy steps forward with one foot, however, this also is a portrayal of potential action. He is both detached from and involved in the land before and beneath him. He stands literally upon the foundation and ruins of the past in anticipation of moving forward into the future. If Amorsolo conveys the doubled message that Murphy is both passive and active, he also simultaneously portrays the American as a solitary, private individual and as a great man who belongs to the public. Murphy is of course the sole figure in the painting, populating the otherwise unpeopled landscape. He is relatively informally dressed, nattily clad in a white suit with two-tone wingtip shoes. But I would note that he also is clad by the cloud-filled sky, which occupies about two-thirds of the painting. Murphy is doubly costumed. The billowing clouds surround his figure and lend him an aura of greatness, thus transforming him from a private individual to a public leader. Ironically, according to the Murphy Memorial Museum’s tour narrative, Murphy disliked the painting because he felt that his proportion to the stone blocks at his feet made him look short. But all in all, this is the portrait of a secular god, a visual record of Murphy’s status and power. Amorsolo paints a portrait of imperial vision, Murphy’s top-down ocular mastery of the land. But I would argue that, unlike European traditions of the imperial gaze emphasized by Mary Louise Pratt and others, Murphy’s vision is not an allegory for conquest of the land. Instead, the combination of Murphy’s pose, gesture, expression, and costume— particularly the way that Amorsolo positions the figure and places the hands—allegorizes the American benevolent conquest of Filipino hearts and minds. The top-down, autocratic directionality of Murphy’s gaze is contradicted or reversed by the relative informality of his costume—a

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white linen suit with two-tone wingtip shoes—and the sense of pensive restraint conveyed by the clasped hands. Murphy’s vision is that of the New Deal colonizer, and Amorsolo’s portrait visually captures the spirit and logic of progressivist imperialism. Murphy’s unquestioned authority in the Philippines ironically facilitates the reversal—rather than the affirmation—of hierarchical relations between the government and the people. Amorsolo’s portrait captured popular sentiment about Murphy. The Philippine press hailed Murphy as a “visionary.” Serving as her brother’s first lady, Marguerite Teahan dutifully collected and pasted newspaper clippings and souvenir documents into albums that now are on display in Harbor Beach. For example, in a 1935 Philippine Herald clipping titled “ ‘Socialist’ Murphy,” the Manila-based editorial shrugged off the accusations of “socialistic inclination” and impractical idealism that dogged Murphy throughout his career. Instead the editorial argued that Murphy’s “socialistic program” and his goal of “stressing the social betterment of the people” effected what it viewed as the rightful return of the “social majorities”: When the evidence is clear that the structure of government is such that the reverse of what is proper obtains—that is, the government has been constructed from the top down instead of from the bottom up—the only solution to the problem will be found in the area reserved for the social majorities in the national life.

The editorial approvingly described the governor as a “social crusader”: A political machine should be something more than, say, a factory machine: it must not only be efficient but must keep time with the pulsation of the people’s life. The politician who looks over his machine to keep it in tune, does so not as a machinist concerned only about the mechanical function of his machine, but as a social crusader with a sense of the vital needs of his community.

The editorial then called Murphy a “visionary”: When Governor Murphy shows such deep concern for the masses as he is showing, he is a visionary only in the sense that he is using his vision

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where others are incapable of using theirs. His concept of government, in other words, is not limited to government as an official entity, but includes the more fundamental fact that [the] government must draw for its strength on the vitality of the people. . . . Such a government will draw for its energy on the vitality of the people themselves, and on nowhere else. What Governor Murphy is striving to do is to save that vitality for the government by not allowing it to spend itself in useless discontent. There is nothing more stupid than uselessness in the biology of the race.57

I am fascinated by the editorial’s claim here that Murphy facilitates as a machinist-politician the communication and fulfillment of the people’s needs. In a rhetorical version of Amorsolo’s portrait, Murphy’s top-down vision facilitates governance “from the bottom up.” Murphy “is using his vision where others are incapable of using theirs,” an argument that, by the end of the piece, explicitly invokes racial, colonial stereotypes. So on the one hand, the editorial approves the government’s return to “social majorities” and the importance of the “vitality of the people.” On the other hand, it ends by stereotyping as prone to “uselessness” the very “social majorities” that it initially endorsed. Again, we see here the workings of the ideology of progressivist imperialism, wherein a populist program of social justice and equality ironically emanates out of the regime’s fundamental commitment to authoritarianism and inequality. Many of the other newspaper clippings saved in the siblings’ albums praise the governor-general more extravagantly. An especially fulsome poem titled “Song of Welcome (To Governor-General Murphy)” was published in the Philippine Herald in June 1935. Penned by one Jose M. Hernandez, the poem concluded with this stanza: “And in the years of doubt, O teach us Lord / To bless him, lone crusader on the sod; / And we shall carry on with torch and sword / For him, our noble knight . . . we thank Thee, God.”58 In a July 4, 1935, editorial titled “Our Leader’s Tribute,” the Philippine Herald approvingly described how Manuel Quezon, then president of the Philippine Senate, “pa[id] a tribute [sic]” to Murphy on the “eve of the celebration of the Glorious Fourth”: “It is difficult to improve on that tribute paid Governor Murphy by the acknowledged leader of the Filipino people.” The editorial nonetheless attempted the task by declaring,

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In the person of Frank Murphy is epitomized America’s work in the Philippines. He represents the highest type of American manhood and he embodies in his personality the true spirit of sound Americanism. . . . Frank Murphy has endeared himself in the Filipino heart because he is honest and sincere and because he is the personification of everything the Filipinos have learned to love and admire in that which they know as genuine Americanism.59

Similarly drawing on the rhetoric of unctuous friendship, Pedro de la Llana, the longtime reporter for the Manila Times and other newspapers, handwrote the following dedication in a copy of The Philippine Commonwealth Handbook (A Cultural and Economic Survey of Present-Day Philippines with Sketches of the Outstanding Builders of the Commonwealth) that he gave to Murphy, now shelved amongst the family’s book collection in the Murphy Memorial Museum: “ ‘To that great humanitarian and poet of action, Frank Murphy, on the occasion of his election as Governor of Michigan.’ With the warm regards of His friend, P. de la Llana, Nov. 1936, Manila, P.I.” The governor-general relished this acclaim and encouraged the development of this persona as part of his general strategy as a highly ambitious politician. Murphy was well aware of the precedent set by previous governors-general who parlayed their service in the Philippines into successful bids for the U.S. presidency or vice presidency. Unsurprisingly, the American press repeated the mantra of Filipino colonial affection. For example, in a lengthy 1940 feature article titled “The Story of Frank Murphy,” the Detroit Sunday Times claimed that “what endeared him to the Filipinos was that he opened Malacanan [sic] Palace to the natives, made them welcome. They loved him because he tried to understand them.”60 When it comes to the Philippine press, however, it is crucial to remember that the immediate political context for this rhetoric of exaggerated admiration was the “Philippine cause,” the struggle for independence first in the form of commonwealth self-governance and then in the form of postcolonial nationhood. Such servility might have been the only rhetorical form that Filipino nationalism was allowed to take officially and publicly. Indeed, the grandiosity of the rhetoric might be seen as a strategic response to Murphy’s own grandiosity, for example, his claim to his

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brother that “I’m going to set these people free.” It behooves us, then, to be attuned to the possibility of at least two sets of meaning generated by this pattern of Filipino tribute to the American. On the one hand, the word “tribute” can refer to acts of praise and appreciation. On the other hand, it can refer to a mode of regular payment to a ruler that materially and symbolically emphasizes relations of dependence and obedience. But if we understand the instance of Filipino tribute as a rhetorical device of indirection rather than a literalist mode of direct communication, both sets of meaning are in play. The exaggerated performance of dependence serves to camouflage the demand for independence. If we understand these accolades as forms of tribute in this double sense, how might we interpret the significance of a 1935 El Debate article titled “What We Owe to Murphy”? Teahan preserved the English translation of the Spanish-language article in one of her albums. Describing Murphy and the Philippines as “linked for life,” the Philippine periodical hailed Murphy as “our illustrious champion,” nothing less than a gift from heaven: Divine Providence in his infinite wisdom sends to weak peoples now and then men of the caliber of Governor Murphy. The United States in their infancy as a nation, received from Heaven a gift in the person of Lafayette. Filipinas, in [sic] the eve of her independence, has the good fortune of counting on Frank Murphy.61

The article emphasized the great contrast between the capacities of a “weak” Filipino people and those of the American leader. It went on to explicitly refer to the Philippine cause, which took the form of a parallel between the Marquis de Lafayette’s role in the American Revolution and Murphy’s role in the Philippine independence movement. Invoking the United States’ own colonial history and war for independence, the El Debate article then gestured toward the possibility of future equivalence between the two countries, toward a future when both nations would be sovereign: As we write the history of the last stage of our struggle for liberty, the name of Frank Murphy appears in it engraved in gold as the American who helped us more than any one else in establishing firmly the foun-

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dations for an independent existence which has been achieved at great expense and sacrifice.62

It is tempting to be distracted by the racialized invidiousness deployed by this rhetoric of unctuous friendship. But I think that it would be a mistake to interpret the flattery solely or merely as evidence of Filipino gullibility. This rhetorical pattern of Filipino self-debasement and extravagant tribute to Murphy should not be interpreted as evidence of weakness. Rather, it should be interpreted as a weapon of the weak. If we refrain from literalist readings of Filipino flattery, we can see that the relentless mobilization of such adulation has another side or purpose to it. Its excessiveness warns us that the gullibility undergirding colonial affection might be simulated. Indeed, it might be instrumentalized. It then becomes clear that the periodical’s paramount concern was independence and that the tribute to Murphy, who here is “engraved in gold,” constituted a strategy of flattery or even bribery. Moreover, if we understand the hyperbole of Filipino flattery as grounded in “fake” or staged gullibility, we also can see that the grandiosity of Murphy’s statements about freeing the Filipinos is undergirded by enormous privilege, privilege that is obscured by the “real” and fatal American innocence immortalized by Herman Melville’s Captain Delano. Recall that, in Melville’s novella Benito Cereno, the American seaman Captain Delano epitomizes the unidirectional nature of American innocence.63 Delano naively accepts the contradictory lies fed to him and the pantomime enacted by the enslaved Africans who have successfully mutinied and taken over the ship. He cannot see what really is happening on the ship because the innocence that characterizes American racism makes it impossible for him to ascribe intelligence and the capacity for performativity, let alone revolution, to the African. He is confident in the stupidity of the African. Hence, the possibility of the existence of another—let alone different and antithetical—ontology lies beyond his ken. But it is of course the American’s own stupidity that nearly costs him his life when the Africans end the farce and declare open war. Not unlike Melville’s Captain Delano, the Murphy Memorial Museum displays and produces a one-way epistemology in the form of American innocence. The Murphy siblings collected and surrounded themselves with Filipino material objects that they saw and understood as gifts and

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souvenirs, nostalgic keepsakes that reminded them of their Filipino friends. The Murphy siblings were living with tribute but mistaking it for gift. The gaze of the American innocent thus transforms the hierarchical, unilateral nature of a tribute system into a democratic, bilateral gift economy, a transformation that is confirmed by Murphy’s fantasy that he would give freedom to the Filipinos: “I am going to set these people free.” There is an unmistakable innocence about Murphy’s grandiosity. Moreover, as I noted earlier, in the Murphy museum today, the docents have incorporated into their narrative another version of American innocence, a knowing ignorance about the incompletion of their museal narrative. The museum thus stages a highly unequal encounter between different epistemologies. Alternative interpretive and representational practices are necessary if we are to be able to detect Filipinos’ needs and demands, interwoven or embedded as they are in the “tribute” economy. When we examine the materiality of the Murphy siblings’ sojourn in the Philippines, what simultaneously demands our attention is the “structure of feelings” that governed Murphy’s governance, so to speak. As a number of Filipino studies scholars have shown, feelings of debt and obligation permeated the “special friendship” between the Americans and the Filipinos.64 This structure of feelings both reflected and masked the economic terms of the hierarchal, nonreciprocal relationship of neocolonial dependence that was imposed well before the transition to the Philippine Commonwealth (which of course occurred during Murphy’s regime), let alone when the Philippines achieved independence after World War II. The problem is not merely that this “tribute” economy was uneven and nonreciprocal. The problem is that the Americans regularly, if contradictorily, insisted that the hierarchical nature of paternalist colonial relations with the Filipinos was mutual, reciprocal, and affirmed by feelings of affection. Most importantly, the strength of the friendship between America and the Philippines was guaranteed by the promise of future sovereignty that awaited the future Filipino, who would have learned by that time how to deserve freedom.

Domestic Imperialism and Filipino Tribute The complexity of progressivist imperialism makes it difficult to parse Filipino demand. The question becomes, What strategies of

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indirection did Filipinos mobilize in order to make claims about what the Americans owed them, even as those claims were nearly drowned out by declarations about what Filipinos owed to the Americans? In the mostly journalistic sources that I have cited thus far, we have seen how exaggerated tributes to Murphy contained and conveyed the call for independence. However, in order to find traces of other forms of Filipino demand that exceeded elite desires for self-governance and the achievement of postcolonial statehood, we have to turn away from the (male) public sphere, dominated as it is by the discourse of colonial paternalism and ethno-nationalism. What happens when we pay attention to the (female) sphere of the domestic? When I began examining Marguerite Murphy Teahan’s archive at the Bentley Historical Library (which houses collections related to the history of the University of Michigan as well as the state of Michigan), I must confess that I began to see why Frank Murphy’s biographer Sidney Fine treated Teahan so dismissively as the adoring, younger sister of the great politician. In the diary-like fragments that she jotted down on scraps of official stationery and in a bound journal titled “My Trip Abroad,” she defined herself in relation to the men in her life. Upon hearing that she would join her brother in the Philippines, Teahan wrote, “Our home during his administration will be tropical Manila for he has asked me to go and run his household for him and I’m pleased and proud but torn apart at the thought of leaving [my brothers] Georgie and Harold.” Reflecting on their arrival in Manila in June 1933, Teahan described herself as “the governor’s inconspicuous little sister.” Though she was “thrilled—amazed eager” about her new life, she wrote that “sort of a loneliness and sadness swept over [her].” She continued: “Who always asked only to live in the dear home my mother and father had prepared for we [sic] children and made as loveable and sweet a haven on earth[,] mother and father gone [sic]—I hoped to stay near and love my brothers near—it was all I asked of life—and here I find myself half way around the world beyond Japan—beyond China.” Of her first visit to Malacañang Palace, the official residence that would serve as her home, Teahan breathily wrote, “We entered the big spacious palace I still bewildered at it all—standing beside my illustrious brother—my husband [William Teahan] always near.”65 Teahan saw herself as an adjunct socially and literally stationed next to her brother and husband.

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She took on this role of Murphy’s supportive sister and substitute-wife not merely in her diary but also in her letters and official messages to the public. In her typewritten reply to a letter from a Filipino schoolboy, she explained how she came to be the “First Lady of the Land”: “Perhaps by filling my little place in the world trying to be a good sister watching over the home and health of my brother really made it possible for me to be here.”66 She occasionally issued official communiqués that offered banal, highly gendered moral guidance like the following: “If I were to offer a concrete suggestion, it would be this: why not keep the Scriptural injunction, ‘I am my brother’s keeper,’ in mind always, and resolve to make every possible social event a charitable benefit as well?”67 As the colony’s official hostess, she managed the social life of Malacañang Palace. She hosted events like the bimonthly “at home” afternoon teas with live programming that featured readings and performances by Filipino musicians and writers.68 Her archive contains her notes about lunch and dinner menus and entertainment programs. (I admit that I shuddered a little while reading the menus, composed of middle American—or should I say Irish American—fare with the occasional inclusion of Orientalist dishes.) Though her diary entries were infrequent and haphazard, she took the time to describe the effort she put into her appearance: “My Amah [Chinese maid] has just washed my hair. She uses in the rinse some kind of a little flower that comes from Spain and it brings out the color of my hair.”69 She described the clothes she wore to official functions: “I wore [a] blue chiffon dress with big ruffled collar that blew with the breeze caught at the neck with a glittering rhinestone buckle [and] a big blue hat with blue and white daisies on it.” Outlining her plans for a dinner that she would host for a visiting British general, Teahan gave the details of the flowers and jewelry she would wear: “I wear white cadenas de amor, called ‘chains of love.’ I always wear it in my hair. At my waist I’m wearing a bunch of white sampiguitas [sic] it’s so fragrant. And the only ornament I’m wearing is the little diamond cross (on a gold chain) that Frank gave to me.”70 Reducing herself not merely to the clothes but the accessories that embellished her costumes, Teahan accepted and embraced the ornamental role to which she was consigned. She confirmed the stereotype of the pretty, featherbrained society hostess, and I was ready to disregard her archive. Then I came across an extraordinary series of three dozen or so letters from members of the Filipino public addressed to Teahan that are

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preserved in her archive at the Bentley Historical Library. These letters were penned by ordinary Filipinos—“ordinary” to the extent that literacy in English at the time could be considered at all normative—who petitioned Teahan for assistance with a range of problems in their lives. In all of the letters, rites of self-debasement and deification were followed by a demand. For example, a student journalist called Socorro Yabot enclosed in her letter to Teahan an article that she wrote about Teahan. She concluded her letter by asking Teahan for her assistance in publishing the article: “I do hope you’ll not grudge [sic] me the favor of publishing the article about you in said magazine. Trusting that you’ll be kind enough to consent to have said article to be made in my page, I am, Very sincerely yours, Socorro I. Yabot.”71 I have compiled below the types of requests that Teahan received from these individuals, which range from the trivial to the serious. Note that I excluded the more formal letters Teahan received from organizations requesting monetary and other forms of assistance (for example, hospitals, churches, orphanages, and schools). I also excluded correspondence from elite Filipinos, like the notes that Teahan received from Aurora Quezon, wife of President Manuel Quezon. I am interested here in the requests made by ordinary members of the Filipino public. Types of requests: • Photograph of Marguerite Teahan • Acknowledgment of receipt of letter • Acknowledgment of receipt of author’s materials, e.g., poems • Personal meeting with Marguerite Teahan or Frank Murphy • Prison sentence commutation or pardon • More hygienic housing • Assistance in publishing a journalism article • Advice for performing better in school • Work (types of jobs requested: waiter, housekeeper, teacher, ticket seller, nurse, Bureau of Customs clerk, typist) • Work specifically for Teahan, e.g., as a servant at Malacañang Palace, as Teahan’s secretary’s assistant • Purchase of an advertisement in a school yearbook • Official message for publication, e.g., Christmas message • Funds to repair parish church

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• Funds to increase number of beds at hospitals, convalescent homes • Invitation to school function • Funds to feed children, e.g., orphans or wards

Because most Filipinos were foreclosed from the public sphere, these letters of “tribute” to Teahan constituted a strategy—weapons of the weak—for Filipinos to make demands upon the progressivist imperialist state by making inroads into the domestic space ruled by the white woman. As the above list indicates, most writers begged Teahan for assistance in obtaining employment in their profession or trade, or, failing that, any job at all. Many referred to the number of people in their families whom they were supporting. Several authors indicated that they were migrants from rural areas by saying that they were living on their own in the city. (Many letters were from residents of Manila, but several letters were from other cities and regions.) Two writers sought Teahan’s help obtaining prison sentence pardons or commutations. Others asked her merely to mail them her photograph as a souvenir, and it seems that Teahan did send out her autograph and photograph, which in turn triggered notes of gratitude. Still others asked for a personal audience with her at Malacañang Palace, presumably in order to strengthen their appeals to her or, instrumentally, with a view to enhancing their own social standing. I at first thought that the significance of these letters lay in the glimpse that they provided of the problems and desires of literate Filipinos, urban and rural, of the era. But then I realized that it was more important to pay attention to the letters’ rhetorical rather than social reality. How these Filipinos were describing their lives and what they wanted or needed was more revealing than what they were saying. I began to treat these letters’ affectations and idiosyncrasies as a rhetorical archive. The letters caught my attention because they seemed like versions of the same imploring voice. There was an almost formulaic regularity to the letters’ rhetorical patterns, a three-part sequence of deification, self-abasement, and demand. Each writer opened his or her letter by paying homage to Teahan, tributes followed or accompanied by self-belittlement, and then concluded with a demand of the “first lady of the land.” For example, Gervasio Honrado of Dagupan, Pangasinan, began his letter to Teahan thus: “Although I am too low and humble person to communicate with you, yet I insist in [sic] doing so, because

Figure 2.12. First page of Alfiana Villablanca’s letter to Marguerite Murphy Teahan, November 20, 1933. Marguerite Murphy Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. 91

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I am very much in need of your most sincere help if you please to extend” (emphasis added).72 With this rhetorical combination of penitent and petitioner—a melding of passivity and aggression—these writers asked Teahan to fulfill a range of minor and major requests. I also began to discern gaps and shifts in the mannerisms assumed by the writers, and I began to wonder whether the provenance of their rhetorical styles needed to be understood as multiple and hybrid rather than singular. Might these letters be deploying a cross-pollination of several traditions of supplication? If so, these letters reflect the history of multiple empires visited upon and absorbed by the islands, the living legacy of Spanish feudalism, Southeast Asian patronage, Roman Catholic intercession, and American progressivist imperialism. Here are some samples of how writers opened their letters to Teahan with extraordinarily ornate, dramatic, and formulaic greetings. Alfiana Villablanca of Manila wrote, “Maam [sic] excuse me if this unexpected letter of mine will surprise you. But before I will explain my best wishes, may I say my respect to you? I am asking your forgiveness if I am wrong. For you might think that I am not respecting you.”73 Eustaquia Semporios of Manila wrote, “I trust with all my heart that you will be our protecting mother, beaming the torch of hope that will guide us to safety and peaceful life, at the end ‘Noble Lady,’ you could expect that your most precios [sic] help will be engraved to every member of my family in the innermost of our hearts, so that I can not forget throughout our life your merciful heart, who save us from ruin and perdition. At your feet, Eustaquia Semporios.”74 Emerenciana Marquez Lim of Albay wrote, “At last you are back to our dear Philippines. Indeed I prayed for your safe return. Mrs Teahan, I have read much about you and your charitable work you have done to the poor. Now here am I, a perfect picture of misery before your eyes, on bended knees I knock at your door to empty to you my divine Lady, the secret of my soul.”75 Finally, in a note thanking Teahan for her autograph and picture, Patrocinio B. Hernando of Ilocos Norte wrote, “You could not over estimate my happiness when I received your autograph and picture, and I can’t thank you enough for your kindness.” Hernando then went on to correct Teahan, who apparently had used the wrong gender: “I hope to send my picture (if it means anything to you) so you will know that you

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have made a little girl happy and not a boy as your letter addressed Mr.” Hernando signed her letter by pointedly including “(Miss)” before her signature.76 Hernando’s letter captures the spirit of obsequiousness and audacity—or of tribute and demand—that pervades the other letters. Taken together, these writers refused the impersonal logics of the New Deal, which tried to produce a population with entitlements to bureaucratically distributed goods. Instead these writers displaced the logic of the New Deal with an alternative rhetoric of personal relation. The tone of the letters is both overly formal and intimate. These writers deployed a vertiginous combination of distanciation and proximity. They clearly chose a mixture of rhetorical techniques that they thought might register with Teahan so that their demands could be intelligible to her. The letters’ formality is accompanied and belied by a surprising degree of aggressive entitlement. These Filipinos presumed upon their friendship with the “first lady of the land” even as they profusely apologized for doing so. Alfredo de Guzman of Rizal opened his letter with this apology: “I beg your pardon for taking this [sic] courage in writing you, for I am a poor struggling man who is jobles [sic] and in need of daily provision for his poor age [sic] mother.”77 Socorro Yabot of Manila opened thus: “I hope you’ll forgive me for disturbing once more the tranquility of your peace.”78 Consuelo C. Garcia of Nueva Ecija opened her letter requesting Christmas gifts to disburse to children in her town by similarly asking Teahan for forgiveness: “If this act of sending your highness a letter without having had yet the privilege to know and meet you personally is an obtrusion [sic], I beg then for your pardon.”79 On the one hand, these authors’ exaggerated formality seems to reflect their attempt to write in a style that they thought befitted an appeal to royalty or patron saints, someone whose social rank was absolutely beyond their reach. Consorcia Teodoro hailed Teahan with a flourish of compliments typical of all of the letters’ openings: “May your kindness accept my highest esteem and my sincere wishes over your happiness and success of all the undertakings you are accomplishing.”80 On the other hand, these petitions also configured Teahan as someone whose gendered status as “first lady of the land” put her absolutely within their reach. Taking her in their confidence, many of the letter writers divulged personal details about their lives in an attempt to establish an intimate relationship with Teahan. She then would become

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unquestionably proximate to them. For example, Adoracion Laviano of Iloilo described the epiphany that she experienced and that impelled her to write to Teahan: “After many sleepless nights praying and thinking to whom shall I confide my trouble [sic], a very serious one for me you came to my mind at once smiling, that never unmistakable smile of a kind heart that befitted your most tender, kind and loving face.”81 The power of the revelation of these personal details lies in its capacity to position Teahan both far away from and very close to the Filipino petitioner. That is to say, while the revealing of personal details usually is associated solely with increased intimacy, these letter writers disclosed personal details through a rhetorical formula that simultaneously asserted intimacy with Teahan and underscored the great distance that lay between her and the writer. At first glance, this combination of closeness and distance seems contradictory. However, similar to the way that believers might pray to saints for miracles big and small, these petitioners addressed her with a form of confiding worshipfulness that they hoped, I think, would remind her of her greatness and of the accompanying obligation and duty—noblesse oblige—that would compel her to respond to their petition. They also follow the model of the Catholic petition to the Virgin Mary as stand-in for the unapproachable Father-Son. One of the younger voices among this sheaf of letters was that of Emma de Aenlle of Manila, who wrote to Teahan to invite her to her school’s program. She began her letter by introducing herself as a “fat girl”: A humble president of the Araullo High School “Girls’ Club Organization,” is writing to the “First Lady of the Land,” would the lady pay attention to a fat (have you any prejudice against fat people) girl who has hopelessly made up her mind to invite Mrs Teahan to the inaugural program of her school?

Note that de Aenlle’s professed humility and starry-eyed sentimentality— “hopelessly made up her mind”—are accompanied by a parenthetical accusation lodged against Teahan: “have you any prejudice against fat people.” De Aenlle then goes on to explicitly voice her anxiety about the proper way to address Teahan, even as she continues to accuse Teahan of possible bias:

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Please, Mrs. Teahan I am she, the fat madame president who is addressing you; give me hope less [sic] I should think you have some prejudice against me. Is this the proper way to address you? Please forgive me if I am making a mistake of addressing this way. I really am confused with all the formalities with which I must address you. But I have decided to put down what I want to say in my own way.82

De Aenlle deploys emotional bribery. Her “invitation” is in fact a demand. Her lack of confidence (“I really am confused”) is belied by the exertion of her will (“I have decided to put down what I want to say in my own way”). Her professed humility is a vehicle for the presumptuous assertion of claims upon Teahan. In conclusion, these letters adhere to colonial (Spanish and American) cacique and Christian economies of master-slave relations, but they also bear the trace of feudal (Southeast Asian) economies of obligation. By paying attention to Frank Murphy’s sister’s archive—and the gendered dynamics of the imperial white archive are by no means coincidental—we glimpse how the regime of progressivist imperialism as one form of debt—Filipino gratitude for Murphy’s gift of Commonwealth freedom and women’s enfranchisement (“I am going to set these people free”)—encountered an other mode of debt or obligation. These letters contain and mobilize the possibility of a different relation to community and futurity. Affectively and rhetorically these petitioners lay the foundation for their political and economic demands. We cannot assume that Filipino payment of tribute to the American is one-way. We also cannot assume that Filipino flattery constitutes proof of Filipino gullibility. Filipino flattery rather is an attempt to open up the possibility of demand, in response to the unidirectional, unilateral ideology and epistemology of the Americans. These are private letters, but they contain public petitions. The tribute economy is the way that elite Filipinos could make ethno-nationalist demands for independence and political freedom. It also is the way that ordinary Filipinos could make demands for distributive justice and what Carlos Bulosan called the “freedom from want.” As a form of colonial debt, progressivist imperialism encountered an other economy of debt and obligation that demanded compensation or

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returns to the Filipino people. Reading the contents of the museumhome against the grain of its imperial innocence, we can trace another narrative and this alternative economy. In this other mode of debt and obligation, the Filipino letter writer takes the agent of benevolent or progressivist imperialism at his or her word, literally. In so doing, the Filipino letter writer exacts a payment even as it takes the form of the tribute. Time and again, the American museum represents the Filipino as a racial primitive or as a colonial object of improvement. But when we reread this representation of the Filipino through the lens of the museum’s accumulative desire, we can see and hear the Filipino as the subject of a demand. We can discern this alternative economy of which the archive remains innocent.

3

Lessons from the Illiterate Carlos Bulosan and the Staged Wages of Romance

I have argued thus far that the imperial museum and university are the site of endless material and epistemological accumulation. But what does endless anti-accumulation look like? What might we learn from the extravagance of those who cannot or should not be able to afford extravagance? In this chapter I turn to the writer and labor activist Carlos Bulosan (1911–1956) and the lessons to be learned from the thriftless and the illiterate. I focus on Bulosan’s short story “The Romance of Magno Rubio,” originally penned in the 1940s, about the lives and desires of Filipino seasonal field workers in Depression-era California during the U.S. colonial period (1899–1942). I also analyze its contemporary award-winning staged adaptation with its ensemble cast of five actors, which has been produced by professional and amateur theater companies across North America and in Asia.1 Magno Rubio is the furthest from a hero that one can imagine. In Bulosan’s story, Magno has “fish-eyes” and “gorilla legs”; his “coconut head sank into [a] turtle head.”2 He cannot read or write. Far from saving every cent and dollar that he earns working the fields, Magno throws it all away on romancing a white woman he has never met. And the contemporary staged production faithfully reproduces a story made up of “caricature, incongruities, and ribald exaggeration.”3 I saw the original MaYi Theater Company cast perform Romance in Manila (2003), and I subsequently attended three more productions in Chicago (2004), Stockton, California (2008), and Los Angeles (2011). I was struck by my and the audiences’ attraction to this most unlikely of heroes. How could I reckon with a story of field workers throwing their money away on gambling, women, and drink, invoking all the stock stereotypes of Filipino men and working-class and underclass masculinity in general? But I understood why the story might resonate so strongly with a contemporary 99

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Figure 3.1. Art Acuña, Paolo Montalban, Ramon de Ocampo, Jojo Gonzalez, and Bernardo Bernardo in The Romance of Magno Rubio, Ma-Yi Theater Company production. Photograph by Matt Zugale.

audience dealing with wave after wave of recessions and foreclosures when one of Magno’s compatriots says to him, “You are mortgaging your whole future.” I knew I had to write about the phenomenon of “The Romance of Magno Rubio” because, as the literary critic Epifanio San Juan Jr. reminds us, “Bulosan will not ignore us.”4 The son of peasant farmers dispossessed of their land and livelihood in Pangasinan, Philippines, Bulosan migrated from the Philippines to the United States in 1930. Over the course of his brief life, he published poetry, short fiction, political essays, and the epic autobiographical novel America Is in the Heart, and he became a prominent labor activist who eventually was blacklisted during the McCarthy era. Bulosan wrote “The Romance of Magno Rubio” in an era when Filipinos were prohibited from voting, buying property, and marrying whites.5 The seasonal field workers in his story occupied the legal limbo of noncitizen non-alien, or “national,” one of the official terms for the status of Filipinos at the time. Nonetheless, Magno Rubio spends all of his wages and goes into debt in order to romance a white woman. He is indeed a big “rube.” We

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watch in wonder as he tries to realize the magnificent (magno) dream of marrying a blue-eyed, presumably blond (rubio) woman when he knows it is an illegal and impossible dream. He falls desperately in love with Clarabelle, whom he discovers through a Lonely Hearts magazine, “one of those magazines that advertise the names and addresses of girls for one dollar.”6 He is illiterate and yet his romance blossoms through correspondence because he hires a coworker to write his letters in exchange for bottles of wine. As his coworker gets greedier, the price increases to five dollars per letter and then up to twenty dollars per letter, though they each earn a daily wage of $2.50 as seasonal laborers. Quickly running through his savings, Magno takes out loan after loan from his foreman. As a source of credit, the foreman facilitates the shift from piece work to debt peonage. Magno is ridiculed yet abetted by his coworkers as he uses his current and future earnings to send cash and more and more extravagant gifts to the white woman.

