Figures of the Unassimilable: American Empire, Filipino American Postcoloniality, and the U.S.-Philippine War of 1898-1910s By Oscar V. Campomanes A. B., University of the Philippines, 1984 A. M., Brown University, 1987 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of American Civilization at Brown University Providence, Rhode Island May 2011 © Copyright 2011 by Oscar V. Campomanes This dissertation by Oscar V. Campomanes is accepted in its present form by the Department of American Civilization as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date____________ ____________________________________ Robert Lee, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date____________ ____________________________________ Susan Smulyan, Reader Date____________ ____________________________________ Ralph Rodriguez, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date____________ _____________________________________ Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School iii CURRICULUM VITAE Oscar V. Campomanes was born in Bambang, Nueva Vizcaya, Philippines on November 23, 1961. He received his A.B., major in Filipino Language and Literature, and minor and cognate in Journalism and Philippine History at the University of the Philippines in 1984. Campomanes completed his A.M. in American Civilization at Brown University in 1987. Campomanes's work is widely published in both Philippine and international journals, and in critical anthologies or reference volumes. His more recent articles include: “Images of Filipino Racialization in the Anthropological Laboratories of the American Empire: The Case of Daniel Folkmar” in PMLA (October 2008); “La Revolución Filipina in the Age of Empire,” Japanese Journal of American Studies 18 (2007); and “Filipinos, Filipino Americans, and US Imperialism,” in ‘Positively No Filipinos Allowed:’ Building Communities & Discourse (2006), edited by Tony Tiongson, Edgardo Gutierrez, and Richard Gutierrez, with Temple University Press. He has also served as a contributing writer for such volumes as the Encyclopedia of the American Left (Garland, 1990), Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (Oxford University Press, 1995), Cambridge Interethnic Companion to Asian American Literature (Cambridge University Press, 1997), and the Blackwell Companion to Asian American Studies (2005). He is gathering his various critical essays of the past two decades for publication as one anthology in both the Philippines and the United States. Last year, Campomanes was invited to participate in an anthology publishing workshop and publication project, on the subject “Asian American Studies in Asia,” by iv the Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica, in Taipei, Taiwan. For the period 2006-2010, he was invited as one of several featured participants from Japan, the Philippines, and the United States in a bookwriting project titled “The Philippines and Japan Under the U.S.'s Shadow,” funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the University of Tokyo (Todai), and Kanagawa University. The book resulting from this transnationally collaborative project in comparative area, ethnic, and empire/postcolonial studies, The Philippines and Japan in America's Shadow, has recently been released by the National University of Singapore Press (2011). Campomanes was the recipient of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations University Network (AUN) Distinguished Visiting Professorship from the Vietnam National University-Hanoi, People’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam, in 2002. Distinctions and funding grants for his work, while on a tenure-track appointment in the Department of English at the University of California Berkeley for the period 1993-1996, include the University of California Regents Junior Faculty Fellowship (Summer 1994) and a University of California Junior Minority Faculty Grant (1994), as well as two Filipino Studies Working Group organizational grants from the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, University of California, for the 1993-1994 and 1994-1995 academic schoolyears. As a graduate student, Campomanes was awarded predoctoral fellowships by the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. in 1991-1992 and a summer residence fellowship at the Newberry Library (Chicago) in 1991. Campomanes has held teaching appointments in the following universities: University of California, San Diego (1999-2000), New York University (1998-1999), University of California, Berkeley (1993-1996), Williams College (1991), and Yale v University (1989-1990). He currently teaches literary and cultural studies fulltime and in a tenured position in the Department of English at the Ateneo de Manila University (Quezon City, Philippines), and serves as Associate Professorial Lecturer in the Graduate School of the Royal and Pontifical University of Santo Tomas (Manila, Philippines). vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS No profuse expressions of gratitude can ever adequately do justice to the countless intellectual, affective, and material contributions, which so many people (teachers and mentors, family and friends, colleagues and acquaintances or, specially, my own students) have made to this study over the years. That it took such an inordinate amount of time to complete, and travelled with me through the curious twists and turns of my academic career (in varied institutional sites and existential habitats across the continental United States and the Pacific), only makes the acknowledgments I am now able to profess to them next to impossible or worse, liable to unforgivable omissions. In an other and future incarnation of this project, I intend to compose a more proximate inventory of my indebtedness to everyone who knows that, without their unquestioning love, unconditional support, and unflagging trust, I could have not come anywhere near its now successful—if most of the time, tortuous and tardy—completion. I can best pay tribute to Robert Lee, lifelong mentor and lifetime friend, by saying to him, simply, in Tagalog: taos-pusong pasasalamat. Bob will need no reminding about how profoundly and immensely my intellectual formation, and own investments in American and Filipino/Asian American Studies as fields of work and personal commitment, are due, for the most part, to his boundless generosity of spirit and, more crucially, to his astounding largeness of mind. Mari Jo Buhle and Neil Lazarus were unsparing with their confidence in, and support, for this project, from its first conceptions through its early, if often fragmentary, manifestations. I consider it one of my greatest fortunes to have taken instruction from them, as well as from Bob—exemplars all—in the arts of academic research and sociocultural critique. It is my hope that, in its present vii form, this project is able to live up to some of the exacting standards, which they, and Bob, have set with their unimpeachable and exemplary work in their respective fields. To Susan Smulyan and Ralph Rodriguez I owe a life-changing intervention, which they quietly and steadily made in the final stages of this study's completion. But even from the beginning, when I was just setting out to undertake what would turn out to be a much-distended and unwieldy endeavor, Susan, in particular, never hesitated in sharing with me her institutional wisdom and inspiringly good cheer, proving decisive to my successful applications for grants in support of my research and writing for this project at crucial moments. Up to the last minute, Ralph himself did not leave anything to chance and went out of his way to help me negotiate the tricky terrains of the process of completion. To Susan and Ralph, both: my endless thanks, and I wish to express to them the hope that our engagements continue and take new and sustained forms. At the Smithsonian Institution, which provided me with a nourishing base from which to explore various sites for materials and critical exchanges related to the project in nearly two memorable years of fellowship there, I could not have dreamed of any better research supervisors than Gary Kulik and Charles McGovern. They were tough and critical interlocutors of my then ever-shifting and continually amorphous work, forcing me to clarify to myself what it was that I was seeking to accomplish with it. If the result, as is here presented, satisfies some of their expectations of it, that should go a really long way in giving me a sense of achievement. Any serious researcher knows how academic work cannot take off at all or prosper in any way without the professionalism, dedication, and kindness of librarians, archivists, and other custodians of any society's knowledge and information repositories. viii I am unable to name each and every one of them who, in my time, extended every imaginable courtesy, and all the considerate attention, to my requests for assistance in search of the sources I needed for my work. But I must acknowledge and thank those who made my research, and the research of countless other fellow travellers, something to look forward to, with a great sense of anticipation and excitement, everyday, throughout my respective visits (of varying durations) at the following institutions: the John Hay and Rockefeller Libraries at Brown; the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachussetts; the Peabody Museum and Houghton Library at Harvard; the Smithsonian Institution Archives, the Archives Center of the National Museum of American History, and the National