Paid Dances, Paid Letters Bulosan depicts the super-extraction of value from the male Filipino worker during his hours of leisure. During this era, this kind of superexploitation was more typically associated with sites like the gambling hall and the taxi dance hall. In the taxi dance hall of the 1920s and 1930s in the United States, male Filipino workers could and did go through all of their earnings in a single night as they paid a dime per minute for dance after dance with white women and women of color.7 Similarly, Magno blows through tens and then hundreds of dollars at an astonishing rate in pursuit of an unattainable object: the white woman whom he is by law prohibited from marrying. Bulosan moves from the site of the taxi dance hall to the scene of writing. In so doing, he shifts from cultural modes associated with Filipino mastery (or, more precisely, masterful mimicry) to cultural modes associated with Filipino incapacity. He transports us away from the scene of Filipino prowess at “splendid dancing,” as the performance studies scholar Lucy Burns puts it, and toward the scene of Filipino incompetence and illiteracy. Bulosan’s shift from dancing to writing achieves several things. Because Magno’s naïveté is so exaggerated, Bulosan gives us a satiric portrayal of what Burns calls the “infantilized colonial subject” in the guise of “gullible and defenseless

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Filipino migrants.”8 Confronted by Magno’s baffling stupidity, we understand that there are allegorical and political stakes as to how we interpret this portrayal of Filipino gullibility. Digging in the dirt even as he goes deeper in debt, Magno counts how many heads of lettuce or tomatoes will buy him the words “I love you.” Language is literally composed of the fruits and vegetables whose harvest—the repeated act of picking— facilitates the alienation of Magno and his comrades from their own labor. This alienation follows earlier dispossessions from the Philippine land and augments the vicious segmentation of the workers (by the workers themselves) into a racialized, classed pecking order of who is illiterate and who is not, who is an “Igorot” and who is not, and who is a “peasant” and who is not.9 The illiterate Magno insists on a literal reading of the act of picking produce. A pea, for example, will allow him to buy the letter p. This literalist reading by an illiterate allows us, Bulosan’s literate readers, to begin to grasp the processes and repercussions of what we have been trained not to read: the creation and exploitation of living labor. When we frame Magno’s illiteracy as a weapon of the weak, we can begin to see that the source of his vulnerability to exploitation— his illiteracy—also is the source of his liberation from an accumulative economy. In fact, Magno’s lack of education seems to allow him to see right through the ideology of education. At one point, Magno turns to his compatriot Nick for help. Nick is the only member of the crew who has attended college. Rolling a wad of tobacco in his cheeks, Magno says, “I have confidence in myself. But some men use their education to enslave others. I thought education is meant to guide the uneducated. Did some educated man lie about this thing called education, Nick?”10 Nick replies, “I don’t think so, Magno. Education is a periscope through which a common ground of understanding should be found among men.”11 Magno’s bald insight about how the educated “enslave” rather than “guide” the uneducated and Nick’s reply have several repercussions. This exchange implies that a form of colonial tutelage—or the official policy of “benevolent assimilation” in the Philippine case—is masked by democracy and its promise of a “common ground.” Moreover, Magno’s illiteracy reveals the perfectionist ideology that undergirds a particular narrative about education that dovetails with American meritocratic exceptionalism, or what we more loosely call the

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American Dream, even as it justifies the existence of the racial, imperial state. When education is understood as a path of teleological progress toward perfection, the acquisition of literacy is an individual milestone even as it also marks the emergence of a general and invidious difference between the uneducated and the educated. (Indeed, the literacy tests for voting under Jim Crow laws at the time are an example of the link between literacy and citizenship in the racial state.) The logic of the imperial, racial state depends on this linear and developmental narrative of American history as inevitably progressing toward that perfect future nation even as that future horizon is ever receding and even as the frontiers of America’s manifest destiny continue to expand. The “perniciousness” of the “myth of America,” David Palumbo-Liu argues, “lies in the fact that it is more than the externally identified ‘myth’ so easily debunked by social reality.” He continues, “It is rather the more deepseated myth of America’s ultimate justness despite every social fact.”12

Domestic in a Foreign Sense The problem for Filipino Americans has been that of “forced inclusion” into—rather than exclusion from—the imperial state.13 As I have discussed in the earlier chapters, the Philippines and other new “territories” were deemed “foreign to the United States in a domestic sense,” the phrase that the U.S. Supreme Court coined at the turn of the last century to describe the predicament that the new colonies posed for the American constitutional republic. The Filipino “national” is a perfect example of that experience of being inside and outside, of being externalized in order to be internalized and vice versa. Filipinos function as the “foreign” entity necessarily produced and demanded by the “domestic” contradictions of the imperial state. The Filipino workers of the 1920s and 1930s hence were deemed “savage” and “barbaric” in ways distinct from the racism against Chinese, Japanese, and Korean workers because of the legacy of the Philippine-American War. San Juan reminds us of the repercussions of Filipino savagery for our contemporary War on Terror: Unlike the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, Filipinos alone are considered “savage” or “barbaric” for their fierce resistance to American “pacifying” troops circa 1899–1902 (witness the “water cure,” retrenchment of entire

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villages, anti-sedition laws, and other ethnocidal measures replicated in today’s barbaric war on the Islamic separatists in southern Philippines, all infected with the contagion of the terrorist Abu Sayyaf) and their obsession with independence.14

The Filipino also fulfills the need for an external other to the internal contradictions of capitalism. Even though a number of scholars in Asian American studies have commented on the special legal positioning of Filipino “nationals” in relation to the imperial, racial state, few have commented on the special positioning of laboring Filipinos in relation to capitalism. As I noted in my introductory chapter, David Harvey paraphrases Rosa Luxemburg’s observation that capitalism has an “inner dialectic . . . forcing it to seek solutions external to itself.”15 Indeed, capitalism “needs other races.”16 Historically, legally, rhetorically, and materially, the problem that Filipinos pose for America involves America’s innate and endless need to convert land and people into property and labor. The Philippines and Filipinos in America exactly fulfill that role, the role of the outside constantly being incorporated. There is, then, an additional violence innate to this process that has to do with the continual occlusion of that process of permanently unincorporating people and lands. As Oscar Campomanes has argued, the forgetting of the Filipino is integral to the imperial constitution of the United States as a free and democratic republic.17 Conversely, the remembering of Filipinos in America reveals the capitalist colonial nightmare of the American Dream. Dylan Rodríguez calls this phenomenon the “Filipino condition.” According to Rodríguez, until the genocidal nature of the Philippine-American War is acknowledged by both Filipinos and Americans, the hyphenated Filipino American subject “cannot exist.”18 In its place we find what he calls a “suspended apocalypse.” Put another way, the “Filipino condition” names not merely the conversion of the external other into a market but the continual destruction of the other’s culture, achieved by the process of what Hannah Arendt calls “endless accumulation.” According to Arendt, the “neverending accumulation of property must be based on a never-ending accumulation of political power.”19 Riffing on Arendt, David Harvey asserts that that endlessness has to do with the ability to continuously open up (noncapitalist) territories to capitalist development.20 The noncitizen,

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non-alien workers in Bulosan’s writings who have migrated from the Philippines to America constitute small islands of “noncapitalist territories” that have moved from the space of the foreign to the space of the domestic. If, as Harvey puts it, “tribute is in effect extracted from the rest of the world,” America no longer has to travel afar because the “rest of the world” comes to America to pay tribute in the highly mobile form of the noncitizen non-alien seasonal laborer.21 As such, Bulosan demands that we reconsider and complicate what Harvey calls the “dialectical relation between territorial and capitalistic logics of power” when it comes to the Filipino condition.22 The Filipino dancer, the Filipino field worker, and the Filipino houseboy—these are figures that are simultaneously internal and external to the American capitalist empire.23 They symbolize and embody the positioning of the noncapitalist within the capitalist and the foreign within the domestic. Thus, any threat posed to the nation-empire by the Filipino comes from both within and without. Indeed, the different forms of Filipino movement—dancing, picking, serving—are connected to one another in this economy of endless accumulation and white paranoia. Commenting on the praise excited by Filipinos’ “splendid dancing” in the 1920s and 1930s taxi dance halls, Lucy Burns notes, “Movement is granted, and celebrated, only at the expense of the laboring Filipino body.”24 But this dialectic between the territorial and the capitalist logics of power also begets struggle and resistance. The dancer, the farmer, and the servant— these are perfectly disciplined bodies that nonetheless do not belong to and, hence, constitutively exceed the body politic. Indeed, in one of the several tightly choreographed scenes in The Romance of Magno Rubio, the cast makes explicit the link between dance, battle, and labor by wielding long sticks that oscillate between three functions: percussive dance props, Arnis weapons, and asparagus-harvesting tools. These bodies are always in motion, and this state of constant displacement is the source of their vulnerability to exploitation as well as the source of their intransigence. Given this political history of the Filipino body in motion, I think it no coincidence that a story like “The Romance of Magno Rubio” has found its audience in the theater. We might think of the staged adaptation of Bulosan’s short story, beginning in 2002 with Ma-Yi Theater Company’s production, as a significant form of anti-accumulation. Performance, after all, is something that dies nightly. It is a form of culture that

Figure 3.2. Jojo Gonzalez, Paolo Montalban, and Bernardo Bernardo in The Romance of Magno Rubio, Ma-Yi Theater Company production. Photograph by Matt Zugale.

Figure 3.3. Jojo Gonzalez and Bernardo Bernardo in The Romance of Magno Rubio, Ma-Yi Theater Company production. Photograph by Matt Zugale.

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is repeatedly destroyed and yet lives on. Perhaps because it has taken on this anti-accumulative form, Bulosan’s story has become a far-reaching cultural phenomenon in the Filipino diaspora and the Philippines.25 Ma-Yi Theater Company is a not-for-profit, pan–Asian American theater company based in New York City, and it commissioned the playwright Lonnie Carter to adapt “The Romance of Magno Rubio” for the stage. In 2003, along with Carter, the director Loy Arcenas, the lyricist Ralph Peña, and the original New York City cast won eight OBIE awards. (The OBIE is the off-Broadway theater award awarded annually by the Village Voice newspaper to theater artists and groups in New York City.) The play subsequently has been staged in a number of venues, including Laguna Beach, California (Laguna Playhouse, 2003); Manila and other cities in the Philippines (Ma-Yi and Tanghalang Pilipino, 2003–2004); Chicago (Victory Gardens, 2004); Toronto (Carlos Bulosan Theater, 2005); Honolulu (Kumu Kahua Theatre, 2008); Stockton, California (Bob Hope Theatre, 2008); Los Angeles (Ford Theatre, 2011); and Singapore (DBS Arts Centre, 2012).

Figure 3.4. Magno Rubio (Jojo Gonzalez) dances by himself in The Romance of Magno Rubio, Ma-Yi Theater Company production. Photograph by Matt Zugale.

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Figure 3.5. Magno Rubio (Jojo Gonzalez) dances with a chair in The Romance of Magno Rubio, Ma-Yi Theater Company production. Photograph by Matt Zugale.

As I already have noted, the improbable story of an illiterate paying for letters to romance his beloved has its historical referent in the phenomenon of the taxi dance hall transactions between the male client and the female taxi dancer, or what Rhacel Parreñas and Linda España-Maram have dubbed the encounter between “brown monkeys” or the “brown hordes” and “white trash.”26 In a scene that elicited prolonged applause in every production of Romance that I have seen, the actor who plays Magno performs a solo dance with a chair, a gorgeous “minuet with a chair,” according to a New York Times reviewer.27 Magno has asked Nick to translate and set down in a letter his words to Clarabelle. But words fail Magno. All he manages to utter is ikaw (“you”) three times before falling silent. At that point, another worker produces a guitar out of thin air, and the entire ensemble breaks into a serenade, each line beginning with ikaw. Nick and the Chorus collectively author the words of courtship and seduction that send Magno into thrills of ecstasy as he begins a solo dance with a chair. Suddenly, Clarabelle is displaced by a chair. Magno fluidly twirls the chair and then dances by himself, his arms embracing empty air. Caught up in a

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reverie about the Big Blonde, he nearly swoons by the end of the solipsistic serenade. This scene captures the literalization of abstraction, a theme that runs throughout Bulosan’s story. If Magno Rubio converts abstract ideas like “love” and phrases like “I love you” into literal fruits and vegetables that he can harvest in the fields, with this “minuet,” the absent and reified Clarabelle first appears as a chair and then disappears. Magno Rubio show us how “all that is solid melts into air.”28 With this “minuet,” Carter’s play references the taxi dance hall and the history of white supremacist anxieties about the Filipino dancing body as a source of economic and sexual rivalry, exploitation, and desire. Drawing on the historian Catherine Choy’s concept of “corporeal colonization,” Lucy Burns argues that the Filipino dancing body should be understood as an “archival embodiment” that opens up a history of the rise of anti-Filipino sentiment (the 1930 Watsonville Riot, for example, began at a taxi dance hall in an adjoining town); a genealogy of deviant sexuality, in particular the typecasting of the Filipino man as either sexual predator or infant; and a subaltern history of a “collective way of life” that emerges in sites associated with vice and the amoral.29 As I argued earlier, Bulosan’s story “Romance” contributes to this genealogy of the Filipino dancing body by transporting the scene of action from dancing to writing. Bulosan’s story decreases our ability to be distracted by the Filipino’s “splendid dancing” and instead focuses our attention on the Filipino’s incompetence (which, we will see, Bulosan goes on to deconstruct); and the staged version of “Romance” marvelously accentuates this tension between mastery and incapacity such that we must take seriously the politics of Magno Rubio’s stupidity.

The Politics of Magno’s Naïveté In “Romance,” both the story and play, the predatory nature of the white woman is enhanced, as is the gullibility of the Filipino worker. There is a lot at stake in how we interpret Rubio’s naïveté, given how easily Bulosan’s story lends itself to narratives of American minoritized meritocracy and exceptionalism. Are we to laugh at Magno’s foolish desire for a white woman in an era of laws and policies explicitly forbidding miscegenation between Filipinos and whites? Do we admire him for his utter devotion to the idea of Clarabelle? Do we celebrate the purity of

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the perseverance that she inspires in him and that he in turn inspires in us? Or do we concur with Dylan Rodríguez’s assessment of the “Filipino American dream of the United States of America” as a “profound antimemory, an un-remembering and un-witnessing”?30 The themes of hard work and perseverance associated with the American Dream dominated the reviews of the various theatrical adaptations of “Romance” across the mainstream and ethnic newspapers and blogosphere.31 Whether critics liked or disliked the play, Magno was admired for the naïve and unwavering pursuit of his dreams. For example, a reviewer for the Los Angeles Times wrote, “It’s a faithful, rhyme-driven staging of Carlos Bulosan’s short story about a simple farm worker in 1930s California who won’t let hardship, heartbreak or his lot as an exploited immigrant mar his hopeful spirit.”32 The reviewer for the Los Angeles-based newspaper Campus Circle characterized the play as an “unforgettable tale of romance, love, survival and pursuit of the so-called American Dream.”33 A second reviewer from the Los Angeles Times found Magno’s “bighearted spirit . . . energizing” and “a blessing more than a liability” and praised Carter for “maintain[ing] an upbeat sense of human resilience despite the characters’ dire conditions.”34 Commenting on the “poignancy of Magno’s delusion,” the reviewer for the New York Times wrote, “That he is deceived and fleeced is evident to everyone except Magno himself. But given the hopeless lives of the farm workers it is never clear whether his ill-placed dream is his doom or his salvation.”35 The reviewer for the Filipino Reporter concluded thus: “Is Magno Rubio working for ‘the man’ or for ‘the woman’[?] Perhaps he is working for nothing more tangible than their dreams.”36 The reviewer for the Chicago Reader opined, “In the midst of this dismal pit, [the actor] Rodney To’s Magno shines with a sweet vulnerability and unshakable zeal that make us cheer for him in the face of impossible odds.”37 There are a few notable exceptions to this trend in the play’s reviews, but overall what emerges is a pattern of sentiment overcoming the rational.38 According to these reviewers, our rational assessment of the foolishness of Magno’s devotion to Clarabelle is, in the end, outweighed by our sentimental pity for the tragedy of his unrequited love and our admiration for his work ethic. The overwhelming majority of the reviews affirm an assimilationist reading of Magno’s naïveté whether they take an allegorical or realist

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approach to the play. Several reviewers explicitly refer to the allegorical nature of Romance. Another New York Times reviewer comments, for example, that “this relationship [between Magno Rubio and Clarabelle], fed by Magno’s naïve fantasizing, is an allegory of the relationship between the laborers and the big, bountiful America they dreamed of back in the Philippines.”39 Interestingly, a number of the reviews slide back and forth between an allegorical and realist interpretation. For example, a reviewer for Variety refers to “Bulosan’s not-so-subtle metaphor of American the Bountiful as a hard-hearted bitch” and refers to the story as a “fable,” and yet complains about the predictability of the plot and the characters’ lack of transformation.40 This oscillation between the allegorical and the realist indicates, I think, resistance to or unfamiliarity with modes of political satire that become much more legible outside the American exceptionalist framework. By contrast, the dramaturge-critic Joi Barrios-Leblanc reads Romance within Filipino traditions of political satire like the Tagalog sainete (short comic play). Drawing on the work of the literary critic Bienvenido Lumbera, Barrios-Leblanc interprets the “rube” as a symbol of resistance against the merging of cosmopolitanism and colonialism that was established by the geographical hierarchy between the tagabukid (the “wild” provincial from the countryside) and the tagabayan (the “civilized” citydweller).41 She refers to the genre of the Tagalog sainete and the drama simboliko (symbolic drama), which is a “theater form that articulated the anticolonial and anti-imperialist sentiments of the Filipino during the American occupation at the turn of the twentieth century.”42 BarriosLeblanc also situates Romance in relation to the Philippine theatrical formula wherein two men—typically a wealthy foreigner and a poor Filipino representing the “revolutionary”—compete for a woman’s love, a deployment of the “conventions of romance” in order to express “anticolonial sentiments.”43 According to this formula, the woman inevitably chooses the poor Filipino, who would pretend to be dying in order to exert pressure on the priest to honor his last wish and then would reveal that he was alive and unharmed. Barrios-Leblanc underscores the recognizably insurgent nature of this kind of allegorical strategy for the Filipino audience: “The character of the Filipino suitor who pretends to be dead but is actually alive, is especially significant, because it refers to the Filipino revolutionaries waging a guerilla war against the American

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colonizers.”44 In her own translation of the play into Filipino for MaYi’s tour of the Philippines, Barrios-Leblanc dealt with what she perceived as assimilationist elements of the play by including references to today’s neocolonial conditions and radical cultural traditions in the Philippines.45 Bulosan referred to his writings as satire that expresses “bitterness” that at times is “hidden” and at other times is more “pronounced.”46 San Juan emphasizes the satirical elements of Romance thus: “The story of course is not a realistic but a satiric portrayal of a contrived situation, with strong allegorical and didactic elements. Like the vignettes in [Bulosan’s collection The Laughter of My Father], both story and play mobilize the tendentious potential of caricature, incongruities, and ribald exaggeration found in the genre.”47 In both the original story and the theatrical versions of “Romance,” the characters’ names signal to the reader the story’s allegorical nature and a complex satirical economy. Magno at first hires his coworker Claro to write letters to Clarabelle, setting up a connection between Claro and Clarabelle who, respectively, cheat and cheat on Magno. The name Clarabelle of course combines the ideas of beauty and light, and so the character that one reviewer calls a “vulgarly quintessential gold digger” ironically is associated with clarity or enlightenment.48 At the same time, Magno’s name has at least two possible connotations: He is a great rube and he is a big (magno) blond (rubio). Interestingly, the latter translation connects Magno with Clarabelle. By signaling these commonalities between Claro and Clarabelle and between Clarabelle and Magno, Bulosan reveals his anxiety about his own position of getting paid to write. Here, Bulosan signals the writer’s general and long-standing anxiety about the relation between the writer and the prostitute, where the commodification of writing appears as the sale of the self. Through the ambiguity of the name Magno Rubio, Bulosan expresses his ambivalence about his own role in translating Filipino workers’ experiences and getting paid for it, a male Filipino version of Clarabelle, so to speak.49 In his autobiographical narrative America Is in the Heart, Bulosan refers to his writing letters for other people, a service that of course is similar to that offered by Nick in “Romance,” the only character with a college education. (Note that Bulosan did not have a college education, and I argue later in the chapter that Bulosan has an ambivalent relationship to Nick’s higher educational and class status.)

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When it comes to its staged adaptation, the stakes of reading Romance as allegory or realism become even clearer. In the original Ma-Yi Theater production, the double-role casting of the characters Clarabelle and Atoy—one actor played both roles—produced a Brechtian alienation effect that was enhanced by the additional staging of Clarabelle in silhouette. That is to say, the actor who played Atoy also played Clarabelle, speaking in falsetto tones and facing the audience, while a

Figure 3.6. Ramon de Ocampo in The Romance of Magno Rubio, Ma-Yi Theater Company production. Photograph by Matt Zugale.

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Figure 3.7. Art Acuña, Jojo Gonzalez, and Orville Mendoza’s silhouette in The Romance of Magno Rubio, Ma-Yi Theater Company production. Photograph by Matt Zugale.

second actor mutely played Clarabelle in silhouette. Several reviewers applauded the staging of Clarabelle as a “towering shadow” because it “makes her image larger than life.”50 A reviewer for the Filipino Reporter thought that the staging was “problematic” but found that it “yield[ed] better results than if a real Clarabelle materialized in the stage.”51 A reviewer for the online newspaper SFGate noted, “All Magno got, after all that hopeful waiting, was the shadow image of a faithless woman on a canvas curtain and the falsetto voice of [actor] Ramon De Ocampo, as the brazen Clarabelle, leading him on toward nothing and running off with another man.”52 In effect, the character of Clarabelle was staged as a composite of the (aural) voice separated from the (visual) body and across male and female genders, and this staging decision powerfully underscored the story’s allegorical elements. By contrast, the director of the 2011 production of Romance at the Ford Theatre in Los Angeles took what might be called a more realist approach to Carter’s script when he decided to cast a female-bodied actor to play Clarabelle. The theater set also included a wall with graffiti that, upon second glance, revealed the names of prominent Filipino Americans

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alongside the infamous phrase “No Dogs and Filipinos Allowed,” which emblematized anti-Filipino segregation. In his program notes, the director, Bernardo Bernardo, described his desire for a “different interpretation” that would “pay tribute to the Manongs who blazed a trail for all Fil-Ams [sic].” He noted, “I decided from day one that I will show more of the darker, grittier side of Bulosan’s world in reinterpreting Lonnie Carter’s text.”53 Bernardo clearly wanted to create a more historico-realist rather than romantic or humorous version of the play as a way of marking the California state legislature’s formal apology earlier that year for anti-Filipino government policies and laws, what Bernardo calls “nearly 100 years of discrimination, prejudice and hardship.”54 Bernardo also incorporated the balagtasan tradition, a Filipino form of debate or the “dozens,” in a way that enhanced the performative and kinetic spirit and structure of the play, whose success depends on the ensemble cast’s ability to impress the audience with its mastery of a range of skills: singing, dancing, musical instrumentation, and martial arts. However, I found that Bernardo’s turn toward realism and his rejection of the double-role casting of Clarabelle diminished Clarabelle’s allegorical importance and resulted in a production that affirmed rather than challenged stereotype, both in terms of the misogyny of Clarabelle’s character and the racism and classism of Magno’s character. Although there always will be tension between the story and its staged adaptation, Bernardo’s staging of the play substantially—and, in my view, adversely— changes the story’s representation of women. For example, when Magno’s dream about Clarabelle’s embrace turns into a suffocating chokehold, Ma-Yi Theater staged the scene as a dialogue between Magno and the rest of the crew, and so Bulosan’s misogynistic representation of Clarabelle is understood as a means of indicting a larger structure of racial and colonial strangulation. But in Bernardo’s version, Magno lies down and falls asleep while the female-bodied actor playing Clarabelle literally takes him by the throat and chokes him. In this “darker, grittier” version, Clarabelle is unquestionably evil, and there is little space for Bulosan’s misogyny to be anything but misogyny. This misogyny is, I think, connected to the transphobia that emerges in Bernardo’s staging during one of the ensemble’s musical numbers that involves cross-dressing. A malebodied worker ties his shirt high up on his chest so that it looks like he has large breasts and wraps a kerchief around his head so that he looks

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female. In typical transphobic fashion, the other workers shudder and recoil from the cross-dressing character, who is treated like a joke and nothing else, again because of the general diminishing of allegory. When the gender ambiguity that Carter’s double-role casting embeds in the play is removed, this cross-dressing scene becomes quite narrowly vicious, and the opportunity to reflect on the generally homosocial nature of the workers’ lives is lost. But more generally speaking, the play’s reviewers—across the range of different productions—too quickly pass over the significance of Magno’s naïveté. Most reviewers maintain that Magno’s dreams and hopes are destroyed and that he finally learns a lesson when, in the end, he finds out that Clarabelle has betrayed him and run off with all his money and another man. For example, the Variety reviewer writes that the story is about the “education of [the workers’] gullible friend” and ends in the “destruction of Rubio’s romantic ideals.”55 The Campus Circle reviewer writes, “Meet Magno Rubio, who is a bit primitive but becomes educated as the story progresses.”56 These reviewers reveal their desire to read the play as a colonial bildungsroman. Even Epifanio San Juan Jr., the preeminent scholar of Bulosan’s oeuvre, emphasizes Magno’s “disillusionment” and reads a “sense of pathos” into the story, concluding that “comic distance eventually supervenes, and life returns to routine work in the end.”57 I found only one reviewer who noticed that Magno is unaffected at the end of the play: “The play’s final image is a smiling Magno, hovering godlike above the action, cheerful as a puppy and ready, it would seem, for another adventure.”58 But the reviewer unfortunately and tellingly compares Magno to a dog, a simile that invokes the animalistic nature of racist rhetoric and calls up the derogatory term “dogeater,” which is particular to Filipino American history. But is Magno really “in for a heart-smashing”?59 Is this really what happens in the end? Let us take a closer look at Bulosan’s ending, which Carter faithfully re-creates. When he sees Clarabelle in a car laughing with another man as they drive away, Magno reacts in the following way: He was speechless for a moment. Then he understood everything. He brushed his eyes with a finger and took my arm. “I guess we’ll start picking the tomatoes next week, Nick.” “Yeah,” I said.

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“Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s hurry back to the bunkhouse. Those guys will eat all the chicken!”60

Magno’s heart is far from smashed. He barely sheds a tear before he returns to work, an abrupt reversion to routine that is accentuated by the story’s abrupt and anticlimactic ending. Bulosan demands that we pay attention to Magno’s intact heart. He also demands that we pay attention to his nonrealist aesthetic. We do Bulosan a disservice if we ignore the satirical and allegorical elements that he deploys, which live on in the story’s theatrical adaptation. It is crucial to read both the fictional and theatrical versions of “Romance” fully rather than partially as allegory, and the characters of Clarabelle and Claro are key mechanisms for this fuller kind of allegorical interpretation. Clarabelle is indeed a “not-sosubtle metaphor of America the Bountiful.” She stands in for the “United Snakes of America,” as one of the characters in Carter’s play puts it.61 Despised for their underhanded ways of cheating and tricking others out of their hard-earned money, Clarabelle and Claro are an allegory for what Peter Linebaugh calls the “cheating form of the commodity.”62 If we read “Romance,” both the story and the play, fully as allegory, we see that Magno’s lack of disappointment is connected to his lack of education and his illiteracy. At one point, Nick tries to teach Magno to read but fails: “I was tempted to teach him the alphabet, which I did for a few days, but he lacked concentration. And his memory was bad because his mind was taken up by the enticing photographs.”63 Bulosan’s text shows that Magno is unteachable. We easily could conclude that Magno is either stupid or animalistic, “cheerful as a puppy.” Returning to Bulosan’s text, however, we find that there is a lesson to be learned from Magno’s illiteracy. Magno’s lack of disappointment is accompanied by total comprehension: “Then he understood everything.” This combination of lack and plenitude means that it is possible that Magno both learns “everything” and is unteachable. Bulosan offers us an allegory of literal-minded illiteracy that transforms Magno’s foolishness into a knowing kind of naïveté as he shells out dollar after dollar for the words and the gifts to romance the six-foot-tall “Arkansas Arkanssassin.”64 There is value in Magno’s unteachability, an alterity that is connected to his literalism, his way of treating (literal, material) fruit as (abstract) words and vice versa. His literalism reveals how the commodities of agribusiness impose horizontal

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mobility upon him and his class in order to make possible vertical mobility for another class. His illiteracy yields literalism, which in turn yields literalization. Thus, at the level of representation, Bulosan manages to convert illiteracy—a weapon of the weak—into a means of exposing exploitation, which otherwise would be covered by the words—the rhetoric and ideology—of American meritocratic exceptionalism. Both story and play versions of “Romance” are structured brilliantly around a combination of the abstract and the literal. Ridiculing Magno’s conception of love, Claro declares, “Words, words, words! They don’t mean a thing.”65 But when it comes to the colonial subject’s idealization of money, whiteness, and imperial romance, it is clear that Bulosan is showing us that words do, after all, “mean a thing.” Bulosan portrays the conversion—the abstraction—of produce into labor into wages into money, gifts, and words for the white woman. However, while Marxian analysis calls our attention to the abstraction of the conversion of social meaning and processes into things, Bulosan performs one more turn of the screw. Magno literally counts how much asparagus or how many tomatoes will buy him the words “I love you.” Bulosan is responding to Marx’s call for attention to the abstraction of the representative form of money and wages by creating an illiterate character like Magno who insists on treating the form of representation—language—totally literally. Rubio picks peas in order to buy the letter p, thus recalling and transforming Marx’s marvelous formulation: “All commodities are perishable money; money is the imperishable commodity.”66 Read as a positivity, Magno’s illiteracy opens up a way of apprehending alterity. We can reread his act of throwing it all away—“you are mortgaging your whole future”—in an exemplary way, along with the story’s depiction of other practices of excess: drink, sex, and gambling. Lonnie Carter conveys the story’s themes of excess through the excessiveness of his “language-drunk” writing, as one reviewer puts it.67 Another reviewer describes Carter’s script as a “kinetic piece of seriocomic storytelling.”68 Yet another provides these insights into Carter’s lingual aerobics and his cross-cultural adaptability: Long established as a distinctive talent but not widely known, he has spent nearly 30 years writing plays that jump racial and ethnic boundaries.

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Many of his lines are tuned to the rhythms and rhymes of rap and its antecedents in black street jive. His language is often densely packed with wordplay and allusions, for which he grazes omnivorously, ranging from the shoals of pop culture to the mountaintops of classic literature and the Bible.69

These practices of excess are sources of racial and gender stereotyping, but they also are indictments of capitalism, and they reveal the possibility of other values and economies. Magno Rubio teaches us to throw it all away as he goes deeper and deeper into debt and his increasingly reckless actions expose the exploitation that structures all of the crew’s lives, an indictment that is all too relevant for our own day. As importantly, Bulosan’s story indexes the existence of an other economy of debt that is based on assumptions of reciprocity, generosity, and collective survival. These workers form a sociality that operates according to a wholly other system of obligation. By this I refer to a range of Filipino concepts captured by the Filipino phrases utang na loob and kapwa. As scholars associated with the sikolohiyang Pilipino movement explain, the everyday phrase utang na loob literally means “inner debt,” and it refers to a range of interiorized feelings of social obligation, while the term kapwa can be understood as a worldview based on profoundly collective forms of mutual recognition.70 I return to the significance of sikolohiyang Pilipino at the end of this chapter, but I note for now that Bulosan complicates this resurfacing of a subaltern economy of values. In “Romance,” we see how this reemergence of alterity functions both to organize labor for capital and to preserve and promote resistant values.71 For Magno Rubio and the rest of his crew, kapwa is a mode of survival through solidarity that ironically also strengthens capitalism’s iron grip over their bodies. It is no wonder, then, that excess is such a strong theme in Bulosan’s story. Excess marks the rejection of the reproduction of extricated labor even as it also comes at the cost or risk of individual and collective self-preservation. Bulosan’s story intertwines this theme of excess with a complex repetition, circulation, and rhythm of racialized work and words. Carter’s staged adaptation draws on Bulosan’s repetition of a passage that produces a deliberately vicious caricature of Magno even as it contains hints of lyric verse:

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Magno Rubio. Filipino boy. Four-foot six inches tall. Dark as a coconut. Head small on a body like a turtle. Magno Rubio. Picking peas on a California hillside for twenty-five cents an hour. Filipino boy. In love with a girl he had never seen. A girl twice his size sideward and upward, Claro said.72

Versions of this passage appear five times in a short story that is only sixteen pages long. The rhythm of the repetition of verse in the story disrupts the text’s status as linear narrative. This repeated verse clearly inspired Carter to write most of the play in lyric verse. Indeed, the staging of the play is highly percussive and tightly choreographed, dependent for its success on the fluidity and synchronicity of the ensemble cast, who cannot afford to miss a line or a beat. If we follow this rhythm of racist insult, sexual desire, and exploited labor, we begin to grasp Bulosan’s investment in the literary devices that he uses to depict various acts of putative exchange, an economy that the Filipino enters in order to be converted into money. In other words, we start to understand the relation between the form and content of the wages of colonial romance. In Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, Antonio Negri usefully describes the relation of form to content when it comes to money: Marx notes, if money is an equivalent, if it has the nature of an equivalent, it is above all the equivalence of a social inequality . . . . Money hides a content which is eminently a content of inequality, a content of exploitation. The relation of exploitation is the content of the monetary equivalent: better, this content could not be exhibited.73

What I am suggesting is that there are common characteristics between, on the one hand, how money “hides the content” of exploitation and, on the other, how Filipino American labor disappears, how what Campomanes calls the “invisibilization” of colonized Filipino subjects is achieved.74 Thus, Carter’s achievement is that of translating for the stage Bulosan’s remarkable condensation of labor, desire, and language, interlocked as they are by the operations of abstraction. At the same time, what is at stake in “The Romance of Magno Rubio” is the clash between two perspectives on gambling. There are a number of scenes in the story and the play in which the men drink and gamble, in search of relief from boredom and loneliness. These scenes of gambling

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of course signal a racial as well as socioeconomic type, particularly Filipino men’s innate moral turpitude and their inexorable path to financial debt and ruin. (Of course, this is a not-unfamiliar stereotype for other men of color and white working-class men.) Generally, gambling signals the opposite of heteronormative behavior, that of the virtuous family man who devotes himself to accumulation rather than to squandering and who devotes himself to saving and assimilation rather than expenditure, extravagance, and various forms of waste and transgression. “The Romance of Magno Rubio” turns the tables on this understanding of gambling. In its portrayal of exploitation and the men’s refusal to accumulate, capitalism is revealed as a form—the form—of gambling with debt. Ferdinand Braudel defines Western capitalism as “a collection of rules, possibilities, calculations, the art both of getting rich and of living,” and he notes that these include “gambling and risk.” Braudel further notes, “The key words of commercial language, fortuna, ventura, ragione, prudenza, sicurta, define risks to be guarded against.”75 As Anthony Trollope portrays so powerfully in the novel The Way We Live Now—and as we know from the 2008–2009 collapse of the market— capitalism is an elaborate form of gambling with debt. Along with the other forms of excess that are portrayed in “Romance,” Bulosan uses the representation of workers’ gambling as a form of revelation—an exposure of capitalist gambling—and, as I noted earlier, as a sign of workers’ rejection of the reproduction of extricated labor. In his play, Carter translates Bulosan’s gambling with words in ways that underscore the performative dimension of rhetoric. Let us turn to the rhythm and economy of language in Carter’s staged adaption. Below are examples of the different characters’ speech and my attempts at rhythm analysis, which I hope illustrate Carter’s metrical and lyric complexity and range. Here is what Magno Rubio sounds like when he describes the rhythm of his and his compatriots’ work in the fields: For every pod of pea I pick one mill is what I earn For every little mill I get one word is what I buy For twenty ears of corn I shuck

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one cent is what I put away For fifty heads of lettuce plucked two cents will buy—“With love I burn!” For every bunch of cherries snapped “I miss you” ’s what I sigh One hundred stalks of ’sparagus for “Love you love you love you, love” I work the livelong day.76

Carter establishes a direct ratio between piecework labor and the number of words, which is underscored by the plodding meter, that Magno can purchase for his correspondence with Clarabelle. The playwright brings to life Bulosan’s insistence on literalizing the metaphorical nature of wages and the money form. The Chorus then responds to Magno: Words words words, now here’s the matter monkey boy in heat Words words words, more veg—e—tables, Rubio, more fruit Fruit fruit fruit, the bigger harvest sooner you two meet Work words work, she loves your chatter monkey boy in heat Words work words, she needs you at her, wants you to repeat.77

Here the Chorus uses a regular four-stress pattern that at times breaks into rhyming couplets, so generally the effect is comic and parodic. The cook, Prudencio, is an older, gentler character who moves a little more slowly on Carter’s stage. While most of the play’s language is quite bawdy and riotous, Prudencio uses blank (nonrhymed) verse when he tries to console Magno and when he talks about missing his own wife: Why are you weeping, little one? How long have you been at this? This life which makes us all old without cease What is it when we have no work?

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What is it even when we do? Weep for that that keeps us here Playing games of cards, so ripped and bent, my back so stripped and bent with four or five manongs like me And always one off to the side with his solitaire Or strumming battered guitars with broken strings The wattles of my rooster neck shaking with anger like a dog with an old shoe in his stinking mouth Why are you weeping, little one? Why is your face broken? How long have you been at this This life that makes us old without release What is it when we have no work What is it even when we do Weep for coming here across the waters When we had hope that this land Would open its arms And yes it has—open—now shut around us “parang sawa” [like a large snake] The United Snakes of America Little one, go ahead and weep.78

Prudencio’s speeches are elegiac, and they powerfully convey his and his coworkers’ loneliness. In contrast, the character Clarabelle uses verse that is metrically irregular, so the effect is comic. During the one and only encounter between her and Magno, Clarabelle addresses Nick, who acts as their interpreter. Carter wonderfully mixes the “tiempo” of her pulse with the temperature of her passion when she meets Magno and is baffled by his inability to speak English: Doesn’t he speak, ah what? Inglese? He’s been writing me all these letters. You should see them, Nickie boy. The things he says—mooey delicioso! Are you sure you don’t, how you say—Tenga la bonedad un poco tiempo

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Take my tiempo, feel my tiempo, racing mucho uno mas uno uno mas.79

As I have noted, the role of Clarabelle is played by one of the male actors in gestural and aural drag. He uses highly exaggerated falsetto while he faces the audience and speaks into an old-fashioned microphone that recalls 1950s radio. In a scene that powerfully melds the promise of miscegenated sex with the technology for transcontinental remittance, Clarabelle begs Magno to “please, please, Western Union me”: Tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow please Western Union me Back to your sweet proposal, dear, I have it with me now My heart is with you now and then I’m there ASAP I think of you much every day you say you to me bow So, darling, handsome Magno love express your dough to me Tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow you Western Union me.80

Clarabelle’s plaintive plea to “please, please, Western Union me” contains a crucial pun: her seduction of Magno involves the promise of miscegenated union with the Western woman in exchange for cash remittance through the transcontinental telegraph system. Finally, Nick, nicknamed “college boy” by his coworkers, recites sonnets that indicate his higher level of education and his mastery of a “classic” and classy form. For example, puzzled by Magno’s boundless naïveté, Nick delivers the following speech, which takes the form of a classic Shakespearean sonnet: What quality of soul sustains a man To have such faith in someone he’s not seen What possibly can he be thinking? Can He hold such hope when all about him mean

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To tell and do tell him he’s lost his mind? When he, beyond all reason and belief Who should have given up, as others find No solace in anything, no relief Except who touches them and whom they touch; Is this untouchable, this wretched ram Whose only good would seem to be so much Of picking, stacking, carting—Jesus damn! Or does he, Magno Rube, know more than we And should we turn ourselves so loose—and free?81

Because of this speech, the play does lend itself quite easily to interpretations that valorize assimilation. The play valorizes a man like Magno Rubio, who has “such faith in someone he’s not seen.” The final couplet about freedom is ambivalent, however, and it suggests that Nick has a glimpse of the alternative values that Magno represents. As I have argued, according to the ending of both the story and the play, Magno never assimilates. He shows no interest in the individuated process of accumulation that underwrites assimilation.

Rereading Plagiarism What are some other ways to read Nick’s Shakespearean sonnet? Let us shift our attention to the copied form of Nick’s speech, a literary form of borrowing and stealing. I argue that we should think of Carter’s mimicry of a Shakespearean sonnet as a tribute to Bulosan’s putative predilection for plagiarism, and an occasion for rethinking the morality and criminality surrounding literary theft. Given the charges of plagiarism that plagued Bulosan during his lifetime and that mar his reputation today, how might Bulosan be providing us with what Kimberly Alidio calls an “avenue towards overturning the moralism” of the terms “prostitute” and “plagiarist,” a path that opens up through a nexus of “overlapping underground economies [and] ‘black markets’ ”?82 Just as the cheating characters of Claro and Clarabelle afford us clarity about broader scales and modes of capitalist exploitation, an analysis of Bulosan’s plagiarist economy gives us insights about the nature of post/colonial cultural production.

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During his lifetime, Bulosan was haunted by charges of plagiarism, and those accusations continue to mar his legacy.83 Indeed, the basic plot of “Romance” is very similar to that of two stories published in 1940 by his writer friend John Fante.84 In Fante’s story “The Dreamer,” a Filipino called Cristo is a foreman for a fruit company and he wants to marry a “typical American girl.”85 Cristo falls in love with a “girl he had seen but never met,” a tall, blonde singer who performs at a dance hall.86 Bulosan echoes this language when he describes Magno as “in love with a girl he had never seen.”87 In Fante’s story, Cristo hires the narrator, a writer, to pen the love letters that accompany the increasingly expensive gifts that he mails to the singer. The singer finally rejects him and the gifts. Calling himself a “big fool”—perhaps what inspired the name of Bulosan’s Magno Rubio—Cristo declares at the end of the story, “ ‘I am big fool. Twenty years in America. I look for wrong thing. Is not clothes. Is not yellow hair. Is love. Is here.’ He tapped his heart.”88 The narrator is confronted with the sight of Cristo’s disappointment: “He faced me, the hurt deep inside him tightening the muscles around his mouth, his eyes dry and bright and wanting darkness.”89 In Fante’s story “Helen, Thy Beauty Is to Me,” Julio Sal is a “Filipino boy” who has a “dark face” and stands only “five feet, four inches” tall. He falls in love with a taxi dance hall dancer called Helen, she of the “smooth red dress” and “golden head.” When Helen lays her head on Julio Sal’s shoulder, a “dream shaped itself in his Malay brain,” a dream of her marrying him and cooking breakfast for him.90 Julio Sal pays a Filipino roommate, a poet and a graduate of the University of Washington, to write love letters to Helen on his behalf at a rate of a penny per word. (Note that one might argue that, at a meta-textual level, Fante is depicting how he is “plagiarizing” Bulosan’s experience, but we will return to this point later.) When Julio Sal’s dream inevitably is crushed by the predations of the taxi dance hall, he “wanted to sigh; instead a sob shook itself from his throat,” and, at the end of the story, he abruptly leaves the dance hall and buys a one-way bus ticket out of the city.91 Both stories are portraits of the noncitizen national’s attempt to transform a monied erotic transaction like taxi dancing into marriage, and by marriage I mean the noncitizen national’s access to whiteness as property vis-à-vis the body of the white woman. At a glance, one can tell that Fante’s fiction is composed of caricature that has little to no irony in its effort to create a tragic portrait of the

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“Filipino boy.” The Filipino’s infatuation is depicted in the language of biological racism or animalism, especially that of Julio Sal. In contrast with Magno, whose illiteracy generates knowledge, Julio’s naïveté about Helen’s work as a taxi hall dancer reproduces racialized stupidity. Shot through with stereotype about the fatuousness of the “Filipino boy” and his dreams, Fante’s story stirs the reader’s pity for Julio Sal and misogynist anger at Helen—clearly, a reference to Helen of Troy—while confirming racial type in its reduction of the Filipino to the possession of a “Malay brain,” his “Spanish-Malay passion for bright leather” and other flashy objects, and his strutting around with the “grandeur of a bantam cock.”92 With the characters of Cristo and Julio Sal, Fante mobilizes a more sincere version of Burns’s “infantilized colonial subject.” Fante’s Filipino male protagonist is more than naïve. He is a baby in the form of an adult, whose absurd and impossible desires are crushed by the reality principle. In both stories, the Filipino is utterly devastated by the white woman’s rejection. He is a child in the form of an adult who refuses to go to school. For example, in “Helen, Thy Beauty Is to Me,” the poet chastises Julio Sal for working in the fields instead of studying: You are a fool, Julio Sal. Sixteen years ago in Hawaii I say to you: “Go to school, Julio Sal. Learn to read English, learn to write English; it come in handy someday.” But no, you work in the pineapple, you make money, you play Chinee lottery, you shoot crap, you lose the cockfights. You have no time for American school. Me, I am different. I have big education. I am graduate, University of Washington.93

With “Romance,” Bulosan rescripts and transforms the political and moral economy of Fante’s stories. Configured as an instance of what the historian Augusto Espiritu calls an “adaptive practice,” Bulosan’s allegorical version of the naïve “Filipino boy” and the predatory white woman is a successful critique of Fante’s static portrait of both Filipino and white working-class people as unidimensional stereotypes.94 Yet the charge of plagiarism haunted Bulosan during his lifetime and continues to dog his legacy today. Bulosan never was accused of copying Fante’s stories (as far as I can tell), but he did face a lawsuit filed by the writer Guido D’Agostino in 1945, which was settled out of court.95 In combination

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with the rise of McCarthyism and the targeting of labor activists like Bulosan, this lawsuit precipitated the sharp decline in Bulosan’s career and reputation. According to Espiritu, those who hated Bulosan “took the plagiarism charge as a confirmation of his lack of originality, while those who admired him have failed openly to grapple with the two stories for fear of sullying the reputation of their hero.”96 Whether or not Bulosan was guilty of plagiarism, I find convincing Espiritu’s argument that Bulosan does “both more and less than copy the story.”97 Espiritu argues that while “it does indeed seem that Bulosan borrowed D’Agostino’s plot structure, theme, and even language [and] passed off as his own and presented as new and original another writer’s idea,” Bulosan wrote an adaptive “retelling” of D’Agostino’s story.98 This mode of adaptation must be understood in its historical context, which includes traditions of storytelling, orature, and folklore. Espiritu reminds us that as a child, Bulosan was “exposed to an oral culture in which storytelling, folktale, and myth suffused everyday conversation. Even in the United States, Bulosan’s fellow Ilokanos, the largest migrant population from the Philippines, exchanged folktales and oral performances, including some dealing with supernatural occurrences,” and so the writing of “Romance” should be understood as a form of “hearsay.”99 That is to say, Bulosan said on paper what he heard. Espiritu further argues that Bulosan’s “adaptive practice” is a crucial part of the making of folklore: In effect, Bulosan, taking illegally from D’Agostino, was describing the making of folklore itself—the process of oral transmission, its aural aspects, its quality of being heard or overheard. The story’s repetitious, aggregative manner links it to distinctive traits of oral cultures. We can see this process of adaptation at work in the characters’ attempts to embellish details of the original story as well as aspects of the story to suit their personal styles and tales.100

San Juan concludes that Bulosan’s plagiarism should be understood as a practice of the people: “In Laughter, Allos [Bulosan’s nickname] reworked many traditional fables and anecdotes whose provenance in Arabic and Indian folklore is well-known and whose plots, motifs, and character types continue to be reproduced by authors in many disparate

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languages and cultures. It is the folk, the people, who function ultimately as the original authors.”101 Other Filipino historians have also located Bulosan’s mode of writerly “hearsay” in a larger context. Espiritu observes that Bulosan’s plagiarism is connected to a larger tradition: “Historical forgeries, similar to plagiarisms, have been a consistent presence in Philippine historiography, as the studies of Fr. Schumacher and Glenn May have shown.” The historian Vicente Rafael suggests that we recognize these forgers not as “failed historians” but as “aspiring storytellers.”102 Thus, the forger is the means of “transmitting various historic ‘possibilities’ and a ‘starting point,’ rather than a final authority, for inquiring into Filipino nationalist narratives under American colonial rule.”103 In a 1979 interview published by Amerasia Journal, Carlos Bulosan’s brother Aurelio Bulosan noted that although his brother used to “mingle with the ordinary Filipinos, talk like them, and act like them, . . . they didn’t know that Carlos was gathering materials from them.” Aurelio explained, “You see, when you write something about the people you have to be among them, you must feel every word you write. Carlos used to tell me, ‘You know, words have hearts and souls, that’s why I am very careful in using words. It’s like using people, you have to be careful.’ ”104 San Juan also speculates on the possible authorial role played by Bulosan’s white women friends: “I frankly believe that most of his works are products of combined efforts by him and his numerous women helpers. A novel purported to be by Bulosan, All the Conspirators, is, judging from its style and content, the work of a woman friend who was also a writer.”105 What a reversal, if San Juan’s claim turns out to have been true: The white woman who is the addressee of the “Filipino boy’s” letters in Bulosan’s writings might turn out to have been the author or coauthor of those letters.106 This blurring of the lines between addresser and addressee and between the subject and object of writing is indicated by the names of the characters in “Romance.” Bulosan might be a composite of all of the characters: Nick the poet, Magno Rubio the illiterate, Claro the one who gets paid for writing, and, most intriguingly, Clarabelle, with whom Bulosan shares the initials “C” and “B.” This blurring of the boundaries between such different characters is a symptom, I think, of Bulosan’s ambivalence about a range of issues, including his attitude toward the Filipino elites— the ilustrado elite in the Philippines and the government-sponsored

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pensionado students in the United States. Bulosan celebrated the fact of his self-education when he wrote, “It is not really important to go to the university. A college degree does not mean that you are educated. . . . Education comes after school, from your relations with your fellow man, from your understanding of yourself.”107 Bulosan was aware of the negative reception of his writings in the Philippines and linked this critique to bias against his class and educational background. In a letter to a Philippine scholar, Bulosan wrote, “There is no need for Filipino writers to feel that I am inferior to them, or that their books are better than mine; neither should they feel that they are educated because they went to colleges, nor should they think that I am ignorant because I lack formal education.”108 However, Espiritu notes that Bulosan had conflicting desires and feelings about his relationship to his “unlettered countrymen,” and observes that Bulosan’s “desire for inclusion in high society cut across his desire to represent the cultural experiences of peasants and workers. He felt a simultaneous sense of difference from and camaraderie with Filipino migrant laborers in the United States. On the one hand, he possessed intellectual abilities that made him feel superior to them. On the other hand, as with José Rizal, his education fired him with a vision of educating his countrymen.”109 Bulosan’s friend Dolores Feria wrote that if Bulosan could have afforded to do so, “he would end up at the bar of the Ambassador or the Builtmore [sic] Hotel, nothing less. For he had very bourgeois tastes, in spite of his fanatically proletarian sentiments.”110 Returning to the characters of the story “Romance,” I want to suggest that Bulosan might not have fully appreciated how his complex portrayal of the relation between the educated and the uneducated might contain a lesson for himself. I already have suggested that Nick learns from, rather than teaches, Magno a lesson about the value of illiteracy. But the story also contains a lesson for Bulosan. While the story at first seems to portray stark differences between the learned Nick and the unlettered Magno, these characters turn out to be an allegorical composite of Bulosan’s individual psyche. The lesson for Bulosan might be that he should listen to his own internal and “primitive” Magno, who symbolizes Bulosan’s own background lacking in formal education. Magno teaches his own author, Bulosan, that there is value in unteachability. Going beyond Bulosan’s individual psychobiography, I suggest that if we understand Bulosan’s so-called plagiarism in relation to a larger pattern

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of aspirational storytelling, then we begin to treat stories like “Romance” as a point of departure rather than an end product or commodity. Moreover, while realism tends to produce stereotype, as I have demonstrated in the case of John Fante’s stories, “plagiarized” versions of those realist forms produce powerful political allegory. Magno Rubio teaches us about unteachability. He cannot read or write, and this unteachability indexes his non-assimilation to the accumulative logic of capitalism. He does not care about becoming or being an autonomous subject. Recall that he is defrauded of his labor by wage-slavery before he is defrauded by Clarabelle. As I argued earlier, this gap between the two forms of fraud indicates that Bulosan is creating a knowingly naïve character like Magno Rubio who embraces his non-autonomous status and who configures Clarabelle as a source not so much of “hope” as of “reflected light,” as Joi Barrios-Leblanc brilliantly suggests.111 As Denise da Silva puts it, this is an “embracing of the otherwise, which is not the opposite—accumulation x waste, savings x debt, but probably an element of another grammar altogether.”112 Through “another grammar,” we can exceed Marxian analysis, especially that which would either ignore the significance of noncitizen, non-alien seasonal laborers or impose standards as to whether they are capable of becoming proletarian labor. So while it might be said that Marx’s critique of capitalism is distinguished by his focus on abstract labor time, Magno’s literalness and the kind of literacy it signals—an ability to literalize and thus make legible—suggest that another critique of capitalism is possible. The literary critic Fred Moten has argued via the political philosopher Cedric Robinson that we should understand the Marxian tradition “as part of the ongoing history of racial capitalism.”113 On the Black radical tradition’s relation with Marxism, Moten declares, “It’s just that we’re all that and then some.”114 Similarly, Bulosan’s story and its contemporary adaptation subsume the Marxian tradition in yet another important gesture of politicized excess.

Lessons from the Illiterate: Then and Now Bulosan tells a history for the present. His writings have a prescience about them that has resonated with a readership and audience in the twenty-first century because they expose the dispossession and desires

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that structure capitalism. In 2008, when the enormity of the devastation wreaked by the fiscal crisis had become clear, the community-based organization Little Manila Foundation (LMF) brought the original New York City cast and crew to Stockton, California, to stage a production of Romance in a city that had been dubbed the “foreclosure capital.” I traveled to the Central Valley city to attend the production. The Stockton production was a fund-raiser for the LMF and its work on the historic preservation of Filipino American sites in Stockton, where Bulosan had lived on and off. Much of the buzz leading up to the Stockton production focused on how historically momentous it was for Bulosan’s story to come “home” to Stockton, which from the 1920s to the 1950s was home to the largest Filipino American community in the United States because it was near menial agricultural jobs. According to the historian Dawn Mabolon, whose tour of the Little Manila area was linked to the October 2008 Romance production, Stockton was for Filipinos the place to be—to find jobs, to reunite with friends, to gamble, to eat some Chinese or Filipino food, to join a fraternal society, to go to church, or to find out about the unions.115 After seeing the production in the Bob Hope Theatre in downtown Stockton and taking Mabalon’s tour of the ravaged city, I could see much more clearly why Magno gambles with, throws away, and “mortgag[es] [his] whole future.”116 I began to understand that the central character’s naïveté and literalism allow Bulosan to traverse multiple modes of capitalist abstraction. This form of multivalence offers knowledge about the brutality of what it means to pursue the romance of money and love in America. Bulosan literally and abstractly spells out the violence and contradictions of being foreign in a domestic sense. The connection between Bulosan’s 1930s and the twenty-first-century present moment became even clearer to me as I began to see that both Magno and the subprime debtor are illiterates who are treated as naïve or stupid. While these debtors are not literal illiterates, they are contractual illiterates—illiterate in the financial and legal languages of lending instruments—and hence usually configured as the objects of condemnation. How could they have signed those deeds? Either they were trying to take a shortcut to accumulation and failing, or they were too stupid and naive to understand the contract. While Magno Rubio is admired for his hard work, the racialized classism against the subprime debtor

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takes the form of condescension at best and, at worst, invidious judgment that draws on and reaffirms other stereotypes of working-class people of color. Dominant constructions of the subprime debtor draw on stereotypes of lower-middle-class and working-class people and especially of Black women. The refrain is all too familiar: the subprime debtor is a hapless, naive victim of smarter, educated folk. He is a contractual illiterate whose inability to read the instruments he signed led to the global economic meltdown of 2008. She is greedy and tries to cheat the system like her predecessor, the welfare queen dreamed up by the political Right during Reagan and Thatcher’s era and further reified by Clinton’s 1990s welfare reform. She wants to get rich quick and buy her dream home without working long and hard at a decent job, like decent folk do. The social-climbing subprime debtor gambled with debt on a microeconomic scale, and her behavior enabled macroeconomic forms of gambling with debt, ending in collapse on a national and global scale. We see how these stereotypes start to go in circles, chase their own tails, and contradict themselves. Subprime debtors are, on the one hand, victims of their own pathos and ignorance and, on the other, willful, knowing, and amoral cheats. Yet these images and perceptions still enthrall. Even liberal and progressive commentators made links between the financial devastation wreaked on the subprime debtor and his or her purported lack. For example, the authors of the otherwise excellent 2010 study commissioned by the Center for Responsible Lending, “Foreclosures by Race and Ethnicity: The Demographics of a Crisis,” emphasized the “vulnerability” of communities of color, yet that vulnerability rhetorically is connected to lack and lag: “As the foreclosure crisis threatens the financial stability and mobility of families across the country, it will be particularly devastating to African-American and Latino families, who already lag their white counterparts in terms of income, wealth and educational attainment.”117 Moreover, such families tend to have “higher unemployment rates.”118 This is not to dismiss or deride the report. On the contrary, the report contains important insights and statistics about the demographics of the foreclosure crisis. For example, it documents the fact that 82 percent of completed foreclosed loans between 2005 and 2008 involved owner-occupied, primary residencies, not investment properties. The report also calls attention to especially hard-hit places like Prince George’s

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County, Maryland, one of the country’s largest African American– majority counties.119 Despite the best of intentions, there is an insidious tendency to turn the blame back onto the victims of the foreclosure crisis, a rhetoric and ideology of “personal responsibility” that usually is moored to tenets of white supremacy that manifest themselves as meritocratic, self-disciplined individualism. In his essay “The Subprime and the Beautiful,” Fred Moten observes that from the vantage of an “oldnew liberality,” the subprime debtor is a victim of predatory lenders and a long history of residential and financial segregation and exclusion while also remaining, most fundamentally, a victim of her own impulses, which could be coded as her own desire to climb socially, into a neighborhood where she doesn’t belong and is not wanted—the general neighborhood of home ownership, wherein the normative conception, embodiment and enactment of wealth, personhood and citizenship reside.120

Let me turn to a more explicit example. Among the online comments responding to a 2007 article titled “Minorities Hit Hardest by Housing Crisis” and published by the online progressive gazette Common Dreams, one reader expressed his or her irritation with the author’s focus on “minorities” and asked, exasperatedly, Okay, I agree that “these people” are being targeted, and that’s wrong, but for heaven’s sake, what happened to personal responsibility? . . . If something seems “too good to be true,” it generally is. What is needed is more education. I was raised to avoid debt, and to pay it off as rapidly as I can. That has served me well. . . . Todays [sic] debtors will be tomorrow’s indentured servants. Minorities should be taught this.121

However, as we continue to learn from the ongoing investigation of the foreclosure crisis, the need for “more education” seems to have been even more dire. According to lawyers defending homeowners in foreclosure cases, bank employees who processed the mortgages seem to have been barely literate themselves, the so-called robo-signers who “couldn’t define the word ‘affidavit.’ ”122 Like Magno, the subprime debtor achieved a literalization of the logic of debt that structures

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capital. The contractually illiterate spelled out for all of us what was and is so clearly a systemic hoax, now the subject of a series of documentaries and feature-length narrative films, that arose with the fiscalization of the economy and the rise in prominence of bankers and stockbrokers in bed with ratings agencies and finally bailed out by the federal government.123 Shakespeare reminds us that “there is boundless theft / In limited professions.”124 This is a hoax that implicates all of us, the educated and the uneducated, but that also binds us in ways that potentially spell other forms of belonging to and with one another—alternative, other forms of debt. If we understand Magno Rubio’s naïveté and illiteracy as an element of Bulosan’s satire and not as a tragicomic, realist depiction of migrant or subprime victimhood, we can begin to see how “The Romance of Magno Rubio” contains references to other traditions and economies based on reciprocity, mutuality, and obligation. Without granting Bulosan the capacity for satire—and the capacity for thought—we cannot glimpse the alternative economy of anti-accumulation that he constructs in the story because, under capitalism, such alternative economies typically

Figure 3.8. Art Acuña and Jojo Gonzalez in The Romance of Magno Rubio, Ma-Yi Theater Company production. Photograph by Matt Zugale.

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are criminalized or pathologized as manifestations of the innate turpitude and stupidity of the working and subaltern classes. This chapter responds to the call for “more education,” but it tries to do so by reversing the direction of learning and edification so as to challenge the educational accumulation that I described in the previous chapters. Let us for once consider the lessons that the illiterate offer to the literate rather than the other way around. If we set aside for a moment our training in epistemological accumulation and our desire for the so-called safety that putatively awaits us at the other side of hard work and material accumulation, we can grasp at and grasp Magno Rubio’s stupidity or naïveté as a moment of pedagogical clarity for ourselves. We can treat Magno Rubio’s literalism as a mode of literalizing and exposing both colonial capitalist exploitation and other ways of being. Recall Nick’s couplet: “Or does he, Magno Rube, know more than we / And should we turn ourselves so loose—and free?”

Spelling Lessons At first glance, it makes no sense at all to sign those subprime mortgage loans, so in some ways it is understandable that commonsensical explanations of the subprime debtor’s psyche invoke her desire to take a shortcut to homeownership and the realization of the American Dream. Indeed, the (white settler) American Dream can be said to be symbolized and embodied by the dream home. So the subprime debtor’s attempts to enter or at least get nearer to the “general neighborhood of home ownership, wherein the normative conception, embodiment and enactment of wealth, personhood and citizenship reside” are interpreted as manifestations of aspirational assimilationist desire, an embarrassing investment in the whiteness of belonging.125 But if we take seriously (rather than sneer at) the ways Magno gambles with, throws away, and “mortgag[es] [his] whole future,” we might be able to glimpse other reasons and worldviews underpinning the decision to sign those bad contracts. We might be able to glimpse what an alternative ethical economy of anti-accumulation might look like. Perhaps what was and is desired is not the American Dream and its concomitant dream home but rather shelter, pure and simple, or what Vince Schleitwiler has called a “city of refuge.”126 Rather than under-

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standing the actions of Magno Rubio and the subprime debtor as an assimilationist “investment” in the American Dream, they might be explained by reverting to other values and economies that are impelled by a belief in “our common capacity, insofar as we are one another’s means, to live beyond our means” rather than the logic of capitalist accumulation that underwrites assimilationist desire.127 In his owed/ode to the subprime debtor, Moten writes, “Consider the subprime debtor as guerilla, establishing pockets of insurgent refuge and marronage, carrying revaluation and disruptively familial extensions into supposedly sanitized zones. . . . The subprime debtor, in the black radical tradition of making a way out of no way (out), is also a freedom fighter, a community disorganizer, a sub-urban planner.”128 For people who historically have had no chance in generations at getting anywhere near the “general neighborhood of home ownership,” perhaps the decision to sign those contracts was a worthy risk. Perhaps it was a form of squatting. Perhaps it was a worthy gambit so as to provide shelter for, typically, multiple generations under one roof according to the laws of reciprocity and other forms of debt, which I referenced earlier, like utang na loob (inner debt) and kapwa (the self in the other) in the Filipino worldview.129 With the insights afforded by the illiterate, we begin to discern other or older customs and worldviews that have been targeted by the literate. In his book The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All, the historian Peter Linebaugh chronicles the role that writing can play in the eradication of customary use of the forests. For example, with Britain’s 1878 Forest Act, the metropolitan literate dispossessed the rural illiterate. In British colonial India, according to Ramachandra Guha, “one stroke of the executive pen attempted to obliterate centuries of customary use by rural populations all over India.”130 Linebaugh reminds us that these ancient rights were converted into “unwritten privilege.”131 The domain of the unwritten was written out of history. The twentyfirst-century rise of the contractually illiterate subprime debtor needs to be understood in relation to this longer written-out history. In other words, it is only through the terms of a different system of valuation that it becomes clear that foreclosure is another form of enclosure. But there are some important differences between Magno Rubio and today’s subprime debtor. In Bulosan’s story, it is clear that Magno is invested in romance. Unlike the subprime debtor, Magno is not interested

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in shelter. His libidinal investment in Clarabelle is divorced from the romance with accumulation. Magno Rubio does indeed want to marry Clarabelle, but he is not disappointed, and, as I argued earlier, that lack of disappointment is highly significant. Magno’s relationship to his wages as a means of romancing Clarabelle is separate from the generalized goal of acquiring the heteroreproductive, settler colonial home. That fundamental separation is dictated by the fact that he and his whole class do not qualify for homeownership because they do not qualify for citizenship. This means that, unlike the subprime debtor, Magno does not qualify for foreclosure. He is foreclosed from foreclosure. Magno’s difference from the subprime debtor thus makes clear the distinction between two kinds of labor exploitation, before and after the coming of citizenship. Foreclosure could become a form of enclosure only after Filipinos and other Asians qualified for citizenship. Bulosan presciently demands that we understand citizenship not only as the conferral of (home)ownership, of a stake in the state-empire, but also as subjection to a potential market or pool of debtors. I run the risk of idealizing Bulosan’s “Romance” and Magno’s status as a seasonal laborer, but I do wonder, in our era of increasingly insidious means of extracting value from everyday people’s dreams through the instrument of mortgage loans, whether we might be better off being foreclosed from foreclosure. Illiteracy is a spelling lesson. Through his illiterate character Magno Rubio, Bulosan spells out and literalizes the processes of extrication and exploitation that otherwise are occluded by the story of American exceptionalist meritocracy, and opens up the possibility of anti-accumulative debt that inheres in Magno’s and other modes of alterity. Cedric Robinson reminds us, “The Black radical tradition cast doubt on the extent to which capitalism penetrated and reformed social life and on its ability to create entirely new categories of human experience stripped bare of the historical consciousness embedded in culture.”132 For Magno, the produce that he picks—the commodities of agribusiness—count as words that he can buy. He treats the written word not as something abstract but rather as something very close to the material that he harvests. Magno transforms the process of abstraction that is at the heart of commodification (extricating and alienating labor from the worker and then converting it into a commodity that can be exchanged in the market) into

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a literal phenomenon. Indeed, Magno will not or cannot participate in a market economy of abstraction. If capitalism and proletarianization involve converting something material and literal into an abstraction, then Bulosan turns that abstraction back into something literal vis-à-vis a naïve, racially marked and despised character like Magno. At the same time, Bulosan depicts instances of extravagant generosity among the men, underground economies and unfathomable acts of giving it all away under some of the worst working conditions. These are other modes of debt and obligation. In contrast with capitalist forms of gambling with debt, the five workers in “The Romance of Magno Rubio” follow protocols of kinship that draw on other kinds of “debt,” captured by the Filipino phrases utang na loob and kapwa. If, as Marx has it, money is a “social bond, a social thing connecting unsocial individuals,” Bulosan’s characters embody and perform a sociality that operates according to a wholly other system of obligation.133 I return to the concepts of utang na loob as “inner debt” and kapwa as “shared inner self ” because scholars like Virgilio Enriquez who forward the study of “indigenous Filipino psychology” remind us that in the colonial context kapwa can be interpreted as a kind of friendliness, hospitality, and even naïveté to be exploited and integrated in a master-slave relationship, especially in combination with feelings of utang na loob.134 Instead, sikolohiyang Pilipino scholars remind us of a definition of kapwa as an invitation and introduction to an economy of values based on reciprocity. But what Bulosan incisively points out is that there is no simple sidestepping, opposing, or exiting the forces of capitalism. Rather, the rhythm of both Bulosan’s story and Carter’s play teaches us that one must gamble away everything to begin to access and enter the other—rather than the oppositional—economy of debt. Bulosan’s characters throw it all away in an exemplary way. This is the other way to interpret how and why Magno Rubio gambles with, throws away, and mortgages his whole future: He offers us the gift of disownership. Clarity. Claro. Clarabelle.

Figure 4.1. Stephanie Syjuco, RAIDERS: International Booty, Bountiful Harvest (Selections from the Collection of the A____ A__ M_____), 2011. Digital archival photo prints mounted onto lasercut wood. Courtesy of the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.

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The Booty and Beauty of Contemporary Filipino/American Art Stephanie Syjuco’s RAIDERS

Stephanie Syjuco is a plagiarist run amuck. Based in the San Francisco Bay area, Syjuco is a multimedia artist who has become known for her replicas and forgeries and her practice of what might be called mimetic manufacturing. Mimicry and illusionism are major themes across her oeuvre to date, which is composed of what Allan Isaac has called “acts of assimilation gone awry.”1 This chapter, focused on Syjuco’s installation RAIDERS: International Booty, Bountiful Harvest (Selections from the Collection of the A____ A__ M_____), explores how Syjuco apes, ironizes, and subverts the imperial museum’s accumulative practices. Syjuco’s installation provokes a series of questions: What does “booty” have to do with “beauty”? What does the object of stealing, raiding, thievery—booty, plunder—have to do with the object of aesthetic appreciation—beauty? Key works in Syjuco’s oeuvre, like RAIDERS, critique the politics of collecting and displaying in the world of the art museum and the world of the anthropological museum. In my first two chapters, I focused on the anthropological museum, respectively the university’s natural history museum and the family home-turned-museum. Generally speaking, these kinds of collections have become by now infamous for being grounded in the history of colonial theft from the non-West, and for contributing to the ideological production of a range of racial typecasting, from the “exotic” to the “extinct” to the “primitive.” In this chapter on Syjuco’s response to this history of collectionism, I propose to turn away from the more typical approach to the interrogation of the imperial or racial museum through the problem of misrepresentation—that is, the argument that the museum is racist or imperialist because the representation of non-Western peoples and civilizations is inaccurate or absent. Instead, through the 141

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Figure 4.2. Stephanie Syjuco, RAIDERS: International Booty, Bountiful Harvest (Selections from the Collection of the A____ A__ M_____), 2011. Digital archival photo prints mounted onto lasercut wood. Courtesy of the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.

analysis of works like RAIDERS, I argue that the focus on misrepresentation is important but incomplete. As I try to suggest throughout this book, if we are to challenge the racial and imperial museum for its act of accumulating the primitive, we need to focus on representation alongside accumulation.

Mimesis and the Museum Stephanie Syjuco’s obsession with copies, copying, and what she calls “fictional fabrication” emerges out of a specific cultural and historical context.2 Mimesis is a recurrent cultural and socioeconomic phenomenon in Filipino/American studies and other interdisciplines with which it overlaps or abuts, such as queer of color studies. The cultural critic José Esteban Muñoz has underscored the importance of studying the rich, varied manifestations of mimesis and the politics of what he calls “disidentification,” understood as queered and racialized subversions

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of socioeconomic and cultural assimilation to dominant norms in the United States.3 In my own work, I have sought to contribute to the study of disidentification by thickening the relationship between the mimetic and the aesthetic. As I have argued elsewhere, by focusing on the politics of the mimetic aesthetic, I seek to reread Filipino/American cultural production so as to recognize and create value where there was little to none, and I try to situate Filipino/American mimesis within a longer tradition of guerrilla war tactics of shape-shifting developed as part of insurgent mass movements in the Philippines against the Spanish and then against the Americans.4 For a community like Filipino America— simultaneously a colonized and racially minoritized entity—the simple act of putting the word “mimetic” next to the word “aesthetic” is still shocking. This constitutes an act of decolonization for a community wherein it is difficult to imagine that copies and plagiarists might be considered worthy of aesthetical judgment. After all, Filipinos have been deemed apes. Widely regarded as consummate mimics both in Asia and Asian America, Filipinos have internalized this particular form of racialized typecasting. Syjuco’s work asks us to consider the politics of a mimetic aesthetic when it is deployed as a critique of the accumulative tendencies of the museum. The museum functions as both site and source for some of Syjuco’s oeuvre. For example, in her contribution to the 2009 group exhibition called 1969 at the contemporary art institution MoMA PS1, which is affiliated with New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, she created replicas of instantly recognizable works by famous avant-garde artists. According to MoMA PS1’s website, the 2009 exhibition involved a “re-staging” of MoMA’s 1969 exhibition Five Recent Acquisitions, which had been curated by Kynaston McShine. Faithful to the curatorial process of the original show, a “younger group of artists” was asked to create “intervention artworks” so as to “highlight, reflect, and disrupt the collection show.”5 As one of these invited interventionist commentators, Syjuco created two installations that faithfully reproduced iconic works by Joseph Beuys and Robert Morris in MoMA’s collection, which could not be included in the restaged exhibition because of what Syjuco calls the “archival condition of the original works.” She first solicited help from her friends and her “extended social network” to borrow the materials required to re-create what she has called the “proxy” or “stand-in”

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for Beuys’s 1969 Sled installation: a wooden sled, a gray blanket, straps, a flashlight, cord, and wax or lard.6 She has described these copies of Beuys and Morris as “resuscitations” of the real thing: “I wanted to resuscitate them with a little added value.” With these “proxies,” as she calls them, Syjuco claims that she as an artist was able to accomplish what the MoMA could not: She managed to borrow works from famous artists for the exhibition. She also notes that her Morris re-creation entered through the “back-end of the system” and that the fabric materials that made up the installation were used by delivery workers as a moving blanket on the floor, such that her “proxy” contained the trace of both canonical, highly visible artists and invisible museum workers.7 Her reference to the use of her “extended social network,” which includes social media, in the development of these “proxies” underscores the digital or virtual dimensions of Syjuco’s deployment of the mimetic aesthetic, a point to which I will return later in the chapter. Syjuco has “resuscitated” MoMA works in other projects. While teaching at the University of Washington, Pullman, Syjuco and her students collaboratively created notMoMA, a “traveling MOMA exhibition” of life-size copies of “iconic greatest hits from the 1960s and 1970s.”8 Her directive to the students was, “Make it look good from ten feet away.”9 Working off images of what she called the “greatest hits” by artists ranging from Frida Kahlo, Eva Hesse, and Jackson Pollock to Andy Warhol, Alexander Calder, and Charles and Ray Eames, the students fabricated the fakes to actual size in two weeks, by using “readily accessible and affordable/scavenged materials.”10 Syjuco thus prioritizes and democratizes the process of making fake art. Underscoring this interest in process, her website includes photographs of both the final “re-fabricated artworks” exhibited in notMoMA and the process of manufacturing them.11 This focus on process challenges the singularity of both the artist-genius and the art object, and thus reflects on and potentially reshapes the imperial art museum. Installed in the university’s Fine Arts Building, the resulting exhibition inspired Syjuco’s students and their audience to reflect on the relationship between original and copy. According to Syjuco, many of her students’ replicas “were really good”—presumably for how faithful and convincing they were. But she says that she also embraced the bad: “I love the attempt. There’s a lot of human beauty in that.”12 By embracing

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flaws, Syjuco calls attention to the visible trace of labor. Later in this chapter I will discuss in greater detail the significance of imperfection in her work in relation to Marx’s discussion of the importance of the commodity’s flaws in making visible the human hand of the laborer. The worse the fake is, the more noticeable the labor is. It would seem that Syjuco is interested in investigating and amplifying this classically Marxist concern with the relation between appearance and reality. As I argue in my concluding chapter about the social media dimensions of Syjuco’s work, however, this desire to make the processes, materials, and labor of production apparent might be additionally shaped by the norms of online culture, especially the obsessive and constant documentation associated with social media. For now, suffice it to say that Syjuco pays homage to the “human beauty,” as she puts it, of failure by creating replicas of the “booty” collected by art and civilizational museums.

A Tribute to Tribute From the world of modern beauty, we now turn to what Syjuco has wreaked in the world of ancient booty. Known for her interventions in the Western high art canon and emblematic venues like the Museum of Modern Art, she also has taken aim at anthropological museums that attempt to represent civilizations. In her 2011 installation RAIDERS: International Booty, Bountiful Harvest (Selections from the Collection of the A____ A__ M_____), Syjuco displayed wood cutouts that, from a particular distance and angle, look like a collection of classical Asian vases. If her directive to the students involved in notMoMA was to “make it look good from ten feet away,” then she seems to have applied the same tenet to RAIDERS. RAIDERS is a brilliant send-up of Asian civilization museums that display their ceramics collections, the acquisition and size of which seem to determine (or at least correspond with) the museum’s stature. Syjuco has explained that, while growing up in San Francisco not far from the Asian Art Museum downtown, she felt “disaffected” from the objects such a museum might display even though she herself was Asian and eventually would become an artist. She quite endearingly has said of the Asian Art Museum, “I wanted to start a relationship with [the objects] but [the museum] didn’t give me permission.” To Syjuco, the significance of her RAIDERS installation lies in her “attempt to make

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this iconic classic thing and failing.”13 She suggests that the aesthetic value of the work derives not so much from the attainment of perfect reproduction as from the aspirational and failed labor that went into the process of reproduction. But the installation’s title indicates that Syjuco also is interested in exposing and censuring the accumulative practices of the museum. RAIDERS is a tribute to tribute. It is a paean to the history of conquest and plunder that made many art and anthropological collections possible. RAIDERS draws attention to the illicit nature of the aesthetic pleasure, aura of exotic opulence, and pedagogical good provided by the civilizational museum’s ill-gotten gains. Syjuco invites us to look behind the scene, so to speak, of accumulation, an invitation that is loudly announced by her use of display stands that resemble packing crates and storage pallets. In fact, we are to look at it from every angle. We may look at the display stands behind each two-dimensional print, propping up the illusion of three-dimensional ceramics. We may reflect on the materials and processes that prop up exhibitions in museums in general. We may think about the people and the labor that go into making an exhibition: from security guards and carpenters to curators and critics. We may wonder whether there is a relationship between the words “prop” and “property.” (The former is an abbreviation of the latter.) We may wonder what the artist would have to say if or when her collection of fake vases itself got collected. (When the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum acquired RAIDERS, Syjuco wryly commented that it was “almost like pimping one collection to another.”)14 Looking at the RAIDERS installation from the side, front, and rear views, we begin to see the accumulation of the museum object as a process of commodity formation that traverses both the high aesthetic tenets governing the art world and the Orientalist dictums governing the anthropological. If the San Francisco Asian Art Museum’s collections can be said to embody and index the institution’s stature in the museum world, Syjuco’s collection of wooden cutouts parodies the museum’s dependence on its own collections as a source of cultural capital. Even as RAIDERS provokes a doubled critique of acts of misrepresentation and accumulation, it also juxtaposes the world of the anthropological museum with that of the art museum. Syjuco asks us to participate in an exercise of comparison and contrast, reactivating a larger discussion of

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the divisions inaugurated by the separation of the anthropological museum and the art museum. Associated with exotic non-Western civilizations, the anthropological museum generally has been deemed inferior to the art museum, which typically is dedicated to the celebration of European achievement. In her tour de force reading of the museums that abut each side of New York City’s Central Park, Mieke Bal notes that the historical difference between the elegant Upper East Side neighborhood and the less classy Upper West Side neighborhood is reinforced by the contrast between the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History.15 Located to the east of Central Park, the Met houses treasures of the West, which denotes Western European art. Even American art is configured as Western European art’s “poor cousin,” while non-Western art “literally is kept in the dark.”16 In the Met, culture is appreciated for its aesthetic value—art for art’s sake—and for its embodiment and legitimation of the genius of the West. Located to the west of Central Park, the American Museum of Natural History

Figure 4.3. Map of New York City’s Central Park. Map data © 2016 Google.

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(AMNH) houses the other of the Met: stuffed animals, extinct animals, and exotic peoples. Shoals of noisy schoolchildren are chivvied through the corridors and galleries of the AMNH, and the two highlights in their experience are giant dinosaurs and dioramas. The AMNH is a paean to the intersection of Western “collectionism” and colonialism, especially from the nineteenth century.17 As Bal puts it, while Central Park is itself the “token of the indispensable, domesticated preserve of nature-withinculture,” it also serves to divide the city, through these two major museums, into “preserves of culture and of nature, on each side.”18 This geographical east-west division of New York City underscores the two museums’ division of humanity. The Met showcases how one version of humanity produces “culture as nature”—the Impressionist artists’ depiction of the landscape, for example. In the art museum, nature is a source for the production of art. By contrast, the AMNH showcases “cultured nature,” especially in the form of the diorama, wherein museum artisans produce hyper-realist portrayals of nature, including exotic or primitive peoples who are implicitly subsumed under nature.19 This division of humanity is reflected in the difference in commonsensical presumptions about the type of visitors who go to the Met and those who go to the AMNH. The visitor who strolls through the Met’s galleries is presumed to be a fully formed and disciplined adult with an achieved idea of the aesthetic. In contrast, the schoolchildren escorted through the AMNH are subjects-in-process, not-yet-formed creatures who have a dual set of lessons to learn: how to behave properly in a museum, in a civilized manner, and how entire civilizations develop or do not develop properly. Syjuco’s RAIDERS challenges these lessons in civilization in a number of ways. The effect of her fake ceramics is to depreciate our experience of the museum, invested as we are in what Walter Benjamin calls the “aura” of the displayed object.20 Syjuco’s work reminds us of Benjamin’s analysis of the importance of conceptual and literal distance when it comes to the auratic authenticity of the object. Usually, we visit civilizational museums to be awed by the age—the temporal distance, or what Benjamin calls the “historical testimony”—of the object.21 Typically divided from the object by the display case’s window, we are prohibited from touching—spatial distance—the object. However, in the case of Syjuco’s fake ceramics, our distance from them determines the success or failure of the illusion of aura. From straight ahead and ten feet

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away, they look “really good.” In other words, the mock ceramics make a mockery of the auratic. Moreover, Syjuco’s work asks us to question or revise Benjamin’s claims about the relationship between distance and aura in our current age of digital, and not merely mechanical, reproduction. I argue that in the era of virtual space, Benjamin’s claims about the “unique existence” of the work of art vis-à-vis its presence in time and space are compromised. Benjamin argues that “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”22 As we know now, in virtual space an object can be perfectly reproduced; the original and the copy can exist twice in the same time and space, especially if the “original” work is digital in nature. When it comes to his observations about the role and influence of the “masses” in the “decay of the aura,” however, Benjamin remains eerily prescient and stubbornly relevant.23 He calls our attention to the “desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction.” He notes, “Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction.”24 Syjuco’s ceramic reproductions affirm and revise Benjamin’s claims about the relationship between distance and aura. On the one hand, because they are mere paper reproductions—the cheapest of copies, no less!—her propped-up prints contribute to the “decay” of aura, and so we feel that it is much more permissible to approach and come close to the object. On the other hand, the fake vases still form part of a carefully arranged installation that, from a distance, manages to “look good” and real and to generate an auratic presence. The prohibition against touching the aesthetic object and the mandate to keep it at a distance thus overcome the desire to “get hold of an object at very close range.” In other words, the RAIDERS installation puts into play opposing forces, the breaking down and the building up of aura.

The Anti-Dioramic But what of the racialized origins of aura? When it comes to the theorization of auratic origins, Syjuco’s work compels us to question Benjamin’s

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notable silence on race. According to Benjamin, the “authority of the object” depends on its authenticity, and that authenticity in turn depends on its “historical testimony.” He explains that the “authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced.”25 But when it comes to the anthropological museum, the auratic takes on an explicitly racial significance, a dimension of the auratic that Benjamin does not address. In the dioramas of an anthropological museum, the authority of the displayed objects depends not on their “historical testimony” but on the truth-effect of a specific kind of mimetic realism. The aesthetic of the anthropological museum is associated with the re-creation of the “truth” about exotic or primitive civilizations. In its desire to produce an effect of the real, the anthropological museum constructs miniature or life-size scenes of the racial or temporal other: the diorama. (And it is the conflation of these two forms of backwardness—the civilizational retrograde and the historical past—that constitutes much of the racism of the anthropological museum.) Often promoted and experienced as the highlight of a museum visit, the diorama epitomizes the museum’s efforts to produce “truth-speak,” a kind of discourse that, according to Mieke Bal, “claims the truth to which the viewer is asked to submit, endorsing the willing suspension of disbelief that rules the power of fiction.”26 Bal explains that this kind of realist aesthetic entails the “description of a world so lifelike that omissions are unnoticed, elisions sustained, and repressions invisible.”27 This discourse of realism “sets the terms for the contract between viewer or reader and museum or storyteller.”28 Syjuco’s deployment of the aesthetic mimetic ironizes and interrogates the museum’s dioramic deployment of the mimetic. There is something frozen or rigid about Syjuco’s cardboard cutouts that fittingly resembles the figurines and objects displayed in a diorama. Other artists who have drawn on the dioramic for inspiration and source material have sought to revitalize or animate the inanimate. For several decades now, for example, the photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto has produced profoundly eerie yet moving portraits of the landscapes, peoples, and animals that populate the dioramas of New York City’s American Museum of Natural History.29 In the mass media landscape, since 2006 the Night at the Museum movie franchise has pursued its own highly popular version of

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animating the dead, the past, and the extinct. In contrast, the medium and design of RAIDERS accentuate the “fixation and the denial of time” usually associated with the diorama.30 Literally stiff, Syjuco’s cardboard sculptures produce a kind of awkward unnaturalness and stillness. Let us remember, however, that the diorama is racist not merely or even primarily because the scenes tell the “truth” or tell “lies” about the represented civilization. The diorama and, by extension, the anthropological museum are racist because representation itself is racist. The cultural critic David Lloyd and the political scientist Paul Thomas have explained that if the procedures of representation fundamentally involve the subject’s (aesthetic) encounter with an object, that experience is narrativized as a tale of evolutionary development from a state of nature to a state of reason. According to Lloyd and Thomas’s reading of Schiller, a thing is presented to our minds and we are torn between two opposing impulses, the “form-drive” and the “sense-drive.”31 That is to say, on the one hand, we want to think. We want to turn all matter before us into pure form—into abstraction/thought/reason. In Schiller’s words, man wants to destroy all “within himself which is mere world.”32 On the other hand, we want to feel. We want to relinquish ourselves to the “flux of sensations” and thus turn all form into world.33 Lloyd and Thomas remind us that the problem is that, in the West’s account of the aesthetic experience, this dualism is hierarchized and narrativized. The story embedded in the aesthetic experience, which is organized by procedures of representation, is that the sensuous is “prior to the formal” and the formal “must overcome” the sensuous.34 The non-West becomes primitive, or what Denise da Silva has called “affectable”—closer to and susceptible to Nature—through the narrative structure of representation that is embedded in the aesthetic experience.35 The other stands not simply for invidious difference. The other becomes folded into a story of development that fundamentally structures representation itself. Schiller’s “aesthetic programme” is, as the literary critic Terry Eagleton phrases it, a “hegemonic strategy.”36 The aesthetic experience necessarily involves representation—the reference of an object to a subject—and the logic of that process is grounded in racial difference. Given this account of the racialized nature of aesthetic experience, we begin to see how the world of art and the world of anthropology have much traffic with each other. It is precisely this traffic that Syjuco’s

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RAIDERS installation underscores, between the encounter with high art and the encounter with the other. The RAIDERS installation traverses or travels back and forth between art and anthropology. It goes back and forth between the presentation of what Mieke Bal calls “culture as nature” in a high art museum like the Met with its collection of Monet’s paintings of water-lilies, and the “cultured nature” offered by a museum like the AMNH and its painstakingly crafted dioramas.37 But how seriously can we take Syjuco? Is her work just very clever, her oeuvre a diverting but superficial bag of puns and tricks? As it turns out, her work invites us to consider the significance of the surface and the aesthetic politics of the flaw.

The Signifying Surface The wittiness of Syjuco’s work turns on conceptual puns like booty/ beauty, and the façade of her two-dimensional cutouts makes us think about the political significance of art that deliberately lacks or contains too much illusionism. As I have argued elsewhere about the wily trutheffects of Reanne Estrada’s sculpture, the artist does not train us to look for illusionist, representational works that configure the Filipino as content; rather, the artist trains us to look at the medium, materiality, and form of postcolonial subjectivity.38 In other words, the shallowness of Syjuco’s work runs deep. Syjuco’s work illuminates Marx’s arguments about the importance of the surface. Like Marx’s philosophical mode, her cutouts remind us that we have to reverse the typical sequence of inquest. Marx insists that we have to begin not with what we might consider the foundational or “concrete” elements of a society or an economy but with what is “immediately present on the surface of bourgeois society,” that is, the commodity.39 We have to begin with the finished product. We have to start with the end. Let us take a detour through Marx’s observations about the importance of the surface. In his essay on the structure of the beginnings of philosophical inquiry, Jairus Banaji notes that Marx embarks upon his inquest into the emergence of capitalism with analyses of phenomena that are “immediately present on the surface of bourgeois society.” Banaji points out that, rather than beginning by producing conjectures about a

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pre-capitalist society, Marx begins by describing the “Sphere of Simple Circulation,” which of course exists only in an already capitalist society wherein all goods are commodities, all labor alienable, and all relationships between individuals possible only through the social bond provided by money.40 Rather than speculate about the workings of so-called primitive civilizations that exchange goods and services without using money, Marx examines a phenomenon like the commodity because it presupposes the social division of labor and the bourgeois mode of production in its totality. Thus, the concrete, in the form of the commodity, appears as the “surface of society.” In other words, Marx begins his history of capitalism with the end. More precisely, he begins with the end product and then works backward. From the “surface of society,” he deduces the invisibilized operations of capitalism. Money, the commodity, and the “isolated individual”—these phenomena, Marx argues, must be understood “not as a historical result but as history’s point of departure.”41 Marx’s method at first seems counterintuitive. The “concrete” elements of an economy or society are not accessed through the concept of a base, foundation, or even the “real.” The concrete is not underneath or prior, and it is accessed not through an excavation of the base. Rather, the concrete is accessed through a confrontation with the superstructure. This concept of the concrete seems to fly in the face of Marxist theory. Marxist theory has been used and abused for its premise that all culture and institutions merely result from or reflect the economic systems underlying any given society. But I would argue, following Banaji, that Marx’s method reverses this relationship between base and superstructure. According to Marx, the “concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse.”42 Only by beginning with the commodity can we track how people, things, and events that are organically related to one another are torn apart and made distinct from one another. Indeed, Marx condemns economists who move “from the imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions until [they have] arrived at the simplest determinations.”43 For example, when he describes how the typical bourgeois economist attempts to analyze a given country’s political economy, Marx shows how the foundational idea of the “population” turns out to be a flawed abstraction:

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It seems to be correct to begin with the real and the concrete, with the real precondition, thus to begin, in economics, with e.g. the population, which is the foundation and the subject of the entire social act of production. However, on closer examination this proves false. The population is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest.44

In reaching for the myth of the real and the concrete, the economist’s methodology results in the distortion or exclusion of the object at hand. Moreover, according to Marx, if the economist begins with this kind of “imagined concrete,” it becomes much easier for bourgeois values and relations to be “quietly smuggled in as the inviolable natural laws on which society in the abstract is founded.”45 In moving from the “imagined concrete towards ever thinner abstractions,” the economist succeeds in tearing distribution away from production and moves further and further away from the reality of the “population” as a “rich totality of many determinations and relations.”46 Instead of the real and the concrete, the economist creates economic categories that follow “eternal natural laws independent of history.”47 Ironically, even though these economic categories are “independent of history,” the economist creates a temporal sequence of economic categories—a narrative—that simulates historical development. Independent of history, the “eternal natural laws” of economics nonetheless begin to look like history. In fact, Marx argues that we need to think of “sequence” altogether differently: It would therefore be unfeasible and wrong to let economic categories follow one another in the same sequence as that in which they were historically decisive. Their sequence is determined, rather, by their relation to one another in modern bourgeois society, which is precisely the opposite of that which seems to be their natural order or which corresponds to historical development. The point is not the historic position of the economic relations in the succession of different forms of society. Even less is it their sequence “in the idea” (Proudhon) (a muddy notion of historic movement). Rather, their order within modern bourgeois society [sic].48

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Understood as relational rather than temporal phenomena, these “economic categories” begin to make sense as part of an “order within modern bourgeois society” rather than as linear development or as a sequence of philosophical inquest. With this method of a reversed sequence or analysis, we can return to Syjuco’s nearly two-dimensional cutouts and see that her insistence on the surface has tremendous implications for a methodology for aesthetic economy. Much like a commodity—or is it the other way around?—art presents us with a rich, complex surface that signifies (or presupposes) nothing less than the total order of bourgeois society. In addition to this rethinking of the signifying surface, Syjuco’s focus on imperfection (bad copies of classic art) helps us grasp anew the importance via Marx of how the existence of the flaw allows the means of production to resurface and become visible. Marx reminds us that the labor process “disappears in the product”: “That which in the labourer appeared as movement, now appears in the product as a fixed quality without motion.”49 The human hand disappears into the commodity through the alienation of its labor. However, the hand reappears when there is a flaw in the commodity. Marx describes the significance of appearance and disappearance in the determination of use-value thus: Whenever therefore a product enters as a means of production into a new labour-process, it thereby loses its character of product and becomes a mere factor in the process. A spinner treats spindles only as implements for spinning, and flax only as the material that he spins. Of course it is impossible to spin without material and spindles; and therefore the existence of these things as products, at the commencement of the spinning operation, must be presumed but in the process itself, the fact that they are products of previous labour, is a matter of utter indifference; just as in the digestive process, it is of no importance whatever, that bread is the product of the previous labour of the farmer, the miller, and the baker. On the contrary, it is generally by their imperfections as products, that the means of production in any process assert themselves in their character or products. A blunt knife or weak thread forcibly remind us of Mr. A., the cutler, or Mr. B., the spinner. In the finished product the labour by means of which it has acquired its useful qualities is not palpable, has apparently vanished.50

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The laborer and the means of production reappear only when the product is flawed. The invisible becomes visible again. Similarly, across her oeuvre, Syjuco converts the flaw into a means of disrupting the production-consumption economy and asserting the presence of the invisibilized. In projects like Anti-Factory, Counterfeit Crochet Project, and Shadow Pop Up Shop, Syjuco wants to make the artist’s politics visible. She takes what she considers to be an explicit or “apparent” stance against the “traditional production-consumption model.”51 This stance is overtly political and mischievous in ways both sophisticated and deliberately crude. For example, the tag line for AntiFactory is “Because Sweatshops Suck.” Syjuco explains her approach thus: I use that line [“Because Sweatshops Suck”] because it’s straightforward and it automatically positions Anti-Factory as having a political stance as well as a creative stance. When I looked at other people who were making clothing and affiliating with the craft scene, they sometimes talked about politics on a subconscious level, but they didn’t necessarily state their ideas up front. I wanted to make mine apparent. Because each item is unique and handmade, it goes against the grain of mass manufactured products.52

Syjuco strives to direct attention to the visible trace of labor in order to challenge the racial and imperial dimensions of the mythology of the singular artist-genius. Significantly, however, this achievement seems to depend on the mythology of the singular—“unique and handmade”— craft work.53 So to what extent should we consider her subversion of capital—sharp and acute as it is—a politicized stance? More importantly, how might or must we historicize the emergence of an artist like Syjuco in the era of digital media and personas? On the one hand, Syjuco’s desire to make the politics of her creative aesthetic “apparent” would seem to follow the tenets of woman of color, working-class, and Marxist movements that are committed to “mak[ing] apparent” the brutality of working conditions. On the other hand, one could read her stance, suffused as it is with her signature sense of humor and satirical ambiguity, as ironic, a kind of mocking irony that would align her more closely with, say, upper-class English literary traditions of

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highly witty yet detached, apolitical observation. I suggest that Syjuco’s work is not at all immune from the latter critique. It is entirely possible to put together a compelling interpretation of her anti-capitalism as a very clever, updated version of eighteenth-century landed English irony. But as I hope will be clear by the end of this chapter, I do not mean for such an interpretation of her work to be the last word. In many ways, I consider such critique to be a distracting yet necessary detour. Rather, I want to open up this plurality of interpretive possibility, which includes criticism of the limits of political art today, so as to end with a selfreflexive challenge to the critic-viewer: How must we answer the call to participate in crafting a historicized interpretation of the woman of color’s work, one that does not reduce the artist’s biography to her biology and that respects the particularity of her own formalism? How do we continue to read for the crumbs that the artist leaves behind in her often circuitous trail of signification? How do we weave history into the routes and roots of meaning making? Here, I do want to make it clear that, in the critique of Syjuco’s work that follows, I configure her work and her artistic persona as emblematic of the problems and dilemmas of our current moment. I take her artworks to be allegorical of our current era of globalization and I discuss that allegorical significance in ways that the artist might not have intended. Let us take another look at Syjuco’s RAIDERS installation. Up to this point I have focused on the installation’s simulation of an exhibition in an anthropological museum. Arranged atop crates of different heights, the wood cutouts all face forward in the same direction and, as I discussed above, their facades mobilize a very thin simulation of aura. At a glance, the viewer can tell that the installation’s illusionism—its approximation of both two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality—is set up to fail. The success of this aura can last just a few moments, if at all. This auratic failure challenges the viewer to question the kind of expectations called forth in us by the sight of racial, colonial acquisition. So while Walter Benjamin analyzes the aura of nostalgia and authenticity that is attributed to the object, Syjuco produces a critique of Benjaminian aura not only by flattening and cheapening the object but also by creating a simulation of the exotically authentic and ancient object. She demands that Benjamin come to terms with the racialized auratic and thus suggests that aura, like the aesthetic, is always already racialized.

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But Syjuco’s fake vessels contain more interpretative possibilities. What happens when we think of the installation as a parody of a storefront display? What kinds of parallels can we draw between the diorama and the shop window? In both scenarios, the object behind the glass screen can be touched only by our gaze. Just like items for sale in a department store window, all of the “vases” in RAIDERS are carefully lined up in rows and arranged to face the glass window and to attract the attention of the viewer walking by. Interpreted as a storefront display, the façades of the fake ceramics parallel the façade of the display window and, presumably, that of the building that abuts the sidewalk. The installation evokes the experience of window shopping, strolling along the sidewalk of a city’s shopping district ready to consume—or to fantasize about consuming—what one sees. In the RAIDERS installation, the racial aura associated with the inaccessibility of the object displayed in the anthropological museum comes to intersect with the commodity’s allure and its promise of possible

Figure 4.4. Stephanie Syjuco, RAIDERS: International Booty, Bountiful Harvest (Selections from the Collection of the A____ A__ M_____), 2011. Digital archival photo prints mounted onto lasercut wood. Courtesy of the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.

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access. But the viewer’s expectations begin to follow different trajectories. In the museum, the familiar refrain intoned by parents admonishing their children and reinforced by museum guards and signage is “Do not touch!” In the department store, the implicit message is “Do not touch until after you buy.” Although the two sets of objects—in the museum and in the store—similarly are arranged behind glass out of our reach, there are two different economies of ownership in play. In the museum, the object is inaccessible to the museumgoer because it is owned by the institution or the state. This mantle of ownership typically is taken up in the name of the public. So the museumgoer cedes to the institution or state all claims to ownership over the object in exchange for the ability to participate in the generalized scopic pleasure of “public” ownership, which Syjuco’s work reveals to be imperial ownership. This is, after all, what Syjuco means by titling the installation RAIDERS. The beauty/booty of the museum object contains the evidentiary trace of the history of colonial theft, a history that the institution seeks to suppress even as the marriage between archaeology and thievery circulates widely in the popular imagination, thanks to movie franchises like Stephen Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark and Simon West’s Tomb Raider. Just as Harrison Ford’s caricature of the tweedy, bespectacled archaeology professor serves as the analogue to his bullwhip-wielding swashbuckler, colonial “discovery” and the preservation of knowledge are the analogue to theft and conquest. Indeed, the history of looting is obscured and justified by the search for knowledge about unfamiliar parts and peoples of the world, and Syjuco’s deployment of auratic failure indexes this twinned movement of obfuscation and legitimation. Beauty becomes booty. Her propped-up cutouts just barely simulate the auratic Orientalism associated with arrangements of Asian ceramics, and this auratic failure allows us to see that what is on display is not so much the object as the history of plunder that is paraded before our eyes under the guise of knowledge and preservation. Furthermore, if ocular discovery—or what Mary Louise Pratt has called the “imperial eye”—is in the colonial context a mode of conquest, we must reckon with the bald fact that theft is discovery’s analogue.54 When it comes to the department store display case, the object is inaccessible until it is purchased by the consumer. However, under capitalism, the achieved ownership of the desired commodity does not

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mean the end of desire. If the customer can cough up the cash, individuated ownership of the object is entirely possible. But the fantasy of a particular—let’s say, upper-middle-class to über-wealthy—lifestyle that is on display remains out of reach. The feminist theorist Leopoldina Fortunati reminds us via Marx that the “ ‘goal of the economic system’ is ‘the unhappiness of society,’ and not the reproduction of the individual.”55 Cheap wood cutout or priceless ceramic? Diorama or department store display? Museumgoer or shopper? Syjuco merges and oscillates between aesthetic and consumerist experiences so as to draw connections between the ability to buy, own, and display in worlds usually held apart from each other. Moreover, RAIDERS asks us to interrogate our assumption that in both worlds, the glass screen that divides us from the object exists to guard against theft or damage. The screen marks off what has been found to be precious and valuable even as its transparency allows us to see and enjoy the objects’ beauty. But who is the real thief? Is the act of theft so carefully guarded against something that might happen in the future, or is it something that already happened in the past? What or whom is the glass screen really protecting? Even though we can see right through it, does the glass screen actually hide something? Syjuco’s RAIDERS makes us literally take a second look both at the “raider” and at the glass screen so as to ask ourselves, Who is the real raider? Whose criminality is on display and whose is hidden? We begin to understand that the glass screen transparently disguises the actual theft that previously happened. Booty became beauty. But with Syjuco’s “second look,” beauty becomes booty. Enabled by Syjuco’s auratic failure, this “second look” allows us to see how literal and ideological obfuscation is enabled by the transparent screen. Here is where a narratological approach to perception is useful. For example, following Mieke Bal’s approach to narrative analysis, there is a strong, consistent equivalence assumed between vision and narrative. The reigning metaphor in Bal’s approach to narratology is that of vision. We have to pay attention to who is looking, not just who is narrating or speaking. Hence, her concepts of “focalization,” defined as the point of view that “colors” the storytelling, and the “focalizer,” defined as an “agent of perception,” are as important as the concepts of narration and narrator.56 Like the clear glass screen in the diorama or the storefront window, certain modes of narration contain “hidden or naturalized ideology.”57 Description, for example, is a “privileged site of

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focalization,” especially when it comes to its appearance and use in realistic narrative.58 In the realistic novel, description involves “naturalization,” which makes descriptive passages seem self-evident and promotes a sense of objectivity. However, this objectivity turns out to be a “form of subjectivity in disguise.”59 That is to say, the transparency of descriptive narration in the novel produces the guise of objectivity just as the transparency of the glass screen in the museum or shop produces the guise of legitimate ownership. This “second look” might extend to an interrogation of the “looter” and the discourse of “looting” in our contemporary moment. I am thinking of the nearly universal condemnation of the figure of the looter that followed Hurricane Katrina and that eclipsed the potentiality of popular uprisings like those in the wake of the Rodney King verdict in Los Angeles and other cities in 1992; and the murders of Michael Brown in Missouri in 2014 and Freddie Gray in Baltimore in 2015. Why is it that the image of the looter that first leaps to mind’s eye is criminalized and racialized but the real raider—the wolf of Wall Street—remains obscured? In their May 2015 op-ed “Keywords in Black Protest: A(n Anti-) Vocabulary,” published in the wake of months of popular protests in Baltimore, Ferguson, Cleveland, and Los Angeles, Shana L. Redmond and Damien Sojoyner reflect on and challenge the “unshakable truth” that has become attached, through repetition, to terminology like “thug,” “leader,” “gang,” and “riot,” which then become powerful rhetorical accomplices in the “long history of assault to Black assemblage.” Redmond and Sojoyner argue that we must understand the protests emanating from “Black spaces of unrest across the United States as discursive creations.” Baltimore is, as they put it, a “narrative project.” For example, of the word “thug,” Redmond and Sojoyner remind us, “As Seattle Seahawks Cornerback Richard Sherman and Baltimore City Councilman Carl Stokes separately argued, ‘thug’ is now a proxy for ‘nigger,’ exhibiting a kinder, gentler racism that is no less consequential for its target.” Refusing the criminalization of the thug, Redmond and Sojoyner argue that “our task is to refashion the reception and use of the thug through adoption of its fugitive qualities. . . . Instead of running from the thug, we might imagine them instead as the model we’ve been searching for.”60 What would it mean to adopt the thug’s “fugitive qualities”? To run with rather than away from the thug? To listen to rather than merely

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voyeuristically watch the looter? In an Esquire interview first published just after the death of Martin Luther King Jr. and recently republished in April 2015, James Baldwin provided an answer to that question by challenging the truth-speak surrounding the term “looter”: “I object to the term ‘looters’ because I wonder who is looting whom, baby.” Frustrated by Baldwin’s interrogation of the framing of practically every interview question, the Esquire editor then asked Baldwin, “How would you define somebody who smashes in the window of a television store and takes what he wants?” Baldwin retorted, “Before I get to that, how would you define somebody who puts a cat where he is and takes all the money out of the ghetto where he makes it? Who is looting whom?”61 Baldwin systematically dismantles what Redmond and Sojoyner call the “contextualized veracity” of the rhetoric that criminalizes Black dissent.62 Baldwin then suggests that we need to listen to, and not merely watch, the looter. While the image of urban looters smashing storefront windows usually is understood and consumed as evidence of Black irrational violence, Baldwin transforms the spectacle of looting into a scene of instruction: Grabbing off the TV set? He doesn’t really want the TV set. He’s saying screw you. It’s just judgment, by the way, on the value of the TV set. He doesn’t want it. He wants to let you know he’s there. The question I’m trying to raise is a very serious question. The mass media-television and all the major news agencies endlessly use that word “looter.” On television you always see black hands reaching in, you know. And so the American public concludes that these savages are trying to steal everything from us. And no one has seriously tried to get where the trouble is. After all, you’re accusing a captive population who has been robbed of everything of looting. I think it’s obscene.63

Baldwin brilliantly revalues the worth of the television set being hauled away and thus rewrites the script of “these savages . . . trying to steal everything.” The television set no longer has monetary value. It no longer is a commodity. Rather, transformed by “black hands reaching in,” the television set is converted from a commodity into a message: “He’s saying screw you. . . . He wants to let you know he’s there.” In fact, the

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most important lesson is not the conversion of a commodity (the television set) into a message (“screw you”), but rather the insistence of the message: “He wants to let you know he’s there.” Here Baldwin implies that Black bodies historically have been consigned to the status of commodity and thus ontologically are deemed incapable of ever having a message. The insistence on presence constitutes the message: “He wants to let you know he’s there.” In other words, Black people always have been there and always have refused commodity status. We begin to understand that the image of the looter contains a story of seduction: We are seduced by the self-evident savagery of the sight of the Black looter. This is why Syjuco’s “second look” at RAIDERS is so important. Depending on what kind of “judgment” the viewer makes about the value of the television set, the “black hands reaching in” either confirm the stereotype of thieving savagery or send the viewer a message about what or who truly is “obscene.” Following Baldwin, we might extend our earlier analysis of the obfuscatory qualities of the transparent display screen in the museum and the shop to the television set’s display screen. According to the logic of Syjuco’s RAIDERS installation, the glass screen transparently disguises the real theft of the past as precious art that needs to be protected from the possibility of theft in the present moment, and we similarly might argue that the transparency of the realism purveyed by the television screen—this is a faithful recording of what is really happening—protects us from seeing who really is looting whom.64 Similarly, Syjuco’s “second look” demands that we hear a message about the history of theft that underpins the imperial museum’s collections and not merely revel in the sight of beauty/booty. Syjuco’s “second look” enables us to pay attention to the transparency that achieves distortion and disguise. In short, Syjuco invites us to pivot and oscillate between two looks— precious Oriental art or cheap wood cutouts?—that reveal not two perspectives on the same object but the relationship between two phenomena. Beauty and booty: A history of raiding has yielded booty that is belied by its beauty. Appearance and reality: The appearance of transparency masks the reality of exploitation. Syjuco’s deployment of auratic failure invites us to move away from an experience of perspectival and cultural relativism to an understanding of the classed, colonial, and racial workings of aesthetic ideology.

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Figure 4.5 and Figure 4.6. Stephanie Syjuco, RAIDERS: International Booty, Bountiful Harvest (Selections from the Collection of the A____ A__ M_____), 2011. Digital archival photo prints mounted onto lasercut wood. Courtesy of the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.

What happens if we further take up Syjuco’s invitation and take a second look at her aesthetic? Here, I want to exert pressure on the politics of irony and ambiguity generated by her mimetic aesthetic. As I have argued above, her method of flattening the auratic work of art brilliantly exposes the Oriental artifact’s colonial origins as well as the process of commodification. She moreover problematizes the lack of attention to race and colonialism in Benjamin’s and Marx’s approach to the work of art. All of this is accompanied by her signature wry sense of humor. But just how subversive can the position of ironist and master of ambiguity be? Beyond the individual case of Syjuco’s oeuvre, what are some of the larger ramifications of the deployment of irony? Understood as a literary technique for reversing the reader’s expectations, irony depends on the successful production of ambiguity or doubled meaning. Irony depends on the success of the “second look”: the first look by the naïve reader is followed and displaced by the “second

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look” of the educated reader. In his essay “The Spell of Indecision,” the literary critic Franco Moretti acknowledges that irony is an “indispensable component of any critical, democratic, and progressive culture.”65 But Moretti goes on to interrogate irony’s political efficacy by arguing that over the last century or so, modernist works formerly associated with “melancholy, pain, defenselessness, and loss of hope,” exemplified for Moretti by James Joyce’s Ulysses, now are taken to evoke “exhilarating concepts of semantic freedom, detotalization, and productive heterogeneity.”66 Once understood to be urgently subversive of the “modern bourgeois worldview,” the “fragmentary” nature of these works has been transformed into a site of free, ambiguous, endless play, a shift that reflects how the modern bourgeois worldview has come to assimilate and contain these works’ oppositional force. Moretti argues that the emergence of the “spell of indecision” should be taken not merely as the inevitable by-products of the advances of modern life but rather as a powerful hangover from Romanticist traditions: And romantic irony . . . is a frame of mind that sees in any event no more than an “occasion” for free intellectual and emotional play, for a mental and subject deconstruction of the world as it is. Devoted to the category of “possibility,” romantic irony is therefore incapable and even hostile to whatever resembles a decision.67

In other words, the “old formula” of the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief reveals that “much of the modernist imagination—where nothing is unbelievable—has its source in romantic irony.”68 (Note, however, that Moretti makes no attempt to take the next feasible step, which would be to make the connection between the roaming eye of the Romantic poet freely wandering the landscape and the freedom of movement assumed by settlers depopulating, clearing, and occupying the land. But I will return to this point later.) In terms of the implications that this transformation of alienated fragmentation into exuberant possibility has had for the “field of values and value judgments,”69 Moretti argues that this “galaxy of associations” becomes “valuable as such, not as a starting point from which to move toward a definite choice.” Decision, according to Moretti, is “inseparable from praxis and history,” and we must find a way to return to

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decision.70 Irony must “recover some kind of problematic relationship with responsibility and decision, or else it will have to surrender history altogether.”71 However, in an era governed by the celebration of irony and ambiguity, decisions are constantly deferred. We see this phenomenon at work both at the level of the reader who suspends disbelief and at the level of the character for whom even the gratification of desire is postponed. According to Moretti, in the modernist literary economy, money is “desirable because it allows not satisfaction but its postponement.” From Flaubert to Joyce to Goethe, the literary expression of this postponement is daydreaming, the “romantic charm” of which lies in its temporality. Freed from any accountability for the shaping of an alternate future, the daydreamer can “freely renegotiate between and manage past, present, and future alike.”72 In short, at first glance, the “aestheticironic attitude” of the modernist avant-garde appears to be subversive of the “hegemonic frame of mind.”73 But with a second glance, we see that it instead affirms the hegemonic worldview. Returning to Syjuco, I suggest that there is a way to contextualize Syjuco’s mimetic irony as part of an other tradition of guerrilla resistance, colonial collaboration, and constant shape-shifting. These practices make up the history of conquest, genocide, and colonization in the Philippines and constitute a Filipino practice of resistance by way of performative appropriation. Understood as part of a historical and collective tradition, Syjuco’s mimetic irony offers an alternative to Franco Moretti’s decisionist conclusion. Fed up with the “galaxy of associations” and the dilettantish daydreaming of the avant-garde, Moretti calls for “praxis and history” through a return to “responsibility and decision.”74 But Syjuco’s work shows the way toward “praxis and history” through the effects of indecision. Syjuco’s doubled look ceases to be that of Western Romantic irony, which is consumed as a private, self-enhancing good or as a postmodern mode of adjustment. Instead, Syjuco’s doubled look reworks irony as an extension of a cultural practice of decolonizing and campy play. In the case of the Philippines and Filipino America, play and indecision, and not the colonial imperative of responsibility and decision, lead us to “praxis and history.” Time and again, in the theater of war that has come to

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be known as the Philippines, playing dead, changing sides, and shapeshifting were and are part of a praxis of resistance and survival.

From Doubled Look to Body Double Syjuco’s video installations Body Double (Platoon) and Body Double (Platoon/Apocalypse Now/Hamburger Hill) are examples of how decolonizing play and playacting can return us to “praxis and history.” As part of her “attempts at discovering [her] place of birth,” Syjuco claims that she became interested in Hollywood movies about the Vietnam War because the Philippines was the shooting location for Platoon, Apocalypse Now, and Hamburger Hill. For the three-channel video installation, Syjuco edited each of the three movies such that the “peripheral landscape” of the Philippines, as she phrases it, comes into focus while all images that have to do with the main action are covered by blocks of black screen.75 She has screened the edited movies full-length as a threechannel installation, the soundscape of each movie taking turns going silent and coming up full volume. For Syjuco, the Philippines serves as a body double for Vietnam in these Hollywood movies. The Philippines serves as the “scenography of an elsewhere that is Vietnam,” as the art historian Patrick D. Flores has put it.76 As Hollywood movie buffs know, the Philippines has functioned as a stand-in for other Southeast Asian countries like Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Perhaps most famously, Francis Ford Coppola directed Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now (1979), and Oliver Stone later directed Martin Sheen’s son Charlie Sheen as the star of Platoon (1986). For example, in a 2012 article titled “On Location: 10 Hollywood Films Shot in the Philippines,” the Philippine-based online lifestyle guide SPOT.ph declared that these filmmakers “believed in our country’s cinematic beauty” and chose the Philippines for a range of reasons: “For some, the Philippines served as a ‘stand-in’ for other countries, in others it’s a mere flashback setting, and a few ‘revisit’ the country’s past wars.” The article goes on to claim that “with its exquisite beaches, lush beaches, vivid alleyways, rich history, not to mention the semi-ambiguous facial features of its residents, the Philippines is just an open movie set screaming to be used.”77 In its regular column titled “Rewind: DVD/Stream-

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Figure 4.7. Stephanie Syjuco, Body Double, 2005. Digital video, 120 minutes, looped. Courtesy of the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.

ing/Download,” the Wall Street Journal published a mini-review of Peter Weir’s 1982 film The Year of Living Dangerously and characterized it as a “classic romantic adventure . . . set in Indonesia during the same era as the genocide in [Joshua Oppenheimer’s documentary] ‘The Look of Silence.’ ” Despite the brevity of the review, the newspaper took the time to refer to the Philippines as a stand-in for Indonesia: “Much of the film’s success is due to Mr. Weir’s handling of local color—the Philippines as a stand-in for Indonesia. But the center of his story is the torrid relationship between Mel Gibson’s broadcast journalist, Guy Hamilton, and Sigourney Weaver’s world-weary British agent, Jill Bryant.”78 Functioning not merely as the shooting location or backdrop, the Philippines as “body double” stands in for another country. The Philippines is transformed into something between a set, a character, and a stunt person. The theater for several real wars, the Philippines has achieved the dubious reputation as a theater for cinematic war. Syjuco notes, “As a ‘body double’ for Vietnam, the Philippines occupies a strange place in the imagination of the American public—a physically ‘insignifi-

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cant’ place and also a completely familiar place via its substitution for Vietnam.”79 As I have argued elsewhere, the Philippines and Filipino America have been configured as “foreign in a domestic sense,” legally, politically, and culturally, in the American imperial imaginary.80 In the case of films about wars in other Asian countries, the Philippines must mimic Vietnam, Thailand, or Indonesia, like the body double who performs the stunts on behalf of the movie star. Its identity must recede. Its presence must be visible even as its identity must be erased. Its own history of war is displaced by another’s. Syjuco necessarily indexes this history of displacement when she describes her editing strategy as a combination of cutting, cropping, and muting: “Body Double” consists of silent moving sequences of a tropical landscape that fades slowly in and out, interspersed with varying durations of a completely black screen. The scenes of sky, mountains, foliage, and rivers are “cropped” in squares and rectangles that at times take up just small portions of the full screen, and, occasionally, scenes that take up the complete screen. I used the three Hollywood films and edited out all the scenes of battle and dialogue, cropping the frame to focus in on the peripheral landscapes (if any) in an attempt to “search for the Philippines.”81

Syjuco edits out and displaces the main filmic narrative, and she claims that the “resulting videos look like ambient, minimalist imagery of landscapes and closeups of flora and fauna.”82 For example, the first twenty minutes or so of Apocalypse Now is screened in total silence, and the visuals consist mostly of total black punctuated by fleeting, blurry glimpses of the tops of swaying palm trees, rippling ocean waves, or lush jungle. Syjuco’s editing reminds us of cultural studies scholar Nerissa Balce’s incisive observation that, starting with the genocidal PhilippineAmerican War, the representation of the Filipino secures the erasure of the circumstances of his or her visibility.83 This editing strategy at first produces a kind of tranquil or cerebral experience for the viewer. But Syjuco’s edited minimalism creates a growing sense of horror in the viewer, especially for those familiar with the three movies. The video installation is utterly uncanny, a staging of Freud’s account of the unheimlich that draws its power from its juxtapo-

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sition of the familiar and the unfamiliar and of the domestic and the foreign. For example, while watching Syjuco’s rendition of Apocalypse Now, we realize that when a rectangular block of black screen is surrounded by swiftly moving images of trees, ocean, or fields, we are watching an American helicopter swooping across the sky and raining bombs or ammunition. Once the movie begins its journey along the river (and one remembers that Coppola explicitly is referencing Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness), Syjuco brings up the volume and Martin Sheen’s voiceover narration is accompanied by mostly black screen. Thus, when the American soldiers go berserk and massacre a Vietnamese family in a boat, the scene is aurally depicted but visually censored. We hear the dialogue leading up to the gunshots and screams. We slowly come to the realization that we are watching the filmic rendition of terra nullius. In her signature ironic way, Syjuco calls the video installation a “kind of reworked ‘home movie.’ ”84 Syjuco was born in the Philippines and raised in the United States, and she occasionally refers explicitly to her heritage and identity as part of her creative process. However, when she does so, it turns out that the identitarian—the so-called search for home or belonging—is interwoven with the counterfeit and the fraudulent rather than with the real and the authentic. While Body Double shows how the historical identity of the Philippine-American War recedes and gives way to Hollywood’s version of the Vietnam War, Syjuco simultaneously highlights how the identitarian search for belonging and the homeland concludes with a confrontation with the mimetic rather than with the authentic. Syjuco’s process of creating these “reworked” home movies can be considered a blatant form of plagiarism. Like a plagiarist, Syjuco appropriates a work made by someone else and then passes it off as her own. She suggests that the Filipino autobiographical or identitarian mode is characterized not by the “real” representation of the self but the mimetic, ironized representation of the body double. In other words, the imitativeness of the Filipino, understood usually as the limit of Filipino achievement and evidence of his or her incapacity for original thought, should be conceived of as the sign of and for history, especially the staging of war. Perhaps then we can start to think of Filipino American beauty not as a representational sign but as the reworked trace of a history full of puns written by plagiarists and littered with bodies/beauty and theft/booty.

Conclusion Accumulation Now and Then

Across the chapters in this book, I have argued that the material collection of artifacts associated with the racial, colonial primitive instantiates an ideological commitment to the gathering of knowledge. The material accumulation and display of things associated with racially backward peoples form the epistemological foundation of American knowledge production, which, as it turns out, should more accurately be called knowledge acquisition or extraction. The Philippine exhibit serves as an allegory and a “real” case of the primitive accumulation subtending imperial American knowledge just as the extraction of Filipino labor contributes to American capitalist colonialism. With this understanding of the Filipino foundations of the development of an American accumulative drive toward power/knowledge, we can appreciate the value of Filipino American cultural producers like Carlos Bulosan, Ma-Yi Theater Company, and Stephanie Syjuco, who have created powerful parodies of an accumulative epistemology that has been naturalized in different sites and spaces (the museum, the art gallery, and the agribusiness farm) even as they also have proposed alternative, anti-accumulative social ecologies. In this concluding chapter, I return to Syjuco’s work 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 practice, I move out of the museum per se in order to consider the ramifications of the contemporary resurgence of crafting, DIY, and making practices that challenge capitalist accumulation, as part of an era increasingly defined by the rise of the so-called sharing and platform economies that mimic and appropriate these alternative anti-accumulative ecologies.

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Art or Advertising? Exposé or Exposure? In the previous chapter, I argued that in order to more fully understand the broader ramifications of the politics of Syjuco’s “second look” and her deployment of ironized ambiguity, we have to engage in a mode of double or triple vision. At the level of the hermeneutic analysis of the work of art, Syjuco challenges the exploitative economies and worldviews underpinning the museum and the department store. When we encounter her RAIDERS installation, for example, we see at least three scenes: These are antique ceramics in a museum; these are cheap woodcuts in a gallery; these are expensive vases in a department store. Syjuco exposes the connections between colonial acquisition, auratic fetishism, and capitalist commodification by blurring the boundaries between the scopic scenes of anthropological exhibition, aesthetic arrangement, and commercial advertising. However, at the level of the aesthetic, Syjuco’s ironized mimetic method indexes and affirms the hegemonic worldview of our current digital era of increasingly corporatized social media. More generally, because social media presence in the postwork digital era is de facto a form of advertising, the artist today by default commodifies and advertises her digital persona. In this chapter I argue that the exposé that RAIDERS achieves also must be understood as a result of self-promotional exposure in the digital era.1 What does RAIDERS’ exposé of the imperial museum have to do with the obsessive self-documentation associated with platforms like Pinterest, Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram? Everything, as it turns out. Let us take one more look at RAIDERS’ simulacrum of the department store window display vis-à-vis Franco Moretti’s “spell of indecision.” As I argued in the previous chapter, the interpretation of RAIDERS as a department store simulacrum opens up a critique of older forms of commodification associated with the urbanite strolling around a city, glancing at the storefront display and then coveting the artfully arranged commodities, which must be protected from the “looter.” But where does this desire for the commodity come from? Moretti reminds us that the origins of this scopic desire can be traced to the early department storeowner’s principles of dissimilarity and estrangement in the design of window display arrangement. A combination of temporary strangeness and “mutual support” is produced by the juxtaposition of the

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commodity with other commodities.2 As the sociologist Richard Sennett puts it, a commodity’s “use character” is “temporarily suspended” and it becomes “stimulating.” Sennett continues, “One wanted to buy it, because it became temporarily an unexpected thing; it became strange.”3 An everyday thing turned both odd and pleasurable—where have we heard this before? In the classroom and in the art museum. Literature is everyday language made strange: This is the basic formula taught in introductory English courses. As Moretti points out, classic works in modernist art juxtapose, say, an umbrella with a toilet such that the composition as a whole depends on the strangeness produced by different things placed next to each other. What typically is not taught is that this principle also informs the creation of desire for the commodity. Moretti compares the storeowner’s strategy of estrangement with the principle of “disautomatization” in Russian formalism, itself fundamental to the modernist project: A common object transformed into something unexpected and strange: is this not precisely the disautomatization of the way we perceive everyday things advocated by that crucial modernist principle—ostranenie—of Russian formalism? Likewise, is it not also the basic technique of modern advertising, which took off shortly after the golden age of avant-garde movements and whose task is to endow commodities with a surprising and pleasant aesthetic aura?4

The worlds of modernist art and modern advertising collide. Successful advertising depends on disautomatization. Do the arts in turn depend on principles of advertising? Naturally, artists and art institutions engage in any number of modes of self-promotion. Any number of artworks explicitly comment on or thematize advertising. Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans, the Factory, and the pop art movement spring to mind. But my question about advertising is posed at the level of the aesthetic. Returning to Syjuco’s RAIDERS installation, I suggest that while her mimetic method of making fakes does the work of anti-hegemonic exposé, her emphasis on copying as a mode of revealing also is informed by the digital era’s emphasis on constant borrowing, constant documentation, and constant declaration. The ethos of social media is defined by practices of reblogging, “sharing,”

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and repurposing, and so these mimetic and citational practices depend on users’ obsession with accumulating self-documentation and status updates, exemplified by the “selfie.” The constant flow of twenty-firstcentury Polaroids purports to create community—a sociality composed of plural interiorities—by enabling the democratic exchange of glimpses into the minutiae of people’s personal lives. However, the emergence of this promise of a new communal and democratic spirit has been accompanied by the rise of the neoliberal, self-commodifying subject and the postwork society. In an economy that has witnessed a real decline in jobs that provide a living wage, people have turned to social media and online commerce as an alternate means of branding themselves and selling their products. Users attempt to parlay their digital persona into the establishment of social media presence in the hopes that, with enough followers, their presence can be monetized as a source of supplemental if not full-time income. A promising alternative to this tendency toward digital self-branding would seem to be the contemporary resurgence of craft, slow food, and DIY making. Syjuco herself has invested in such practices, as exemplified by her crocheting workshops. But women artists like Syjuco, who identify as makers known for their commitment to the craft movement, are also particularly skilled at and particularly vulnerable to the rise of the platform economy. When it comes to the craft-selling market, the platform economy is overwhelmingly gendered female, especially platform sites like Etsy that target craft sellers and buyers, and this phenomenon has begun to be remarked upon in the American mainstream media.5 For example, in 2015 the Wall Street Journal provided this profile of a typical seller in the online handmade-goods marketplace: “She has a college degree, she probably used her savings to start her online shop and most of her household’s income comes from other sources.”6 The newspaper went on to report that 86 percent of Etsy sellers are female (which is to be contrasted with the masculinity associated with the makers of, for example, food designated “artisanal,” such as butchery, cocktails, and beer); and that Etsy reported that 30 percent of its sellers “use their business as their sole source of earnings” and the rest earn “supplemental income,” while only “5% have paid employees.” According to the same Wall Street Journal article, one of Etsy’s policy directors described the transition to the postwork society in this matter-of-fact way:

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“The workforce is shifting away from full-time employment, and more and more people are combining income from multiple sources.” Criticized for accelerating the “transition away from the security and reliable incomes that come with traditional employment,” Etsy waved off this criticism by claiming that it “democratizes access to entrepreneurship.”7 On its website, Etsy announced in 2012 that it had joined the ranks of “Certified B Corporations,” the so-called benefit corporations that are assessed and certified by the nonprofit B Lab for “rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency”; and it hailed itself as a “new kind of company that uses the power of business to solve social and environmental problems.”8 According to the communications studies scholar Tarleton Gillespie, Etsy’s claims exemplify a broader rhetoric deployed by platform sites and companies that “position themselves as just hosting—empowering all by choosing none.”9 The communications studies scholar Samantha Close observes that the “party host role” is a way for platform companies to “use the rhetoric of empowerment to differentiate themselves from the gatekeepers of broadcast media, who make authoritarian decisions about what content would appear before the public and usually select only a very small range of material.” By contrast, platforms like Etsy see themselves as taking up an “intermediary” position “akin to that of the genial party host, who makes sure everyone is comfortable and happy in an environment conducive to creation.”10 Indeed, the Wall Street Journal article characterizes Etsy as an example of “microcommerce,” which it defines as “people transacting with each other through a website or app, with limited involvement from the marketplace.”11 The problem with this definition of “microcommerce” is that there is little sense of historical or political context for the rise of systemic underemployment across classes.12 Subtended by the neoliberal belief in individualism that has morphed into creative entrepreneurship, the newspaper’s definition of microcommerce implies that Etsy should be understood as a phenomenon outside the marketplace rather than as a product of market forces. Thus, Etsy’s report that 88 percent of its sellers “run their shops alone” can be celebrated as a triumph of the female entrepreneur rather than as evidence of women’s exclusion from existing “entrepreneurial” forums as well as newer forms of commodification and exploitation, including the artist’s and maker’s self-exploitation.

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Broadly speaking, with the gendering and feminization of craft and maker spaces, we are witnessing the latest version of the transformation of traditionally “domestic” forms of labor into monetized commodities. At the same time, as people increasingly turn to social media, computer gaming, and other forms of digital activity as an alternate means of earning a livelihood in today’s postwork society, the method for finding work in an economy with fewer and fewer jobs that pay a living wage now entails forms of personal branding and advertising that intersect with the process of creating one’s digital avatar and persona. When it comes to the emergence of Internet sharing and creative economies, Close points out how the conflation of DIY (do-it-yourself) and DEY (doeverything-yourself) rhetorics masks “hierarchies of power” and the differences between the two, even as crafters “increasingly draw cultural lines” between their work processes, “themselves and the platform”; and she advocates the expansion of the “DIT (do-it-together) work philosophy” that crafters have mobilized in order to counter DEY expectations that place “all of the burdens and risk of entrepreneurial ventures on those least able to bear it.”13

The Politics of the Aesthetics of Playbor Artists, makers, and creative industry types are especially talented at and vulnerable to the rise of the platform economy in the digital and postFordist era, wherein play is not so much separated from as engulfed by labor.14 Their work lends itself easily to the phenomenon and concept of “playbor,” the coining of which often is attributed to digital media scholar Julian Kücklich.15 In his essay “Casual Playbor,” the UX (user experience) researcher and designer Jason Lipshin describes how the term captures how labor is transformed “from an activity restricted to the enclosed space of the factory, to a multiplication of activities expanding out into numerous spheres of ambient life, in which ‘all of society is put to work’ under the auspices of play.” Lipshin provides this helpful account of contemporary digital forms of commodification: For instance, in marketing campaigns for new media technologies, the rhetoric of this new labor is framed by its absence: utopian celebrations of video games’ playful empowerment and expansive spaces emphasize

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interactivity, individuality, customizability, and freedom of choice, without any attention to how play-labor is structured, coded, or exploited for capital. With the popular advent of Web 2.0 platforms, corporations have learned to expropriate value from many aspects of daily life previously attributed to play: “sexual desire, boredom, friendship . . . all become fodder for speculative profit,” as ubiquitous Internet surveillance monetizes personal data into a commodity. Indeed, it is in this new context of control that contemporary labor has been able to hide so well under connotations of playfulness, and that play has been able to become more laborious, allowing Julian Kücklich to coin the neologism “play-bor.”16

Though many scholars of playbor focus on the relation between the digital game industry and its consumers as their primary case study, I want to focus on the special crisis faced by artists. In many ways, the vocation of the artist always has been defined by a particular merging of play and labor. Drawing on the post-Romanticist definition of art I discussed in the previous chapter, we can say that the goal of the artist generally is

Figure C.1. Stephanie Syjuco, FREE TEXTS (An Open Source Reading Room), 2012. Paper flyers with downloadable PDFs. Commissioned for the Zero1 Biennial, San Jose, California. Courtesy of the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.

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Figure C.2. Stephanie Syjuco, FREE TEXTS (An Open Source Reading Room), 2012. Paper flyers with downloadable PDFs. Commissioned for the Zero1 Biennial, San Jose, California.

understood as making the everyday strange or holding up a mirror that refracts the familiar or the ordinary while giving the viewer pleasure; their work can be understood broadly as “play,” consigned to the realms of culture and leisure. In the contemporary moment, however, it seems as if the range of distortion and refraction in the mirror that artists hold

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up has become more and more narrow. If “all of society is put to work under the auspices of play,” then what is left for the artist to do? According to Syjuco, there still is plenty to play around with. In her 2011–2012 installation FREE TEXTS (An Open Source Reading Room), Syjuco explicitly draws on materials that challenge playbor and the culture and economy of saturated commodification that it implies. The installation consists of 8½ x 10-inch paper flyers stapled on a gallery wall from floor to ceiling so as to resemble a giant bulletin board. The 2015 version of the installation that I saw at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts included 140 unique flyers. Printed in simple black font with tear-off tabs at the bottom of each page, the flyers look like the kind of low-budget advertisements posted by small businesses or students on street lamps, in café bathrooms, or on dormitory bulletin boards. Coming closer to the flyers, one sees that these are not advertisements but rather an annotated bibliography of e-versions of new and older classic texts available at no charge via the Internet. Syjuco’s FREE TEXT flyers include Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s 2000 book Empire, Roland Barthes’ 1977 essay “The Death of the Author,” and Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 “Manifesto Antropófago” (Cannibalist Manifesto). Each flyer contains a substantive summary of the work along with tabs containing the printed URL for the online text, tabs that gallery visitors can tear off and take along with them. For example, the flyer for Gary Hall’s essay “Pirate Philosophy Version 1.0: Open Access, Open Editing, Free Content, Free/Libre/Open Media” states that Hall “explores how the development of various forms of so-called internet piracy is affecting ideas of the author, the book, the scholarly journal, peer review, intellectual property, copyright law, content creation and cultural production that were established pre-internet.” Many of the other texts also address the philosophy, politics, and effects of Internet piracy, such as Janneke Adema’s 2009 essay “Scanners, Collectors, & Aggregators: On the ‘Underground’ Movement of (Pirated) Theory Text Sharing” and David M. Berry’s 2008 book Copy, Rip, Burn: The Politics of Copyleft and Open Source. Some flyers provide URLs to sources that presumably address the problems of labor exploitation in the art world, such as the newspaper and website Art Work: A National Conversation about Art, Labor, and Economics edited by Temporary Services.

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The sight of these simple flyers in a gallery at first made me nostalgic. I remembered how much time I spent, as a college student organizer, stapling and taping flyers around campus. But then I realized that my nostalgia for a dying medium and practice was misplaced. Depending on the number of tabs that are torn off by gallery visitors, I could tell which texts were most popular. I also began to wonder about the hierarchy Syjuco imposed on the texts by positioning certain flyers well out of reach near the ceiling and other flyers well within reach. I then realized that the analogue practice of tearing tabs off the flyers was approximating the digital practice of “liking” a status update or post on social media. The overall effect is a simple but thought-provoking merging of old and new media practices that, on the hand, invites visitors to participate in the new distributive democracy promised by the digital era and, on the other hand, literalizes the continued hierarchization of knowledge. In the 2015 installation of FREE TEXTS at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, this merging of the digital and the analogue was accentuated by the fact that Syjuco’s FREE TEXTS was installed alongside Counterfeit Crochet Project (Critique of a Political Economy), another of Syjuco’s installations. The giant bulletin board displaying the flyers in FREE TEXTS formed the backdrop to the display of crocheted designer “fakes.” Counterfeit Crochet Project, one of Syjuco’s more well-known installations, includes a call for crochet beginners and experts alike to join her in “hand-counterfeiting” workshops.17 In these workshops Syjuco and her collaborators crochet knockoffs of haute couture bags, belts, and mobile phone pouches by following the templates of fashion logos that they have downloaded from the Internet. Thus, both installations use materials—paper, staples, balls of wool—associated with the era preceding the digital. Yet both installations draw on content very much of the digital era. So while, at first glance, both installations look and are analogue creations, at a second glance they clearly emblematize the era of the digital. Nonetheless, few if any critics of Syjuco’s work seem to pay attention to this doubled, simultaneously digital and analogue aspect of her work. Critics frame her work in terms of either the resurgent craft movement or her digital work. Generally speaking, this has to do with several blind spots or gaps: first of all, there is the divide between the art

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world and craft or makers; and there is the divide between digital and craft, such that the emergence of the handmade and the (often settler colonial, or homesteading) nostalgia associated with it usually is seen as a radical break with the industrial/postindustrial/globalized. This Manichean framework thwarts the connections that otherwise could be made between this nostalgia for the handmade or locally sourced or artisanal and new forms of commodification in the era of the digital. We then could grasp more quickly how these newer forms of commodification are not merely driving that rejection of the industrial/globalized/manufactured but are influencing the aesthetic of the handmade/ crafted. However, makers and craftivists largely get celebrated (or critiqued) on the terms of craft and making at the level of the work and not at the level of aesthetic. The problem lies with the critic and scholar, which is about the white privilege of ignoring the workings of ideology or race and gender.

The Race for Playbor In contrast, digital race humanities scholars like Lisa Nakamura and historians like Robin D. G. Kelley give us a way to analyze in much sharper and historicized ways the question as to who is a “maker” by arguing that playbor is (and has always been) a fundamentally raced and gendered phenomenon. While I thus far have discussed the emergence of the concept of playbor within the field of digital humanities and especially in gaming studies, this story of origins is misleading, and we have something to learn from that kind of erasure. Until very recently, there has been little to no attention to race, gender, sexuality, and other identitarian categories in the scholarship on “playbor,” wherein, for example, gamers’ play and leisure can be crowdsourced as a form of unpaid labor. More precisely, with the exception of a handful of critical race scholars in digital media studies, there has been little to no attention to the earlier emergence of the term and concept of playbor in African American studies. In his 1997 book Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America, the historian Robin D. G. Kelley had already coined the term “play-labor” to analyze the relationship between “permanent unemployment, the transformation of public space, and the changing

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means and practices of play for African American urban youth” in the Reagan-Bush era.18 As a result of the devastating combination of deindustrialization, the precipitous decline in wages and jobs, police repression, the restructuring of the city’s architectural and urban landscape, and the general defunding of public schools and other services, the increasingly Black and brown residents of the inner city live in a world where they “do nothing but play.”19 In turn, the creativity of urban youth has been appropriated by corporations like Nike and Reebok who convert urban blight and the racial underclass into trendy “street” style and fashion, with special (if extremely uneven) attention to the rhythms, movements, and aesthetics of aerosol or graffiti art, rap and hip-hop music, break dancing, basketball, and double Dutch. As Kelley points out, while the scholarship on leisure in working-class studies generally configures play as an “escape from work, something that takes place on the weekends or evenings in distinctive spaces set aside for leisure,” from the perspective of Black urban youth, the “pursuit of leisure, pleasure, and creative expression is labor.”20 Far from configuring African American youth as passive victims, however, Kelley tracks how some youth of color try to “turn that labor into cold hard cash.” For them, “play has increasingly become . . . more than an expression of stylistic innovation, gender identities, and/or racial and class anger—increasingly it is viewed as a way to survive economic crisis or a means to upward mobility.”21 Kelley concludes that “the terms work and play themselves presume a binarism that simply does not do justice to the meaning of labor, for they obscure the degree to which young people attempt to turn a realm of consumption (leisure time/play time) into a site of production.”22 Kelley moreover underscores the perversity of the postindustrial economy wherein corporations like Nike and other shoe and fashion conglomerates “circulat[e] the very representations of race that generate terror in all of us at the sight of young black men and yet compels most of America to want to wear their shoes.”23 In her 2011 essay “Economies of Digital Production in East Asia: iPhone Girls and the Transnational Circuits of Cool,” digital media scholar Lisa Nakamura highlights how regional and global political, ideological, and economic structures must be taken into account in theses about how work is turned into play and vice versa. According to Nakamura, in the neoliberal economy “ingenuity and entrepreneurialism”

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are perceived both as “necessary for survival” and as a “form of resistance to mass culture.” Silicon Valley culture in general, particularly the Apple company, cultivates this form of neoliberal “cool” through the “celebration of individual cultural production.” In a world wherein the “maker” enjoys an “exalted cultural status” and “the term ‘creative’ has achieved the status of a noun to describe workers such as designers,” Apple’s iPhone exemplifies this “fetish of self-sufficiency and creativity.”24 Nakamura compares the representation of two very different “iPhone girls” who illustrate two distinct forms of “making.” Nakamura first comments on the circulation of images of a smiling Chinese female factory worker whose photograph was installed on brand-new yet hacked iPhones, thus making visible the otherwise invisibilized hands of the workers who manufacture the near-ubiquitous device. The Chinese woman’s smile is notable. The photograph of the worker makes her labor visible, the labor that makes possible the kind of play and creativity that Apple advertises as part of its brand and reputation as the designer of the devices and technology that enable everyday users to tap into their creativity. However, her smile turns her visibilized labor into play—smiling workers, happy workers—and, thus, her labor (and its conditions) becomes invisibilized again. Nakamura then focuses on the visibility of a Korean musician-performer on YouTube who creates music with several iPhones, albeit covers of Beyoncé’s hits. Nakamura cites her as an example of a visible maker in the playbor economy: she hopes to eventually get paid for her play/creativity. Her aspiration is to turn her play into paid labor. By comparing these two “iPhone girls,” Nakamura shows us that the triumphalist celebration of the postracial and the postfeminist in a neoliberal economy relies on differentially visible and invisible iPhone “makers.” I have tried to draw attention to the different role that the concept of “playbor” has assumed across several interdisciplinary fields because there is a problematic gulf between digital media studies and critical race studies. The problem with the former is that it presumes a postracial era and thus prescribes new forms of color blindness, which of course is belied by the scholarship of Nakamura and others in the digital humanities. On the other hand, sociohistorical studies of racism in the inner city and other highly segregated, policed urban and suburban enclaves tend to ignore the networked, digital nature of their subjects’

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lives. How might we productively consolidate and historicize these different understandings of playbor? Kelley’s account—of “play-labor” in the inner city as a phenomenon that preceded and now co-occurs with playbor in the world of computer gaming—suggests how the saturation of play by work in both instances is a result of newer as well as older forms of fundamentally racialized and gendered class stratification. Both in Kelley’s “play-labor” economy and Kücklich’s “playbor” economy, young people grasp at recreational and creative activities as the possibility of an alternative livelihood, even though that possibility is real for so few. Taken together, these divergent genealogies of playbor illuminate the ways that labor becomes invisible as an integral part of the emergence of the postwork society. In other words, labor is obscured through its general pervasiveness. As such, we have to pay nuanced yet capacious attention to how work saturates play, and this chapter is an attempt to expose and understand this phenomenon. We need new cultural theories and methods that can do this kind of exposure, not least because modes of exposure and (self-)documentation are now part of our current hegemony. Documentation and revelation have become de rigueur in the digital era. Users are expected to constantly update their status and upload photographs about their personal lives. Digital media studies scholars have shown that the era of blogging and social media has been marked by significant shifts in the narration of the self, the archiving of memory, and relations between the individual and his or her community.25 I suggest that we understand Syjuco’s work as a successful merging of these two disparate strands of scholarship on playbor. The explicit references to the digital in her oeuvre illuminate the exploitative nature of the playbor economy as it is outlined in digital humanities scholarship, wherein the crowdsourcing of gamers’ activities becomes monetized for corporate profit. At the same time, her work as a craftivist of color highlights the playbor economy as it is outlined by Black studies scholars like Robin Kelley who document the innately racialized, gendered, and classed processes by which people of color’s creativity is at once ghettoized—incarcerated in the inner city—and marketed for national and global consumption. This bifocal attention to Syjuco’s interventions in both the mainstream art world and digital studies allows us to understand how accumulation advances as labor disappears into leisure and

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how that process is gendered and racialized, in ways that advance and also challenge classic Marxist accounts of how labor disappears into the commodity. We can return to and rethink the concept of commodity fetishism, for example, which captures the seemingly magical process by which the value of a commodity is severed from the hands of the human laborer who made it.

A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing: The New (In)Visible Labor When it comes to the business world, especially start-ups, the abovedescribed shifts have had an impact on how entrepreneurs configure not only their public relations and marketing strategy but also their actual mode of production, and the mainstream media have been tracking this phenomenon in ways that both highlight and obscure labor exploitation. For example, in a 2014 feature article titled “Made in America, from Sheep to Shelf,” the Wall Street Journal published a story about a pair of New York City–based entrepreneurs who approached a ranch owner in Oregon known for practicing environmentally friendly agriculture because they wanted to sell a sweater that was made entirely in the United States.26 A lawyer and a tech entrepreneur in their early thirties, the two women had founded a design and artisanal brand, Zady, that “markets the origins of the products it sells” with a mix of “social media, pop-up stores and a personal approach.” According to the article, one of Zady’s cofounders said of their appeal, “There’s something very attractive for our generation about disruption.” (One imagines that the company owners are aware that their brand is a play on the word “zany.”) The proposed sweater was Zady’s first attempt at manufacturing its own product, and they at first met with healthy skepticism from the owners of Imperial Stock Ranch, an operation founded in the 1870s that had survived globalization and the “influx of overseas competition,” as the article puts it. According to the newspaper, similar “old-school businesses” in the U.S. wool-knit industry had survived because of “nimble repositioning . . . and are growing again, . . . but they are sometimes caught off guard to find themselves on the cutting edge of fashion, working with a new generation.” The New Yorkers had heard of Imperial because it had furnished the wool for the U.S. Olympic team’s sweaters for the Sochi games, after a controversy had broken out over the team’s

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former China-made uniforms. The Oregonians apparently rose to the challenge posed by the New Yorkers: “Don’t you want to make a difference?” The ranchers eventually warmed to the entrepreneurs’ approach, which has led to a spectacular upsurge in demand from American designers for their wool. One of the ranch owners said, “We are growing because people want to reconnect to the source of food and fiber and apparel. . . . Food led the way; now apparel is coming on strong.” All participants in this story of the journey from “sheep to shelf,” including the journalist, draw on the rhetoric of neoliberal, postfeminist environmentalism and patriotic anti-globalization that derives from the “trendy lingo of tech start-ups.”27 There is something vertiginous about reading an article that promises a journalistic exposé of a company’s marketing of its own exposé of the apparel industry. The story of Zady’s “feel-good” sweater exemplifies how “difference” and “disruption” have become a source of attractive branding through a form of revelation. But Zady’s cultivation of its brand is not merely about image. Because of its ethos of exposure, the brand drove and changed the process of production. Despite the tiny size of its order—three hundred sweaters—Zady made demands on the ranch owner and its other suppliers that seemed “risky or absurd,” like film or photographic documentation of the manufacturing process “for their website.”28 Zady also demanded that the sweaters be ready in half or a third of the time that the process of washing, carding, dyeing, spinning, and knitting usually would take and that profit margins be reduced in order to meet their target retail price. In the name of making a “difference” that involved revealing all processes and suppliers in the making of a “feel-good sweater,” these entrepreneurs demanded and successfully eked out more work from their contractors in a more compressed amount of time. Though such tactics are familiar from the emergence of giants like Walmart (whose gargantuan size dictates its ability to squeeze its suppliers’ margins and to intensify the extrication of labor), what we have in Zady is the manifestation of the same phenomenon with a tiny order and a start-up company. This scenario seems to follow the reverse of Marxian analysis of commodity fetishism. The emphasis on the exposure of processes of production enables the creation of more, intensified labor. The more that gets shown, it

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seems, the more gets hidden away. Indeed, justified as it is by the “feelgood” rhetoric of environmentalism, the act of disclosure produces the means of its own concealment. I belabor the example of Zady’s sweater because of the layered significance of its “feel-good” nature. On the one hand, the story of the sweater’s origins has emotional appeal: The consumer feels good about herself through her humanitarian choice, which materializes her care for animals and the planet and constitutes her self(ie) as the consumer who cares. The branding of environmentalism works to decommodify the commodity. On the other hand, the wool sweater promises to feel good in the literal, tactile sense. The consumer’s desire to get closer to and touch the fuzzy sweater is amplified by the story of its origins. The closer we get to the sheep, the more we want to get closer to—and purchase— the sweater. Narratologically the distance between the consumer and the commodity is narrowed. The Wall Street Journal article includes a close-up photograph of a sheep. However, despite the Wall Street Journal reporter’s emphasis on the clash and reconciliation between “old-school” and new business cultures, this desire to lean toward the commodity is a powerful hangover from film and photography. In the 1930s Walter Benjamin already had commented on this desire on the part of the viewer to get closer to the object portrayed on the screen or in the photograph. In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin argues that the “desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly” is connected to the desire to “overcom[e] the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction.” Benjamin thus claims, “Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction.”29 He further notes that, unlike in theater or painting, where the total image or continuous scene holds sway, the viewer’s desire to get closer to and touch the object is achieved with editing, like close-ups. Filmic editing allows for the “cutting” of reality. Comparing the cinematographer to a surgeon, Benjamin argues that the surgeon “greatly diminishes the distance between himself and the patient by penetrating into the patient’s body.”30 Unlike the painter’s “total” picture, the cameraperson’s picture is composed of “multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law.”31 In other words, the

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desire for intimacy with the object that is part of the hegemony of our “new” media culture was anticipated by “older” technologies. What is the import for Syjuco’s work and for the art world? Zady’s sweater and Benjamin’s surgeon allow us to contextualize Syjuco’s mimetic aesthetic. Her attention to revelation is governed by Silicon Valley culture and by the generalized obsession with documentation as a mode of establishing and advertising an online persona or a business. Syjuco’s signature deployment of ironized mimesis needs to be understood as part of a larger phenomenon wherein the exposure of the origins of the commodity has become a standard marketing ploy. As I noted, Zady’s sweater exemplifies how the exposure of origins is not merely an attractive part of the company’s brand but a means of accelerating and intensifying the extrication of labor. However, Syjuco’s method of exposing the reality behind the appearance of any given object or phenomenon is explicitly opposed to colonialism, racism, and capitalism, and she achieves the revelation of processes of production through her commitment to the handmade and her mobilization of a “second look.” The fact that critics tend to pay attention to Syjuco’s handmade works and craftivism with scant reference to the digital aspect of her aesthetic indicates a significant gap in art criticism today. As Syjuco’s case illustrates, it is becoming more and more pressing for art critics and historians to take into account how the artist’s social media persona and practices influence her or his aesthetic. For example, since Syjuco’s FREE TEXTS installation contains a paper flyer and tear-tabs that refer to the website for the 2014 conference “Digital Labor: Sweatshops, Picket Lines, Barricades,” the historian and critic must take into account not merely the digital nature of the content but the digital nature of Syjuco’s selection and installation of materials, despite the fact that the materials are nondigital. It is Syjuco’s choice of inexpensive, quotidian materials— office paper, crates, hardware—that successfully exposes the often unpaid, devalued, or unrecognized labor of the artist. And in the end, art and cultural critics have to learn how to take a “second look” at the primitive practices of accumulation, new and old, here and there, now and then.

Notes

Introduction 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

Halpern, 6. Harvey, 141. Luxemburg, 89, 343. Joan Robinson, introduction to Luxemburg, xxv. Coulthard, 10–11. Ibid., 13. Halpern, 66. Ibid., 67. Ibid., 66. Derrida, 2. Rodríguez. Derrida, 1. Ibid. Ibid., 2. Balce, Body Parts of Empire. Derrida, 2. Ibid. Moten, In the Break. Derrida, 2. I am indebted to writings by Johannes Fabian, Mieke Bal, and, most recently, Gustavo Verdesio that have connected temporality with racialization and colonialism in the disciplines of anthropology and archaeology. See Johannes Fabian; Bal, Double Exposures; and Verdesio. Bernabe. Derrida, 2. Moten, “The Subprime and the Beautiful,” 241. How to Marry a Millionaire. Halpern, 61. Ibid., 72. Ibid., 72–73. Ibid. Ibid., 73. Ibid., 79.

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31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

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Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 81. Ibid., 82. Ibid., 83. Marguerite Murphy Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. Laude. Camacho. Hernando. D. A. Miller, 3. In her analysis of descriptive passages in realistic narrative, Mieke Bal points out that description involves “naturalization,” which makes descriptive passages seem self-evident and promotes a sense of objectivity even though that objectivity is a “form of subjectivity in disguise” (37). It is useful to pay attention to non-narrative passages in novels because they often contain “hidden or naturalized ideology,” whereas narration usually contains “overt ideology” (31). See Bal, Narratology. See D. A. Miller for an elegant reading of Austen. Trollope, The Claverings, 311. For a study of the relationship between financial, speculative capital and slavery, see Baucom. I thank Clare Counihan for this reference. Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset, 232. Harvey, 190. I am inspired by Kathryn Bond Stockton’s work on acts of extravagance on university campuses being destroyed by austerity, especially her paper “Making Luxury the One Necessity in the Academic-Industrial Complex.” Moten, “The Subprime and the Beautiful,” 243. Robinson, 168. Hall, 229. Ibid., 229–30. “Guide to Samoan Studies.” My thanks to Kirisitina Sailiata for this reference. Moten, presentation at “Campus Lockdown” conference. This was part of an exchange between Fred Moten and Haunani-Kay Trask about the clarity versus obfuscation of academic language. Expressing exasperation about the jargon and unnecessary obscurity of academics, Trask made a call for clarity and cited Noam Chomsky as an admirable example of such; Moten responded by pointing out the bifocal nature of Chomsky’s work, constituted as it is by the political and rhetorical clarity of his work as a public intellectual and the density of his work as a linguist. The English noun “amuck” or “amock,” which the O.E.D. defines as a “murderous frenzy” in one of its definitions, derives from the Malay and Filipino word “amok” vis-à-vis the Portuguese “amouco” or “amuco.” The O.E.D. also defines the noun as a “name for a frenzied Malay.”

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56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

Pérez, 179. Ibid. Chandler. Williams. Lloyd, 70; Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race. Pérez, 174. I would add that, in a variation of or counterpoint to Williams’s rhetorical style of uncitable unslaveability (as opposed to enslaveability), Pérez’s choice of an essay title, “You Can Have My Brown Body and Eat It, Too!,” must be understood as a deliberate and effective act of impudence: any hostile scholarcritic who responds to Pérez has to cite—and thus perform—the essay title. 62. Pérez, 174.

Chapter 1. Progress through the Museum

1. University of Michigan Museum of Natural History (UMMNH) website. Note that, as I discuss toward the end of this chapter, the University of Michigan has announced that the UMMNH will be moved to a biological sciences building currently under construction and scheduled to open in 2018. 2. I was introduced to Jean O’Brien’s concept of “lasting” through Lorenzo Veracini’s essay “Afterword: A History of the Settler Colonial Present,” 178, fn. 16, 179. Gustavo Verdesio offers an analysis of the “epistemic violence” committed against the indigenous that is enabled through the Western absolute concept of time and through the discipline of archaeology; see Verdesio, 177. 3. In the fall of 2012, several Philippine studies scholars who teach at the University of Michigan—including Victor Mendoza, Deirdre de la Cruz, Christi-Ann Castro, and Joseph Galura—contributed to the creation of an exhibit overlay titled “Let’s Talk! The US in the Philippines: The Untold Story” in order to provide basic historical, political, and socioeconomic context for the Philippine exhibition and collection. According to the University of Michigan’s website, the exhibit overlay was “developed in response to the existing display, Philippine Photos & Finds: A Century of U-M Anthropology in the Philippines. The newly added labels explore some of the ways in which ideas of race informed the American colonial period in the Philippines.” See University of Michigan College of Literature, Science and the Arts. I thank Victor Mendoza and Deirdre de la Cruz for providing information about this exhibit overlay. 4. I do not presume the words “Filipino” and “Philippine” to be self-explanatory, especially in relation to the Native or indigenous in the Philippines. While I do not have the space in this chapter to do justice to the complexity of the dizzyingly plural forms of violence and colonialisms visited upon the archipelago that would come to be known as the Philippines, I am aware that I am using fairly interchangeably and inadequately the words “Filipino” and “Philippine” throughout this chapter. But I do intend that interchangeability to index the multinational and plural (territorial, military, cultural, and economic) forms of colonialism visited upon the Philippines; the twentieth-century Philippine nation-building project

192

5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

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and the rise of a kleptocratic, oligarchic, and comprador colonial elite aided by the Americans; and internal forms of colonialism within the Philippines that have involved the displacement and subjugation of indigenous and Muslim peoples across the archipelago. Sinopoli, presentation. In an essay about the University of Michigan’s inaugural anthropological collection, a result of three years of fieldwork in the 1920s in the Philippines by the archaeologist Carl Guthe that was shipped to Ann Arbor, Sinopoli writes, “Like many early archaeological projects around the world, the history of the University of Michigan’s Philippine Expedition is a part of the history of colonialism, specifically U.S. colonialism in the Philippines” (“New Research on an Old Collection,” 1). As I discuss later in the chapter, however, Sinopoli’s brief reference to colonialism remains just that; the historical fact of colonialism does not affect her analysis. In the 1870s Steere went on his first expedition to the Philippines, Taiwan, and Peru. In 1887–1888 he embarked on a second major expedition, this time only to the Philippines. For additional information about the Steere collections, see Hubbell; Price; and Tobin. For an account of the controversies surrounding the fiscal backing of Steere’s expedition, see Peckham, 82–83. Reznicek. Series of posters entitled “Exhibit Museum: The University of Michigan Alexander G. Ruthven Museums Building,” located at the entrance to the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History. Wynter, 260, 292. In the essay “Before Man: Sylvia Wynter’s Rewriting of the Modern Episteme,” Denise da Silva argues that Wynter’s work helps us to understand that the New World created a crisis in Europe that drove its discovery of science (rather than that European science discovered the New World). For a critical biography of Dean Conant Worcester, see Sullivan; for recent scholarship on Worcester’s colonial photography, see Rice; Salvador-Amores; and Balce, Body Parts of Empire. Rice, 2–3. According to Rice, although the exact number of photographs that Worcester amassed during his time in the Philippines has yet to be determined, the University of Michigan’s website claims that Worcester and his staff took sixteen thousand photographs, while Worcester himself claimed in a 1914 letter that his collection totaled twenty-two thousand photographs (Rice, 21). Balce, “The Filipina’s Breast.” Rice, 3. In addition to the collection at the University of Michigan, Worcester’s photographs are archived at the Newberry Library, the Field Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian, the Peabody Museum, and the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum. For a fascinating case study of Worcester’s photographs, see Punzalan. Rice, 3.

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17. Alvarez. For a range of scholarship on Worcester’s career with an emphasis on his photography, see Balce, “The Filipina’s Breast,” 89–100; Vergara; Breitbart; Wexler; Rafael; Rice; Kramer; and McCoy. 18. Sinopoli, “New Research,” 3. 19. Ibid. 20. Clark, 29. 21. Sinopoli, “New Research,” 7. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Museum didactic entitled “Carl E. Guthe and the Philippine Burial Caves,” located in the anthropology room, University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor. 25. Guthe, 75. 26. Ibid., 73, 72. 27. For an account of the breadth and methods of Guthe’s fieldwork during the 1922– 1925 expedition, see Sinopoli, “New Research.” 28. For recent studies of the history and politics of the American museum’s collection and display of human remains, especially of Native Americans, see Redman; and Fear-Segal. See also Ann Fabian; and Thomas. 29. Guthe, 71. 30. Ibid. 31. Min, 44. 32. Clark, 31. 33. Guthe, 72. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 75–76. 36. Ibid., 75. 37. Quoted in Min, 44. 38. Sinopoli, “New Research,” 3. 39. Ibid., 9, fn. 4. 40. Rice, especially chap. 10, “Establishing the Archive,” 1–39. 41. Fear-Segal, 39. 42. Rice, 4. According to the art historians Eleanor Hight and Gary Sampson, who edited the 2002 anthology Colonialist Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place, only since the early 1980s or so have scholars begun to “shatter this façade of objectivity” (quoted in Rice, 4). 43. Min, 45. 44. Sinopoli, “New Research,” 1. 45. Ibid., 5. 46. Clark, 29, 31. 47. Min, 44. 48. Clark, 31.

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49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59.

60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

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Sinopoli, “New Research,” 9. Ibid., 7. Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race. Lloyd, 70. The label accompanying the display case’s main theme, “The Deadly Tools of a Warrior,” states, “Continuing into the early 1900s, many Philippine communities were organized into small tribal groups or chiefdoms. While trade, marriage, and feasting relations were common among these groups, so was conflict. Large-scale warfare was seldom practiced. Rather, small groups of warriors raided neighboring villages, taking precious goods. In some cases, they took the heads of victims as trophies. Throughout the region, success in warfare was critical to male prestige, and only successful warriors could become leaders.” Philippine exhibit, University of Michigan Museum of Natural History. I decided to not include any images of the human teeth because I do not want to reproduce the politics of display that I am attempting to interrogate. I thank Bill St. Amant for this and several other observations about the design and materiality of the Philippine exhibit. Bal, Double Exposures, esp. chap. 3, “The Talking Museum,” and chap. 4, “Museum Talk.” Bal, Double Exposures. For information about the 2009–2010 theme year, see Frank Provenzano, “U-M’s Museum Theme Year Brings Together Art, Science, Culture and Community,” University of Michigan website, ns.umich.edu (accessed June 10, 2016); and the UMMNH’s description of its related exhibition Collecting for Science: Collections, Science, and Scholarship in the U-M Research Museums, www.lsa.umich.edu (accessed June 10, 2016). At the time, the museum was still called the Exhibit Museum of Natural History. The museum changed its name to the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History in 2011. The UMMNH’s description of Collecting for Science goes on as follows: “[Museum specimens] are a reliable source that any researcher can use to test previous research, conduct new studies, and compare newly collected material to earlier discoveries. Well-documented collections of objects are necessary to address broad questions about climate history, ecosystems, and biological and cultural diversity and evolution.” www.lsa.umich.edu (accessed June 10, 2016). Moreton-Robinson, “White Possession,” 28. Moreton-Robinson, “Towards a New Research Agenda?,” 388. Ibid., 387. Veracini, 177. I am loosely riffing here on Fred Cordova’s important book Filipinos: Forgotten Asian Americans. The special issue of Asian Perspectives, discussed above, is an exception to this phenomenon of collecting and then forgetting the Filipino. See

Notes

66. 67.

68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

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essays by Jamie Clark, Alice Yao, Stephen Dueppen, Li Min, and an introduction by Carla Sinopoli, Asian Perspectives 52, no. 1 (2013). Reznicek. For example, see Vergara; Delmendo; Halili; and Gonzalez. As an important counterpart to the aforementioned scholarship on the visuality of the Filipino in American imperial culture, see the following books for scholarship on fantasies about America in the Philippine imaginary and especially Philippine cinema, explicitly from a postcolonial studies perspective: Tolentino, National/Transnational; Tolentino, Geopolitics of the Visible; Tadiar; and Capino. Campomanes, interview. Balce, Body Parts of Empire. Ibid. Ibid. The career of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippines” serves as the literary counterpart to this act of visual occlusion. While guerrilla warfare against the Americans was ongoing in the Philippines, Doubleday published a collection of Kipling’s poetry, Collected Verse of Rudyard Kipling, which not only excised the poem’s subtitle, “The United States and the Philippines,” but also wrongly categorized the poem under the subheading “Service Songs—South African War.” See Collected Verse of Rudyard Kipling (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1911), 215–71. By contrast, in 1940 Doubleday published another collection of Kipling’s poetry, which included the original subtitle, perhaps not coincidentally in the year that the Japanese expelled the Americans from the Philippines. See Rudyard Kipling’s Verse, Definitive Edition (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1940), 321–23. This elision of the subtitle exemplifies the elision of the Philippines in Anglophone postcolonial studies scholarship, dominated as it is by accounts of the British Empire and by scholars hailing from the Commonwealth. Most recently, Suvir Kaul argues that late twentieth-century and twenty-first-century U.S. wars and occupations in the Middle East should be characterized as American examples of the “white man’s burden.” Quoting famous lines from Kipling’s poem, Kaul clearly does not realize that Kipling’s poem addressed American imperialism in the Philippines. The “white man’s burden” is originally American and not European. Thus, no such translation or transplantation of the “white man’s burden” to the United States is necessary. See Kaul. Rodríguez. See also Kramer. For an analysis of the American idea of the “Filipina savage,” see Balce, “The Filipina’s Breast.” Byrd. Veracini, 178. With this idea of the pivotal Filipino, I am very much inspired by Dylan Rodríguez’s description of the “Filipino condition” as a “structurally contingent

196

78. 79. 80. 81.

82. 83.

84.

85.

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‘affectable’ racial figure—that is, the characterization and logic of Filipino affectability is essentially experimental and unfixed”; see Rodríguez, 10. Luxemburg, 341. See ibid., chap. 32, “Militarism as a Province of Accumulation.” Angela Miller, 34. According to Bradley Cardozo, one of the graduate student activists, after the presentation of the paper, the Obama administration “released new federal rules clarifying NAGPRA/repatriation which basically required institutions like UofM to repatriate, so UofM was forced to repatriate the remains and other items, and Native groups in Michigan were finally able to bury their ancestors” (Cardozo, email to the author). I am grateful to Bradley Cardozo for providing me with an account of the goals and achievements of the Ethnography As Activism Subgroup on Repatriation. For a sampling of the reportage on the controversy surrounding the Native American dioramas at UMMNH, see Cappricioso; Janet Miller; and Diep. For accounts of the interventions achieved by activist graduate students at the University of Michigan, see the website University of Michigan’s Grave Injustice, associated with the Native Caucus, https://umgraveinjustice.wordpress.com; Kirsch, which is the introduction to a special issue of the journal Collaborative Anthropologies that features essays by members of the student-led group Ethnography As Activism; and LaVaque-Manty. LaVaque-Manty provides a broader genealogy of the institutionalization of these kinds of indigenous collections and displays as well as analyses of media and literary representations of the anthropologist. She also refers briefly to the UMMNH at the beginning of the essay. “More Than 120 Ancestors Repatriated.” My thanks to Bradley Cardozo for alerting me about this and other news articles about the repatriation. Ibid. See also “The Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan to Repatriate Ancestral Human Remains from the University of Michigan’s Museum of Anthropological Archaeology,” Native News Online, November 17, 2015, http:// nativenewsonline.net (accessed June 10, 2016). University of Michigan College of Literature, Science and the Arts. I thank Victor Mendoza and Deirdre de la Cruz for providing information about and photographs of the exhibit overlay. Erickson.

Chapter 2. Foreign in a Domestic Space

1. For a clearinghouse resource about the New Deal that provides an interactive mapped national inventory of sites and projects; bibliographies of scholarship, film and television, websites, and oral histories; and a timeline of key events; and biographies of New Dealers; see Living New Deal. 2. Quoted in Fine, Frank Murphy, vol. 1, The Detroit Years, 89–90 (cited in subsequent notes as The Detroit Years). See also Lunt. 3. For a parallel argument about “racial liberalism,” see Karen Miller. For a history of “accommodationist racism” in the wake of the lynching horrors and violence

Notes

4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

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of the 1890s in the South and with the rise of American imperialism after the Spanish-American War, see Fredrickson, esp. chap. 10, “Accommodationist Racism and the Progressive Mentality.” For an account of the New Deal that has a more internationalist lens and that attempts to historicize the contradictions of contemporary American liberalism by tracing the connections between the evolution of white supremacy (e.g., Jim Crow and lynching) and the rise of the New Deal, see Katznelson. Fredrickson, 311. Wolfe, 388. Campomanes, interview; and Balce, Body Parts of Empire. See, The Decolonized Eye, esp. chap. 2, “A Queer Horizon: Paul Pfeiffer’s Disintegrating Figure Studies”; Dallal. Quoted in Fine, Frank Murphy, vol. 2, The New Deal Years, 271 (cited in subsequent notes as The New Deal Years). Ibid., 269. Hayden would go on to write and publish about the Philippines, in books and articles like The Philippines: A Study in National Development; Pacific Politics; and “The Philippines at the Threshold of Independence.” Hayden provides the setting for the Moro New Deal in “What Next for the Moro?” Quoted in Lunt, 84; and in Howard, 60. Fine, The New Deal Years, 81. Howard, 66. Fine, The New Deal Years, 71. Quoted in Fine, The New Deal Years, 81. Fine, The New Deal Years, 82; Howard, 61. Lunt, 94. Ibid., 93. Indeed, Murphy’s regime continued to enforce the collection of taxes, including the widely despised cedula; see Fine, The New Deal Years, 68. Lunt, 94. Fine, The New Deal Years, 82. Lunt, 94. Fine, The Detroit Years, 179. Quoted in ibid., 180. Fine, The New Deal Years, 88. See Karnow; and Boot. Possner, “Cultures of Militarism,” 431. Ibid., 5–6. Ibid., 455. Ibid., 228, 65. Quoted in Fine, The Detroit Years, 27. Irene Murphy. Ibid., emphasis added. Quoted in Fine, The Detroit Years, 66–67.

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34. Quoted in ibid., 68. 35. Quoted in ibid., 66–67. 36. According to Richard Lunt, for eighteen months starting in 1932, guerrilla warfare resulted in the deaths of seventy to eighty Moros and twenty-seven Filipino constabulary soldiers. Murphy put Hayden in charge of the “Moro situation” while he reappointed James R. Fugate as governor of Sulu province (Lunt, 99). These decisions translated on the ground to an increase in Constabulary presence and the consolidation of “attraction,” that is, the settlement of the southern Philippines by Filipinos from elsewhere (Lunt, 99). For a range of studies of the Sakdalista movement, see Terami-Wada; Sturtevant; and Gavilan. For an account of Murphy’s surveillance of Aguinaldo’s activities, see chap. 2, “ ‘I’m Going to Set These People Free,’ ” in The New Deal Years, the second volume of Fine’s three-volume biography. 37. Fine, The New Deal Years, 56–57. 38. Quoted in ibid., 84. 39. Ibid. 40. Howard, 68. 41. Fine, The New Deal Years, 83. See also Fine’s account of the General Motors strike in chap. 8, “The General Motors Sit-Down Strike.” 42. Fine, The New Deal Years, 320. 43. Ibid., 352. 44. Foner, esp. chap. 3, “An Empire of Liberty,” 47–68. 45. Irene Murphy. 46. Fine, The New Deal Years, 30; Howard, 68. 47. Retizos. 48. Ibid. 49. Quoted in Fine, The New Deal Years, 38. 50. Elsner, 156. 51. Ibid., 170. 52. For a refreshingly anti-hagiographical analysis of Amorsolo’s paintings and career, see Flores, “Master Copy.” 53. George Murphy. 54. Kuehnle, 116–17. 55. I thank Mishuana Goeman for this insight about the futurism of settler colonial museum acquisitiveness, a futurism that goes hand in hand with the museum’s consignment of indigenous peoples and cultures to the obsolescent past. 56. Kuehnle, 116. Note that Amorsolo’s portrait of Murphy was derived from a photograph of Murphy published in a supplement of the Philippine Herald, which also is on display in the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum. 57. “Socialist Murphy.” 58. Hernandez. 59. “Our Leader’s Tribute.” 60. Brown.

Notes

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

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“What We Owe to Murphy.” Ibid. Melville. See, for example, Ileto; Lumbera; and Rafael. Teahan, Marguerite Murphy Papers, Bentley Historical Library. Ibid. Teahan, archive, Frank Murphy Memorial Museum. Ibid.; and Teahan, Marguerite Murphy Papers, Bentley Historical Library. Teahan, Marguerite Murphy Papers, Bentley Historical Library. Ibid. Yabot. Honrado. Villablanca. Semporios. Lim. Hernando. de Guzman. Yabot. Garcia. Teodoro. Laviano. de Aenlle.

Chapter 3. Lessons from the Illiterate

1. Throughout this chapter I refer to Ma-Yi Theater Company’s staged productions of Romance, which I saw in Manila (2003) and in Stockton, CA (2008), unless I specify otherwise. 2. Carlos Bulosan, “The Romance of Magno Rubio,” 88–89. 3. San Juan, “Carlos Bulosan,” 109. 4. San Juan, introduction to On Becoming Filipino, 2. 5. As far as I can tell, “The Romance of Magno Rubio” was not published during Bulosan’s lifetime. It was part of a collection added to the University of Washington’s library in 1959. It was published probably for the first time in Amerasia Journal in 1979 in a special issue dedicated to Bulosan that included a substantive introductory essay by E. San Juan Jr. Bulosan’s story then was anthologized in edited volumes, including Cecilia Brainard’s Fiction by Filipinos in America (1993); Luis Francia’s Brown River, White Ocean: An Anthology of Twentieth-Century Philippine Literature in English (1993); and Shawn Wong’s Asian American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology (1996). According to E. San Juan, Bulosan wrote “Romance” during his “breakthrough” period of 1945–1956 as a radical internationalist socialist, which also was the last decade of his life (“Revisiting Carlos Bulosan,” 135). San Juan notes that during this period, the Huk rebellion in the Philippines was declared illegal and started to decline as a result of the

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6. 7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

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arrests of many of the members of the movement. Bulosan denounced the arrest of the trade unionist and poet Amado V. Hernandez when he wrote the article “Terrorism Rides the Philippines” in 1951. In the wake of the Korean War and the rise of Communist China, this also was the era of McCarthyism, red baiting, and anti-Communist panic in the United States and in the Philippines. Bulosan was targeted by the FBI along with other labor activists. Augusto Espiritu notes that Bulosan characterized the last decade of his life as a “decade of silence and heartbreak and re-evaluation of my life and career” (quoted in Espiritu, 54). According to Espiritu, Bulosan suffered a two-year writer’s block that started in 1945 in the wake of the settlement of a lawsuit filed by the writer Guido D’Agostino against the New Yorker for publishing a story by Bulosan that he was accused of plagiarizing from D’Agostino. When Bulosan started writing again, it was only privately in the form of correspondence, and he published very little after 1946 (54). According to Mabolon et al. in their Wiki unit on “Romance,” Bulosan “set to work on twelve short stories [that were] about, Bulosan wrote, ‘the real Filipinos.’ The Romance of Magno Rubio was one of these stories” (Mabolon, Tintiangco-Cubales, and Erpelo, 3). The literature on Bulosan is extensive, but I would call special attention to scholarship by E. San Juan Jr., Martin Joseph Ponce, Augusto Espiritu, Joseph Keith, and Rachel Lee. Carlos Bulosan, “Romance,” 82. Lucy Burns offers an excellent overview of the sociohistorical scholarship and creative cultural productions that focus on the Filipino worker and the taxi dancehall. See Burns. Burns, 34. Carlos Bulosan, “Romance,” 70, 88. Ibid., 80. Ibid. Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American, 402. See, for example, in Lee, the chapter “Fraternal Devotions: Carlos Bulosan and the Sexual Politics of America,” 17–43; and Campomanes, “The New Empire’s Forgetful and Forgotten Citizens.” San Juan, “Carlos Bulosan,” 110. Harvey, 140–41. Luxemburg, 343. Quoted in Campomanes, interview, 40. See also Campomanes, “The New Empire’s Forgetful and Forgotten Citizens.” Rodríguez, 2. Arendt, 143. Harvey, 140. Ibid., 181. Ibid., 183. I elaborate on the figure of the Filipino houseboy through an analysis of Nicky Paraiso’s extraordinary one-man play House/Boy in “ ‘He Will Not Always Say

Notes

24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

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What You Would Have Him Say’: Loss and Aural (Be)Longing in Nicky Paraiso’s House/Boy,” in The Decolonized Eye, 105–25. Burns, 31. The playwright Nancy Rebusit wrote an adaptation of “Romance,” and Maria Bataloya directed a staged reading of Rebusit’s thirty-five-minute play at the Nippon Kan Theatre in Seattle, Washington, in 1984; see Taki. Parreñas; España-Maram. Bruce Weber. Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party. I thank David Lloyd for this insight connecting Magno Rubio’s “minuet” with Marx’s account of the bourgeoisie’s massive overturning of the “whole relations of society.” Burns, 25, 26. Rodríguez, 188. In an interesting twist on this phenomenon, the reviewer of the 1984 staged reading of Nancy Rebusit’s version of “Romance” created a parallel between the playwright’s dreams of getting staged, Magno Rubio’s dream, and the “dreams of the Filipino immigrants in America during the 1930s”; see Taki. Boehm. Vasquez. Shirley.  Bruce Weber. Ferrette. Wilson. For example, the reviewer for the Orange County Register included a quotation from Ralph Peña, who described how Romance resonated with the audience in very different ways in the Philippines: In the last 20 years the Philippines has become one of the world’s largest exporters of labor. The plight of overseas workers hits close to home for many people there. Also, there is a clichéd understanding of what it means to go to the United States: gold mountain, low-hanging dollars, etc. It was good to put that into perspective a little bit. (quoted in Hodgins) The reviewer for the Hartford Courant was one of the few who made comparisons between workers of the 1930s and today: Though set in the ’30s when thousands of Filipinos poured into a state which barred them from intermarrying with gringos or chicanos [sic], it is difficult not to contemplate that even today the vegetables and fruits that color our supermarkets are still ripped from the earth, vines and trees by low-paid stoop labor. (Johnson) Robertson. Stasio. Barrios-Leblanc, 387–88. Ibid., 391, 387. Ibid., 398–99.

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44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Carlos Bulosan, On Becoming Filipino, 184. Commenting on the reception of his collection of stories The Laughter of My Father, Bulosan wrote, Here let me remind you that The Laughter [of My Father] is not humor: it is satire; it is indictment against an economic system that stifled the growth of the primitive, making him decadent overnight without passing through the various stages of growth and decay. The hidden bitterness in this book is so pronounced in another series of short stories, that the publishers refrained from publishing it for the time being. (On Becoming Filipino, 184) I do, however, want to exert pressure on Bulosan’s referral to the Filipino or the Philippines as a “primitive” turned “decadent.” Even as Bulosan here mounts a critique of imperialism as an “economic system that stifled the growth of the primitive,” he also reinforces an ideology of progress and development that fixes the Philippines and the Filipino as “primitive,” a status that, once racialized, signifies as permanent inferiority. By contrast, for me, the appearance of the “primitive” in the form of Magno Rubio’s lack—his lack of education, his lack of American citizenship, and especially his lack of disappointment about Clarabelle’s betrayal—constitutes resistance, an argument that I develop later in the chapter. 47. San Juan, “Carlos Bulosan,” 109. 48. Weaver. 49. I thank Joseph Keith for pointing out to me this possibility of Bulosan’s anxieties about getting paid for writing. 50. Ferrette; Shirley.  51. Baquiran. 52. Winn. 53. Bernardo. 54. Ibid. 55. Stasio. 56. Vasquez. 57. San Juan, “Carlos Bulosan,” 110. Note that in his 1979 introduction to the special issue of Amerasia Journal that first published “The Romance of Magno Rubio,” San Juan characterizes Magno Rubio as “all-too-trusting” (“Introduction,” 20). But he also writes that “in the end Magno seems to escape unhurt: the extortion is dismissed nonchalantly, as though it were a daily occurrence” (19), an interpretation of the story’s ending that indicates that Magno Rubio’s naïveté underscores rather than obfuscates the “daily” and systemic nature of his exploitation. 58. Hodgins. 59. Wilson. 60. Carlos Bulosan, “Romance,” 94, emphasis added. 61. Carter, Arcenas, and Peña, 323. 62. Linebaugh, 64.

Notes

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70.

71.

72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

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Carlos Bulosan, “Romance,” 37. Carter, Arcenas, and Peña, 309. Carlos Bulosan, “Romance,” 79. Marx, Grundrisse, 149. Weiss. Winn. Boehm includes a quotation from Carter about his cross-cultural experience: Carter says he writes so often about black characters (and now the Asian American experience) because “if I weren’t writing about that, I would not be paying attention to what’s going on in the country. The [black] influence is everywhere, and I have to respond to it. I have no illusions—I’m a middleclass white guy—but I know what I hear and observe. You always have to be careful, but if you trust your ear, you’re not going to go too far wrong.” In Decolonizing the Filipino Psyche, Virgilio Enriquez quotes Elizabeth Ventura, who writes, A reader of Philippine psychology literature will immediately note that the decade of the seventies was marked by a concern for indigenization, a recognition of language as a basic variable in personality, social psychology and testing, a broadening of the data base of Filipino psychology through a concern for studying individuals in their natural social settings, rediscovering of the ties of Filipino psychology with other fields of study, and a greater involvement, on a nation-wide level, of Filipino social scientists in the developments of the literature of Filipino psychology. . . . Along with the recognition of the importance of languages came a consciousness of the limitations and sometimes emptiness of Western theories and methods. (4) I refer to Enriquez’s work and other scholars associated with sikolohiyang Pilipino at the end of this chapter. The historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, one of the founding members of the editorial collective of Subaltern Studies, shows in his book Rethinking Working-Class History how it was possible for colonial capitalism to organize labor not through acculturating the workforce to “proper” proletarian habits, but by using their native cultural practices to organize work relations and their hierarchies and duties. I thank David Lloyd for this reference. Carlos Bulosan, “Romance,” 78, 82, 86, 89, 94. Negri, 26. Campomanes, interview, 40. Braudel, 513–14. Carter, Arcenas, and Peña, 318–19. Ibid., 319. Ibid., 323. Ibid., 328. Ibid., 320. Ibid., 321.

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82. Alidio. 83. For a discussion of the plagiarism charges levied against Bulosan that involved Guido D’Agostino’s story “The Dream of Angelo Zara” and D’Agostino’s lawsuit against the New Yorker for publishing Bulosan’s story “The End of the War,” see San Juan, “Carlos Bulosan,” 110. See also Espiritu, especially the chapter on Bulosan, 51–64. Espiritu writes, Bulosan applied D’Agostino’s pattern to the West Coast Filipino American experience, perhaps creating a more meaningful story. . . . Just as [Bulosan’s characters] Pitong and Ponso Tongkol use the language provided by [D’Agostino’s character] Fidel’s dream to articulate latent emotions, Bulosan himself uses the language provided by D’Agostino’s “Angelo Zara” to create an altogether different story that captures something of the Filipino wartime experience. (60) 84. “Helen, Thy Beauty Is to Me” and “The Dreamer” were published in Fante’s 1940 collection The Wine of Youth: Selected Stories. 85. Fante, “The Dreamer,” 244. 86. Ibid., 245. 87. Carlos Bulosan, “Romance,” 78. 88. Fante, “The Dreamer,” 250. 89. Ibid., 248. 90. Fante, “Helen, Thy Beauty Is to Me,” 251. 91. Ibid., 266. 92. Ibid., 251, 260. 93. Ibid., 256. Moreover, Fante’s poet provides a perfect expression of what I dub “progressivist imperialism,” as I outlined in the previous chapter on Frank Murphy and Marguerite Murphy Teahan, but this time in an internalized form. 94. Espiritu, 61. 95. For an excellent account of D’Agostino’s lawsuit, see Espiritu’s chapter on Bulosan, 51–64. 96. Espiritu, 222, fn. 97. Ibid., 59. 98. Ibid., 58–59. 99. Ibid., 61. 100. Ibid., 59. Espiritu also argues that in his attempts to represent the plight of the Filipino migrant worker, Bulosan creates a narrator in America Is in the Heart who is a “suffering, Christlike hero” (67): “The countless sufferings of the principal character of America Is in the Heart only make sense if they are seen as a social representation of the suffering of Filipinos on the West Coast” (67). Both Bulosan and his narrator identify with Christ’s suffering, especially the suffering particular to the pasyon, the vernacular Filipino versions of the passion of Christ. The narrator of America Is in the Heart thus attempts to “empathize with the plight of his brothers and sisters, to evoke feelings of damay (empathy) or awa (pity) for the suffering, Christlike figure in readers, inviting a similar work of suf-

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fering” (68). Espiritu’s insights enable an alternative interpretation to the typical reading of the ending of America Is in the Heart as evidence of Bulosan’s belief in America as a “land of opportunity waiting for every profit-seeking immigrant or Horatio Alger” (68). Rather than inspiring an ethos of assimilationist hard work, Bulosan’s model of suffering “hearkens an idiom of protest in which compassion and empathy for the sufferings of others are paramount values, alongside an alacrity for self-sacrifice that is motivated by the attempt to give back to ‘others’ (e.g., Christ, Rizal) for their sacrifices” (68). Moreover, by calling attention to the presence of folk traditions and animist belief systems in Bulosan’s writings and life, Espiritu challenges the influence of critics who “constructed a Bulosan consonant with the project of modernity, whether defined in terms of progress, ilustrado nationalism, socialism, exile, or mobility” and instead “question[s] this modernist façade by unearthing submerged discourses in Bulosan that suggest his implication in a world that has often been dismissed as ‘pre-modern’ ” (72). However, when it comes to “The Romance of Magno Rubio,” the narrator Nick is educated and detached; he is no “suffering, Christlike hero.” Moreover, with Magno Rubio, Bulosan produces an anti-hero whose travails seem to elicit little to no real suffering because his naïveté is so absolute. Nick learns from Magno Rubio, not the other way around; and Magno Rubio’s lesson is not hard work and profit-seeking but rather to give it all away. In this way, my interpretation of Bulosan converges with that of Espiritu: “Bulosan’s attempt to call the Filipino American community into being seems to be based upon a presumption of giving or reciprocal exchange (the supreme gift being one’s own life) that appears limitless” (68). 101. San Juan, “Carlos Bulosan,” 111. 102. Quoted in Espiritu, 225. 103. Ibid., 225–26. 104. Aurelio Bulosan, 158–59. 105. San Juan, “Carlos Bulosan,” 121. 106. The literary critic Martin Joseph Ponce reminds us that white American women figure as Bulosan’s “intellectual mentors” in America Is in the Heart. See Ponce, 97. 107. Quoted in San Juan, “Carlos Bulosan,” 101. 108. Quoted in Ponce, 119. Espiritu also notes that “many Filipino critics viewed his satires and revolutionary writings on Philippine society with suspicion, if not outright disdain” (Espiritu, 48). 109. Espiritu, 49. 110. Quoted in ibid., 55; original italics. 111. Barrios-Leblanc, 392. 112. Silva, email message. 113. Moten, “The Subprime and the Beautiful,” 238. 114. Ibid., 243. 115. See also Dawn Mabolon’s contributions to the Little Manila Foundation’s invaluable website, www.littlemanila.org; and Mabolon.

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116. Carlos Bulosan, “Romance,” 90. For an analysis of Stockton’s collapse, see Abramsky. 117. Bocian, Li, and Ernst, 3. 118. Ibid., 6. 119. Ibid., 12. 120. Moten, “The Subprime and the Beautiful,” 243. 121. Comment posted by reader-user “Jan Steinman,” November 26, 2007, in response to Ford. 122. See, for example, Conlin. 123. Charles Ferguson’s 2010 documentary Inside Job, Ramin Bahrani’s 2014 featurelength film 99 Homes, and Adam McKay’s 2015 The Big Short are examples of mainstream representations of the 2008 global fiscal crisis. 124. Shakespeare, lines 430–31. 125. Moten, “The Subprime and the Beautiful,” 243. 126. Schleitwiler. 127. Moten, “The Subprime and the Beautiful,” 241. 128. Ibid., 243. 129. I discuss sikolohiyang Pilipino in a little more detail later in the chapter. 130. Quoted in Linebaugh, 152. 131. Ibid. 132. Robinson, 170. 133. Marx, Grundrisse, 17. 134. See Enriquez, Decolonizing the Filipino Psyche; Enriquez, From Colonial to Liberation Psychology; and de Guia.

Chapter 4. The Booty and Beauty of Contemporary Filipino/American Art 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Isaac, xviii. Syjuco, “Everything Must Go!” Muñoz. See, The Decolonized Eye. MoMA PS1, “1969.” Syjuco, artist’s statement for Borrowed Beuys. Syjuco, lecture. Syjuco, artist’s statement for 2010 notMoMA exhibition. Syjuco, lecture. Syjuco, artist’s statement for 2010 notMoMA exhibition. Ibid. Syjuco, lecture. Ibid. Ibid. Bal, Double Exposures, 13–16. Ibid., 14.

Notes

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

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Ibid., 17. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 22. Benjamin, 221–23. Ibid., 221. Ibid., 220. Ibid., 221. Ibid., 223. Ibid., 221. Bal, Double Exposures, 22. Ibid., 32. Ibid., 22. Sugimoto, Dioramas. See also Sugimoto, “Dioramas” (artist’s website). Bal, Double Exposures, 16. Lloyd and Thomas, 49. Quoted in ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 51. Silva, “No-Bodies,” 224. Eagleton, 117. Bal, Double Exposures, 22. With the phrase “cultured ‘nature,’ ” Bal refers to the extraordinary amount of effort and talent that the natural history museum devotes to the crafting of the diorama. For example, New York City’s American Museum of Natural History posts on its website videos that document the artistic labor that goes into replacing the snowy foreground in the lynx diorama or repainting salmon in the brown bear diorama (see “Replacing ‘Snow’ in the Dioramas”). With the phrase “culture as nature,” Bal refers to the way Western culture is deemed the apex of civilization. See, “Hair Lines.” Marx, Grundrisse, 255; quoted in Banaji, 29. Banaji, 23. Marx, Grundrisse, 83. Ibid., 101. Ibid., 100. Ibid. Ibid., 87. Ibid., 101. Ibid., 87. Ibid., 107–8. Ibid., 347. Ibid., 348, emphasis added. Syjuco, “Stephanie Syjuco, Anti-Factory,” 144. Ibid., emphasis added.

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Notes

53. For an interpretation of this phenomenon from the perspective of craft scholars and practitioners, see Paterson and Surette’s introduction to their edited volume Sloppy Craft, 1–25. I thank Marie Lo for this reference. 54. Pratt. 55. Fortunati, 7. 56. Bal, Narratology, 19. 57. Ibid., 31. 58. Ibid., 36. 59. Ibid., 37. 60. Redmond and Sojoyner. 61. Baldwin. 62. Redmond and Sojoyner. 63. Baldwin. 64. For an insightful study of the phenomenon of “watching racial violence,” see Sung, especially her argument about the self-reflexivity particular to television in her analysis of scenes of suburban television watching in the popular television series Mad Men. 65. Moretti, 339. 66. Ibid., 349. 67. Ibid., 341. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid., 339. 70. Ibid., 340–41. 71. Ibid., 344. 72. Ibid., 342. 73. Ibid., 341, 339. 74. Ibid., 344. 75. Syjuco, artist’s statement for Body Double. 76. Flores, “Delicacy and Danger,” 95. 77. “On Location.” 78. “Rewind: DVD/Streaming/Download.” 79. Syjuco, artist’s statement for Body Double. 80. See, The Decolonized Eye, xi–xii. 81. Syjuco, artist’s statement for Body Double. 82. Ibid. 83. Balce, Body Parts of Empire. 84. Syjuco, artist’s statement for Body Double.

Conclusion

1. My argument that Syjuco’s ironized mimesis informs both her aesthetic and her means of self-promotion should not be taken as a totalizing statement about her work. Syjuco deploys social media as a means of sourcing materials and ideas

Notes

2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

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from a community of artists and makers that she sees as an alternative to the destruction of the commons, what Syjuco calls a “shadow economy.” Moretti, 340. Quoted in ibid. Ibid. For a range of studies of the legal, sociopolitical, and business implications of the platform economy, see Rogers; Kenney and Zysman; Chen and Chen; and Gillespie. Lauren Weber. For a theoretical and ethnographic study that focuses on Etsy, see Close. Lauren Weber. Quoted in Close, 1903; Traub. Quoted in Close, 1902. Ibid. Lauren Weber. Rogers; Terranova. Close, 1906. Here I am inspired by Denise da Silva’s use of the term “engulfment” in her account of race as a “global idea,” organized by a geographical and ontological hierarchy between what she calls the “subject of transparency” and the “subject of affectability.” See Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race. Kücklich. For the sake of consistency, throughout the chapter I will be using the term “playbor” as a synonym for “play-bor” and “play-labor.” Lipshin. Syjuco, artist’s statement for Counterfeit Crochet Project. Kelley, 46, 45. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 45. Ibid. Ibid., 75. Ibid., 77. Nakamura. See the anthology Save as . . . Digital Memories, edited by Joanne Garde-Hansen, Andrew Hoskins, and Anna Reading, especially Reading’s chapter, “Memobilia”; and Joanne Garde-Hansen’s chapter, “MyMemories?” Binkley. Ibid. Ibid. Benjamin, 223. Ibid., 233. Ibid., 234.

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Index

accumulation: and capitalism, 2, 4, 104, 136–37; and colonialism, 2, 4; and developmental narrative, 3; by dispossession, 22, 34, 52; and education, 136; epistemological, 28–29, 38, 136, 171; “fixed,” 13; and gambling, 121; of human remains, 55; and imperialism, 72; and knowledge, 29; and labor, 184–85; and land enclosure, 3; material, 28; and museums, 5, 99, 141–42; and the novel, 13; and power/knowledge, 28; and preservation, 39; and the racial primitive, 39; and social justice, 55; and speculation, 13, 15; racial, 2; of social science expertise, 55; and the university, 17–18, 52; violence of, 51; and writing, 7–8, 9. See also anti-accumulation; primitive accumulation Acuña, Art, 100 fig. 3.1, 114 fig. 3.7, 135 fig. 3.8 Aenlle, Emma de, 94–95 aesthetics, 39, 151, 156–57, 163–66; and advertising, 173; and labor, 146, 181; and mimesis, 143–44, 150, 188, 164, 208n1; and museums, 148–50; nonrealist, 117; and race, 151–52, 163; as racialized, 151– 52; realist, 150; and reproduction, 146; and value, 146–47 African Americans, 59, 69; as commodity, 163; as internal colony, 61; and “play labor,” 181–82, 184; and race rhetoric, 161 African American studies: on playbor, 181–82. See also Moten, Fred; Robinson, Cedric

Aguinaldo, Emilio, 68 Althusser, Louis, 14 American Dream: and assimilation, 137; and home ownership, 136–37; and settler colonialism, 136, 138 American Museum of Natural History, 147–48; and collectionism, 148; and colonialism, 148; “cultured nature” in, 148; dioramas in, 207n37 Amorsolo, Fernando, 75–78; portrait of Murphy, 79 fig. 2.11, 80–81, 82, 198n56 anarchism, and progressivism, 67 anthropology: and epistemology, 28; and forgetting, 50; and Orientalism, 146; and U.S. colonialism, 28 anti-accumulation, 99, 171; as gambling, 18; and knowledge, 19. See also accumulation; primitive accumulation anticolonialism: in Filipino drama, 111; in Philippines, 57, 69 Apocalypse Now, 167; in Body Double, 169 Apple Inc., 183 Arcenas, Loy, 107 archaeology: and colonialism, 159; and epistemology, 28; as looting, 39, 159; and preservation, 38–39; and U.S. colonialism, 192n5 archive, 36–37; and epistemology, 7, 37; etymology of, 5; as forgetting, 5; imperial, 2, 5–7 Arendt, Hannah, 2, 104 arkhe, 5–6. See also archive

225

226

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Index

art, and advertising, 173–74, 188; and craft, 180–81; and knowledge accumulation, 271; and playbor, 177–79; political, 156–57; pop art, 173; and social media, 172. See also RAIDERS: International Booty, Bountiful Harvest; Syjuco, Stephanie art museums, 143–47; and anthropological museums, 146–47; “culture as nature” in, 148, 152; and Orientalism, 159, 163– 64; and theft, 163. See also museums; museums, anthropological; RAIDERS: International Booty, Bountiful Harvest; Syjuco, Stephanie Asian Art Museum, 145, 146 Asian Perspectives (journal), special issue on Guthe collection, 37, 38, 194n65 assimilation: and the American Dream, 137; and Bulosan, 110–12, 125, 204n100; and power/knowledge, 171; and teachability, 131 aura: and distance, 148–49; and race, 149– 50, 157; in Syjuco, 146, 148–49, 157–60 Austen, Jane, 13–14; property in, 17 Bal, Mieke, 45–46, 147, 190n42, 207n37; on museum discourse, 150, 152; narratology of, 160–61 balagtasan, 115 Balce, Nerissa, 6, 49; on Filipino visibility, 61, 169; on Worcester photographs, 31 Baldwin, James, 162–63 Banaji, Jairus, 152, 153 Barrios-Leblanc, Joi, 111–12, 131 Benito Cereno, 85 Benjamin, Walter, 148–49, 187; on aura, 157; on authenticity, 150; and race, 149– 50, 157, 164; and reproduction, 149 Bernabe, Jan, 7 Bernardo, Bernardo, 100 fig. 3.1, 106 figs. 3.2–3, 115 Beuys, Joseph, 143, 144 Big Short, The, 206n123

bodies: and capitalism, 119; disciplining of, 105; Filipino, 45, 50, 105, 109; and gender, 114–16; and race, 21, 39, 126, 163; and whiteness, 126 Boehm, Mike, 203n69 Boot, Max, 65 Braudel, Ferdinand, 121 Bulosan, Aurelio, 129 Bulosan, Carlos, 3, 8, 17, 20, 95; and accumulative epistemology, 171; “adaptive practice” of, 128; All the Conspirators, 129; America Is in the Heart, 100, 112, 204n100, 205n106; and assimilation, 204n100; biography of, 100; on capitalism, 139; and citizenship, 17, 104–5, 126, 138; debt in, 17; on education, 130; Filipino critics of, 129–30, 205n108; illiteracy in, 8–9, 17, 99; on labor, 200n5; The Laughter of My Father, 112, 202n46; and plagiarism, 125–31, 204n83; “The Romance of Magno Rubio,” 3; thriftlessness in, 99; workers in, 105, 204n100; on writing, 112. See also Romance of Magno Rubio, The (play); “Romance of Magno Rubio, The” (story) Burns, Lucy, 105, 127; on Filipino dancing, 101–2, 109 Byrd, Jodi, 50 Campomanes, Oscar, 49, 104; on Philippine invisibilization, 61, 70, 120 cannibalism, 40–44 capitalism, 10–11, 131, 138–39; and accumulation, 2, 4, 104, 131, 135–37; and the body, 119; and colonialism, 4, 48, 203n71; and desire, 131–32, 159–60; and dispossession, 132; and excess, 119; and exploitation, 120; fictitiousness of, 15, 16; and Filipino colonial status, 104–5; and finance, 16; as gambling, 121, 133; and literacy, 131; and the primitive, 4; and surface phenomena, 9, 152–53; and Syjuco, 156–57, 188

Index

Cardozo, Bradley, 196n81 Carter, Lonnie, 107, 110, 115; mimicry in, 125; use of language, 118–19; use of verse, 121–25; on writing race, 203n69 Castro, Christi-Ann, 54, 191n3 Central Park (New York City), 147 fig. 4.3, 147–48 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 203n71 Chandler, Nahum, 20 Chomsky, Noam, 190n54 Choy, Catherine, 109 citizenship, 6; of Filipino Americans, 17, 100, 104–5, 126, 138, 202n46; and the racial state, 103; of subprime debtors, 134, 136, 138 civilization: and academia, 32–33; and accumulative epistemology, 46; civilization museums, 145–48, 151; and the primitive, 39, 53, 79, 150, 153; and race, 61, 141–42 civilized behavior, 111, 148; and primitivism, 26 classism: racialized, 132; and subprime debtors, 132–33 Close, Samantha, 175–76 colonialism: and accumulation, 2, 4; and archaeology, 159; and capitalism, 48, 203n71; and domestication, 65; and knowledge, 39; and natural history museums, 147–48; New Deal colonialism, 60, 63; and paternalism, 86, 87; and the primitive Filipino, 2; as structure, 61; and subjectivity, 46–47; Western, 69–70. See also settler colonialism colonialism, U.S., 69–70; and improvement, 66, 70, 96; in the Philippines, 55, 62, 191n4; and race, 54; as reformist, 60; and settlement, 66; and temporality, 189n20. See also settler colonialism commodification: and abstraction, 138–39; of education, 20; of knowledge, 20; and playbor, 179; of the subject, 174; of words, 20; of writing, 112

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communism: anti-Communism, 200n5; and progressivism, 67–68 Cordova, Fred, 194n65 Coulthard, Glen, 4, 7 crafting, 3, 171, 174–76; feminization of, 176 critical literalism, 8–9 critical race studies, 21, 181, 183 critical race theory, 20; and the Western subject, 21 Cruz, Deirdre de la, 54, 191n3 cultural studies, 18 D’Agostino, Guido, 127–28, 200n5, 204n83 Dallal, Jenine, 61 dance halls, 101, 108–9, 126 decolonizing studies, 18 Derrida, Jacques, 5–6; on archive, 36; on différance, 18; and the primitive, 6–7; on sequential and jussive principles, 5 desire: accumulative, 96; assimilationist, 136–37; in Bulosan, 99, 108, 120, 136; and capitalism, 131–32, 159–60; for commodity, 159–60, 172–73, 187–88 digital media studies, and color blindness, 181, 183–84 dioramas, 207n37; as “cultured nature,” 207n37; and ideology, 160–61; of Native Americans, 45, 53, 196n81; and shop windows, 158; and time, 151 disidentification, 142–43 dispossession: by accumulation, 22, 34, 52; and capitalism, 132 DIY (do it yourself) practices, 171 Douglass, Frederick, 19 drama simboliko, 111 Du Bois, W. E. B., 20 Eagleton, Terry, 151 education, 102–3, and accumulation, 136; in Bulosan, 130; commodification of, 20 enclosure: and freedom, 11; land, 3, 9

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Enriquez, Virgilio, 139, 203n70 environmentalism, branding of, 186–87 epistemology: of American innocence, 85–86; and American knowledge production, 171; and anthropology, 28; and archaeology, 28; and archive, 7, 37; and the museum, 46, 86, 96, 99; nonWestern, 30–31; of science, 29–30; and universities, 21, 52 epistemology, accumulative, 28–29, 38, 136, 171; and civilization, 46; and the museum, 46, 52, 86; and preservation, 39; and Syjuco, 171 epistolary, Filipino, 11–12, 12 fig. I.2, 88–96 España-Maram, Linda, 108 Espiritu, Augusto, 127–28, 200n5, 204n100; on Bulosan’s plagiarism, 129, 204n83 Estrada, Reanne, 152 ethnic studies, 18 Ethnography As Activism, 53, 196n81 Etsy, 174–76 Fante, John, 126; naïveté in, 126; progressivist imperialism in, 204n93; stereotyping in, 127, 131. See also Bulosan, Carlos; “Romance of Magno Rubio, The” (story) Fear-Segal, Jacqueline, 36 feminist studies, 18 Feria, Dolores, 130 Filipino Americans: agency of, 3; and citizenship, 138; as colonized, 143; cultural production of, 143; forced inclusion of, 103; invisible labor of, 120; and mimesis, 142–43; as mimics, 143; as minoritized, 143. See also Filipinos; Philippines Filipino American studies: mimesis in, 142; and queer of color studies, 142 Filipinos: burial practices of, 34–35, 37–38; as colonial primitives, 54; and dancing, 109; displacement of, 11; display of,

49, 52, 195n67; domestication of, 59; exploitation of, 101; “Filipino” as term, 191n4; as “foreign in a domestic sense,” 169; as mimics, 143; “national” status of, 100, 103–4; and the nation-state, 105; and the Native, 26–28, 191n4; and Native Americans, 26, 50–51; and primitivizing Orientalism, 50; psychology of, 139, 203n70; as racial primitives, 27, 35, 54, 96, 202n46; racism against, 103; as savage, 103–4; stereotypes of, 116; in university museums, 27–28; visibility of, 49–50, 169. See also Filipino Americans; Philippines Fine, Sidney, 61, 63; on Murphy’s paternalism, 64–65; on Teahan, 87 fiscal crisis of 2008, 132–36, 206n123; demographics of, 133–34; and illiteracy, 132–33 Flores, Patrick D., 167 Fortunati, Leopoldina, 160 Foucault, Michel, 78 Frank Murphy Memorial Museum, 3, 54, 56 figs. 2.1–2, 57 fig. 2.3, 58–59, 61, 72– 79, 72 fig. 2.6, 73 fig. 2.7. accumulative ideology of, 78; as archive of accumulation, 5; and epistemology of American innocence, 85–86; Filipino clothing in, 74–76, 75 fig. 2.8, 76 fig. 2.9, 78; as home, 74; and imperialist accumulation, 72; and tribute, 72. See also Murphy, Frank; Teahan, Marguerite Murphy Frederickson, George, 60–61 FREE TEXTS, 177 fig. C.1, 178 fig. C.2, 179–81, 188; and playbor, 179; texts referenced in, 179. See also Syjuco, Stephanie Freud, Sigmund, 169–70 Fugate, James, R., 198n36 Galura, Joseph, 54, 191n3 gambling: and accumulation, 121; as antiaccumulation, 18; in Bulosan, 120–21;

Index

and capitalism, 121, 133; in Fante, 127; in Trollope, 16, 17 gaming, 176–77, 181; and playbor, 176–77, 184 genocide: and the American archive, 6; and emptying of land, 2; erasure of, 51; and Philippine-American War, 104, 169; and terra nullius, 28 Gillespie, Tarleton, 175 Goeman, Mishuana, 198n55 Gonzalez, Jojo, 100 fig. 3.1, 106 figs. 3.2–3, 114 fig. 3.7, 135 fig. 3.8 Grable, Betty, 8 “Guide to Samoan Studies,” 19 Guthe, Carl, 29, 32–35, 62, 192n5; fieldwork of, 37; and human remains, 37– 39, 45; and knowledge nullius, 48; and preservation, 38 Guthe collection, 33–36, 192n5; human remains in, 32 fig. 1.4, 32–35, 37–39, 55; and U.S. colonialism, 37 Hall, Gary, 179 Hall, Stuart, 18 Halpern, Richard, 3–4, 9–11; on primitive accumulation, 4 Harvey, David, 4, 16, 104–5 Hayden, John Ralston, 63, 197n9 headhunters, 40–41; white scientists as, 45, 47, 55 Heart of Darkness, 170 Hernandez, Amado V., 200n5 Hernando, Patrocinio, 12, 12 fig. I.2, 92–93 home, as museum, 54, 74 Honrado, Gervasio, 90, 92 How to Marry a Millionaire, 8 human remains: in Guthe collection, 32– 35, 32 fig. 1.4, 37–39, 45, 55; repatriation of, 53, 196n81 illiteracy, 8–9, 17, 99, 136; in Bulosan, 8–9, 17, 99, 101–3, 117–18, 130–31; and fiscal crisis of 2008, 132–33; as spelling les-

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son, 138; and subprime debtors, 134–35, 137; as weapon of the weak, 17, 102, 118 illusionism, 141, 152 Ilokanos, 128 imperialism, 15, 196n3; and display of the Filipino, 195n67; and knowledge, 171; and scientific collection, 55; and settler colonialism, 51; and social improvement, 55; and surveillance, 49; and university museums, 53, 141 Imperial Stock Ranch, 185–86 Inside Job, 206n123 irony, 164–67; and modernism, 165, 166; Romantic, 165 Isaac, Allan, 141 Kahlo, Frida, 144 kapwa, 119, 137, 139 Karnow, Stanley, 65 Kaul, Suvir, 195n72 Kelley, Robin D. G., 181–82, 184 Kipling, Rudyard, 49, 195n72 knowledge: and accumulation, 29; and anti-accumulation, 19; and colonialism, 39; commodification of, 20; and imperialism, 171; and improvement, 62; indigenous, 47; and primitives, 59; and progressive imperialism, 59. See also epistemology; knowledge production knowledge nullius, 2, 47–48; as acquisition, 34; and display of the Filipino, 49; and epistemology, 171; as expansionist, 34; and Filipinos, 50; and imperialism, 171; and museums, 27–28; and primitive accumulation, 2, 17, 39; and property, 18. See also terra nullius knowledge production, 18–19; decolonial, 18–19, 20; as knowledge extraction, 171; non-rational forms of, 19; and primitive accumulation, 17; Western, 28. See also epistemology; knowledge Korematsu, Fred, 60 Kücklich, Julian, 176, 184

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labor: and accumulation, 185–85; and aesthetics, 146, 181; and African Americans, 181–82; in Bulosan, 122, 200n5; and Filipino Americans, 120; and museums, 146; and the New Deal, 57; organized, 57, 67–69; in the Philippines, 68, 201n38; and play, 176, 181–83, 184; reproduction of, 119, 121, 146; and social media, 176; in Syjuco, 144–45, 156; and time, 31; as tribute, 105; and value of commodity, 185; visibility of, 155–56, 183, 184–86 Linebaugh, Peter, 117, 137 Lipshin, Jason, 176 Little Manila Foundation (LMF), 132, 205n115 “little New Deal,” 57–58, 60, 65–66, 74; as laboratory for the New Deal, 69–70. See also Murphy, Frank; New Deal Llana, Pedro de la, 83 Lloyd, David, 21, 201n28, 203n71; on aesthetics, 39, 151 looting, 172; and archaeology, 39, 159; discourse of, 161; and finance, 161; and race, 161–63 Lunt, Richard, 198n36; on New Deal colonialism, 63, 64 Luxemburg, Rosa, 4, 52, 104 lynching, 60, 69 Mabolon, Dawn, 132, 205n115 Marx, Karl, 160; and the colonized, 6; and commodity fetishism, 186; on the concrete, 153–54; on flaw, 145, 155–56; on labor time, 131; on land enclosure, 3, 9; and primitive accumulation, 3, 4, 6–7; and race, 164; on surface phenomena, 9, 152–55; on visibility of labor, 155–56, 185 Ma-Yi Theater Company, 105; and accumulative epistemology, 171; productions of Romance, 99, 105, 107, 113, 115, 199n1

McShine, Kynaston, 143 Melville, Herman, 85 Mendoza, Orville, 114 fig. 3.7 Mendoza, Victor, 54, 191n3 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 147; “culture as nature” in, 148 Miller, D. A., 13 Miller, Karen, 196n3 mimesis: and aesthetics, 143–44, 150, 188, 164, 208n1; and Filipino Americans, 142–42; and realism, 150. See also RAIDERS: International Booty, Bountiful Harvest; Syjuco, Stephanie mimicry: Filipino, 101, 143; and primitivism, 75; in Romance (play), 125; in Syjuco, 141 miscegenation, 124; laws against, 109, 201n38 MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), 143, 145 Montalban, Paolo, 100 fig. 3.1 Moreton-Robinson, Aileen, 47 Moretti, Franco, 165, 172–73 Morris, Robert, 143 Moten, Fred, 8, 18; on academic language, 19, 190n54; on Marxian tradition, 131; on the para-ontological, 6; on singularity, 19, 22; on subprime debtors, 134, 137 Muñoz, José Esteban, 142–43 Murphy, Frank, 11, 55–57, 77 fig. 2.10; biography of, 59–60, 66; and communism, 67–68; as forerunner of New Deal, 60; “little New Deal” of, 57–58, 63, 197n18; as New Deal colonizer, 81; as nobility, 71–72; and organized labor, 67–68; paternalism of, 64–65; and Philippine independence, 83–86; Philippine tenure of, 60, 62–65, 67–72, 71 fig. 2.5; progressive imperialism of, 60, 70; progressivism of, 66–67; and social justice, 72, 74; tributes to, 81–85, 86, 87; as visionary, 81–82. See also Frank

Index

Murphy Memorial Museum; Teahan, Marguerite Murphy Murphy, George, 78 Murphy, Irene, 66–67, 70 Murphy, Marguerite. See Teahan, Marguerite Murphy museums: and accumulation, 5, 99, 141–42; and civilization, 79; civilization museums, 145–48, 151; discourse of, 46, 74, 150, 194n60; as domesticating space, 54, 59; and epistemology, 46, 52, 86, 96, 99; futurism of, 78–79, 198n55; and historical amnesia, 79; as home, 58–59, 141; and human remains, 53; and imperialism, 53, 141; and labor, 146; primitive accumulation in, 53, 79, 141; and primitivism, 96; and racism, 141; and representation, 141–42. See also Frank Murphy Memorial Museum; museums, anthropological; primitive accumulation; University of Michigan Museum of Natural History (UMMNH) museums, anthropological; and aesthetics, 148–50; and art museums, 141, 145, 146–47; and colonialism, 147–48; “cultured nature” in, 148, 152; discourse of, 150; and knowledge production, 27–28; Philippine exhibitions, in, 2, 5; and primitivism, 150. See also Frank Murphy Memorial Museum; museums; primitive accumulation; University of Michigan Museum of Natural History (UMMNH) Nakamura, Lisa, 181, 182–86 narrative, and ideology, 190n42 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), 53, 196n81 Native Americans: and as disappeared, 36; and Filipinos, 26, 50–51; “lasting” for others, 51; as primitive, 36, 51; in

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University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, 45 Negri, Antonio, 120 neoliberalism: and austerity, 18; and entrepreneurialism, 182–83; and environmentalism, 186–87; and gender, 183; and individualism, 175; and race, 183 New Deal, 55, 57–58, 197n3; logics of, 93; New Deal colonialism, 60, 63; and organized labor, 57, 69; and the Philippines, 65; and terra nullius, 64. See also “little New Deal”; Murphy, Frank Night at the Museum, 150 99 Homes, 206n123 nostalgia, 180; aura of, 157; and settler colonialism, 181 novel: and accumulation, 13; marriage and gender in, 13–17; and property, 7–8, 13–14; and realism, 13–14 O’Brien, Jean, 26, 191n2 Ocampo, Ramon de, 100 fig. 3.1, 106 fig. 3.3, 113 fig. 3.6, 114 Orientalism: and anthropology, 146; and art museums, 159, 163–64; and primitivism, 50 Palmer raids, 67 Palumbo-Liu, David, 103 Paraiso, Nicky, 200n23 Parreñas, Rhacel, 107 Pashegoba, Jim: dugout canoe of, 24 fig. 1.1, 25–26, 27 fig. 1.2. See also University of Michigan Museum of Natural History (UMMNH) paternalism, 64–65; and colonialism, 86, 87 Peña, Ralph, 107, 201n38 penmanship: as copying, 10; as enclosure, 7; history of, 9; politics of, 7; teaching of, 10–11 Pérez, Hiram, 19–20, 191n61; on affect, 21; on originality, 20, 22

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Philippine-American War, 49–50, 61, 195n72; as genocidal, 104, 169; and racism, 103 Philippines: anticolonialism in, 57, 69; caciquism in, 62, 63; and colonialism, 51, 55, 62–64, 191n4; colonization of, 51; communism in, 68; as filmic body double, 167–69; as “foreign in a domestic sense,” 51, 54, 58, 103, 132, 169; in Hollywood film, 167–68; independence movement in, 62, 67, 83–86, 87, 104; internal settler colonialism in, 63–64; invisibility of, 61–62, 120, 169; labor, exportation of, 201n38; labor unions in, 68; land tenancy in, 68; land usury in, 62, 63, 68; “Moro situation,” in, 67–68; nation-building project of, 191n4; nationalism in, 83–84; and New Deal, 65; and postcolonial studies, 195n72; as primitive, 202n46; and settler colonialism, 51, 63–64; social justice in, 63; as term, 191n4; tribute economy of, 86; U.S. conquest of, 2, 26, 31. See also Filipinos; “little New Deal”; Murphy, Frank; primitive accumulation; Teahan, Marguerite Murphy plagiarism: and adaptation, 128; and Bulosan, 125–31, 204n83; and postcolonial cultural production, 125 Platoon, 167 playbor, 176–79; and commodification, 179; and gender, 181; and race, 181; and social media, 183 Ponce, Martin Joseph, 205n106 Possner, Roger, 65 postcolonial studies, 19; elision of Philippines in, 195n72 power/knowledge: and accumulation, 28; and assimilation, 171; and primitive accumulation, 43, 48 Pratt, Mary Louise, 80, 159 preservation: and accumulation, 39; and archaeology, 38–39

Pride and Prejudice, 14 primitive accumulation, 33; and American academic institutions, 35–36, 45; and discourse, 36; epistemology of, 35; and imperialism, 28; and knowledge production, 17; and Marx, 3, 4, 6–7; and museums, 52–54, 79, 141; and power/ knowledge, 43, 48. See also accumulation; museums, anthropological; primitivism; racial primitive primitives: children as, 46; Filipinos as, 35, 54, 96, 202n46; and knowledge, 39; Native Americans as, 36; as outside of time, 35; and Western garb, 75 primitivism: and capitalism, 4; and children, 46; and civilization, 39, 53, 79, 150, 153; and extinction, 45; and Filipinos, 51; and mimicry, 75; and museums, 96, 150; and Native Americans, 51; and Orientalism, 50; and petrification, 45; and primitivism, 96; and scientific conquest, 2. See also primitive accumulation; racial primitive primogeniture, 13–14, 15 Progressive Era, 59, 65 progressivism: and anarchism, 67; and communism, 67–68; of Frank Murphy, 66–67; and revolutionary movements, 66–67; and settler colonialism, 64–65 progressivist imperialism, 6, 12, 57–59, 62; economy of debt and obligation of, 95–96; and Filipino demand, 86–87; ideology of, 69–70, 82; and internal settler colonialism, 64; and knowledge, 59; and Murphy portrait, 81; and racial improvement, 60, 70; and radical politics, 58, 65; and social justice, 69, 82; and technology, 59. See also Murphy, Frank property: and heteropatriarchy, 13; and knowledge production, 18; and the novel, 7–8, 13–14; and race, 13; and whiteness, 126

Index

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233

Raiders of the Lost Ark, 159 Ramos, Benigno, 68 realism, 13; and aesthetics, 150; and Bulosan, 110–11; discourse of, 150; and mimesis; 150; and naturalization, 190n42; and the novel, 13–14; and subjectivity, race: and accumulation, 2; and aesthet13; and Syjuco, 113 ics, 151–52, 163; and aura, 149–50, 157; Rebusit, Nancy, 201n31 and Benjamin, 149–50, 157, 164; and Redmond, Shana L., 161–62 the body, 21, 39, 45, 50, 105, 109, 126, Red Scare (1919–1920), 67 163; and capitalism, 131; and civilizarepresentation: and museums, 26–27, tion, 61, 141–42; and colonialism, 154; 141–42; as racist, 151 and looting, 161–63; and Marx, 164; reproduction: and accumulation, 13; and and neoliberalism, 183; and playbor, aesthetics, 146; and Benjamin, 187; 181; and property, 13; and RAIDERS, of capital, 13, 52; and film, 187–88; of 151–52; and subprime debtors, 132; and labor, 119, 121, 146; mechanical, 149; in universality, 21 Syjuco, 146, 148–49 racialization, and temporality, 189n20 Retizos, Mita, 71 racial primitive: and accumulation, 39; Rice, Mark, 31–32, 37 as disappeared, 26; and the Filipino, Rizal, José, 130 27, 35, 54, 96, 202n46; and imperial Robinson, Cedric, 18, 131, 138 archive, 7; and knowledge accumulaRodríguez, Dylan, 110, 195n77; on “Filition, 2, 39; and the Native, 27; and pino condition,” 104; on “suspended the temporal primitive, 6–7. See also apocalypse,” 5 Filipinos; museums, anthropological; Romance of Magno Rubio, The (play), primitive accumulation 99–100, 100 fig. 3.1, 106 figs. 3.2–3; as racism: accommodationist, 61, 196n3; allegorical, 110–11, 113–14, 117; as antiagainst Filipinos, 103; and innocence, accumulation, 105, 107; as anticolonial, 85; and museums, 141; in Philippine111; as assimilationist, 110–12, 125; as American War, 103; rhetoric of, 161 colonial bildungsroman, 116; dancing in, Rafael, Vicente, 129 105, 107 fig. 3.4, 108 fig. 3.5, 108–9; douRAIDERS: International Booty, Bountibling in, 113–14, 116; exploitation in, 119; ful Harvest, 3, 140 fig. 4.1, 142 fig. 4.2, Filipino bodies in, 105; Filipino workers 158 fig. 4.4, 164 fig. 4.5; accumulation, in, 109–11; gambling in, 120–21; illiteracy critique of, 146; and anthropological in, 117–18; labor value in, 122; lyric verse museum, 157; and anthropology, 152; in, 119–20, 121–25, 136; miscegenation in, aura in, 146, 148–49, 157–59; and civi124; misogyny in, 115; naïveté in, 109–11, lization, 148; ironized mimesis in, 172, 116; productions of, 107, 113, 114–15, 132; 173–74; and race, 151–52; as send-up as realist, 110–11, 113, 114–16; reviews of, of Asian civilization museums, 145; as 110–11, 116, 201n38; rhetoric of, 121; stagshop window parody, 158–60, 172–73; ing of, 113–14, 114 fig. 3.7; translation of, and social media, 172; and theft, 160; as 112; transphobia in, 115–16; whiteness in, tribute to tribute, 146. See also Syjuco, 118–19. See also Bulosan, Carlos Stephanie queer of color studies, mimesis in, 142 queer studies, 20 Quezon, Aurora, 89 Quezon, Manuel, 69, 82, 89

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“Romance of Magno Rubio, The” (story), 99, 100–102, 199n4; adaptations of, 201n25, 201n31; as allegorical, 117, 131; alterity in, 118–19; as antiaccumulation, 135–36, 137–38; as assimilationist, 125; dancing in, 109; economy of debt in, 119, 139; excess in, 118–19; exploitation in, 119; Filipino workers in, 109–11; gambling in, 120–21, 136; illiteracy in, 8–9, 17, 99, 101–3, 117–18, 130–31; and meritocratic exceptionalism, 118; miscegenation in, 109; misogyny in, 115; naïveté in, 109–11, 116–17, 131, 132, 135, 202n57, 205n100; naming in, 129–30; as rescripting of Fante stories, 126; as satire, 135; and subprime debtors, 132, 134–35; thriftlessness in, 99; unteachability in, 117–18, 130–31. See also Bulosan, Carlos Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 60 sainete, 111 Sakdalistas, 67–68 San Juan, Epifanio, 100, 103–41; on Bulosan’s plagiarism, 128–29; on Romance (play), 112, 116; on “Romance” (story), 112, 199n5, 202n57 Schiller, Friedrich, 151 Schleitwiler, Vince, 136 selfies, 174 Sennett, Richard, 173 settler colonialism: and the American Dream, 136, 138; and imperialism, 51; and nostalgia, 181; and the Philippines, 51, 63–64; and progressivism, 64–65; and Romanticism, 165; and terra nullius, 2, 47; and U.S. imperialism, 51. See also colonialism sikolohiyang Pilipino movement, 119 Silva, Denise da, 21, 52, 131, 192n11; on “engulfment,” 209n14; on mind/body split, 39

Sinopoli, Carla, 28, 33, 37, 38, 192n5 social justice: and accumulation, 55; and Frank Murphy, 72, 74; in Philippines, 63; and progressivist imperialism, 69, 82 social media: and art, 172; and labor, 176; and playbor, 183; and RAIDERS, 172; and the self, 184; and Syjuco, 171, 180, 208n1 Society for American Anthropology, 36 Sojoyner, Damien, 161–62 Spanish-American War, 60–61, 65, 196n3 Spillers, Hortense, 20 St. Amant, Bill, 194n55 Steere, Joseph Beal, 1–2, 1 fig. I.1, 29–32, 30 fig. 1.3, 45, 62; herbarium collection of, 48; Philippine expedition of, 29, 192n6 Stockton, CA, Filipino community in, 132 subjectivity: and colonialism, 46–47; postcolonial, 152; and realism, 13; Western, 21 subprime debtors, 132–37; citizenship of, 134, 136, 138; and classism, 132–33; and illiteracy, 134–35, 137; and race, 132; and “Romance” (story), 132, 134–35; stereotypes of, 133 Sugimoto, Hiroshi, 150 surveillance, 49 Syjuco, Stephanie, 3, 20; accumulation, critique of, 143; and accumulative epistemology, 171; anti-capitalism of, 156–57; auratic failure in, 159, 160; Body Double installations, 167–69, 168 fig. 4.7; Counterfeit Crochet Project (Critique of a Political Economy), 180; and crafting, 174, 184; the digital in, 180–81; fake ceramics of, 145–46, 148–49; the flaw in, 155–56; illusionism in, 141; as ironist, 156–57, 164, 166–67, 172, 208n1; mimetic aesthetic of, 141, 144, 150–51, 164, 166, 170, 173–74, 188, 208n1; 1969 exhibition, 143–44; notMoMA, 144, 145; Philippines

Index

in, 167; as plagiarist, 141, 170; and playbor, 184–85; production in, 144, 188; “proxies” of, 144; punning in, 152; and realism, 163; and reproduction, 146, 148–49; “second look” of, 160–61, 163–64, 172, 188; and social media, 171, 180, 208n1; surface in, 9, 152, 155–56; and theft, 163; trace of labor in, 144–45; visibility of labor in, 156. See also art museums; FREE TEXTS; museums; museums, anthropological; RAIDERS: International Booty, Bountiful Harvest Teahan, Marguerite Murphy, 11, 59, 70–71, 77 fig. 2.10; archive of, 66; correspondence of, 61; journal entries of, 61, 87–88; letters to, 12 fig. I.2, 88–96, 91 fig. 2.12; newspaper archive of, 81–85; as nobility, 71–72; tributes to, 86, 90. See also Frank Murphy Memorial Museum; Murphy, Frank terra nullius: in film, 170; and genocide, 28; and Indigenous sovereignty, 47; and “little New Deal,” 64; and settler colonialism, 2, 47. See also knowledge nullius Thomas, Paul, 151 To, Rodney, 110 Tomb Raider, 159 Torres, Ramon, 68 Trask, Haunani-Kay, 190n54 tribute: and colonialism, 58; and demand, 95; Filipino, 59; labor as, 105; as payment, 84; as praise, 84; RAIDERS as, 146; rhetoric of, 90, 92–95; as weapon of the weak, 85, 90. See also Frank Murphy Memorial Museum; Murphy, Frank; Teahan, Marguerite Murphy Trollope, Anthony, 13, 15–17, 121; antiSemitism of, 16; debt in, 15; gambling in, 16, 17; novels of, 15, 16; speculation in, 15–16 truancy, 9–10

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universality, as racialized, 21 universities: and accumulation, 17–18, 52; and austerity, 17–18; decolonial, 18–20; and epistemology, 21; imperial, 21 University of Michigan Herbarium, 29, 48 University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology, 32–33, 34, 36 University of Michigan Museum of Natural History (UMMNH), 24 fig, 1.1, 25, 191n1; as archive of accumulation, 5; crisis of representation, 26–27; design of, 43–45, 43 fig. 1.8, 44 fig. 1.9; and epistemological accumulation, 52; indigenous cultures in, 25–26; and knowledge nullius, 48; name change of, 194n59; Native American dioramas in, 45, 53, 196n81; Philippine collection at, 1 fig. I.1, 2, 3, 25, 26, 28, 29, 40, 40 fig. 1.5, 48, 50, 53–54, 61, 191n3; and primitive accumulation, 54. See also museums; museums, anthropological; primitive accumulation utang na loob, 119, 137, 139 Ventura, Elizabeth, 203n70 Veracini, Lorenzo, 47, 51, 191n2 Verdesio, Gustavo, 26; on epistemic violence, 26, 191n2 Vietnam War, 167 Villablanca, Alfiana, 91 fig. 2.12, 92 Warhol, Andy, 144, 173 warriors, Filipino, 40 fig. 1.5, 41 fig. 1.6, 42 fig. 1.7, 194n53 Way We Live Now, The, 15–16, 121; gambling in, 16 welfare queens, 133 white man’s burden, 195n72 “White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippines” (Kipling poem), 49, 195n72 whiteness: and belonging, 136; and the body, 126; and Indigenous sovereignty,

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| Index

whiteness (cont.) 47; as property, 126; as rational, 40; in Romance (play), 118–19; and white women, 126 white supremacy, and personal responsibility rhetoric, 134 Williams, Patricia, 20–21, 191n61 Wolfe, Patrick, 61 Worcester, Dean Conant, 29, 31; Philippine expedition of, 31–32; photography of, 192n13, 192n15

World’s Fair (1904), 45, 49; display of Filipinos at, 50 writing: and accumulation, 7–8, 9; and capital, 8; Western, 7 Wynter, Sylvia, 29–30, 192n11 Yabot, Socorro, 89, 93 Year of Living Dangerously, The, 168 Zady, 185–88

About the Author

Sarita Echavez See teaches in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California Riverside, and is co-founder of the Center for Art and Thought. She is the author of The Decolonized Eye: Filipino American Art and Performance (2009) and co-editor of Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader (2016).

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