Colonized Bodies as a Governing Problem: Filipinos and US Imperial Fixations

This paper will examine the United States’ first colony in Asia and the historical relationship between empire, education, and the body. By focusing on the colonized Filipino body in the early 1900s, it will explore the following questions: How were Filipinos as colonial subjects depicted? And, how did their portrayal impact the education provided to them? When the US gained possession of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War in 1898, the newly-acquired colonial subjects posed a significant problem to the rising global power. Debates on annexation versus independence, underpinned by concerns regarding self-governance and protection from other foreign powers, set the stage for the emergence of Filipinos and their brown bodies in the US transnational imaginary and control through empire. The paper will mobilize “imperial fixations” as a key concept in the confluence of empire and education. It will employ the concept of fixation in two ways: first, to have an intense interest; and second, to repair or reform. The Filipino problem – or, the question of how the United States ought to govern its colonial subjects in Asia – became a focal source of US fixations in the early twentieth century. The paper will draw from analysis of transnational archives of government, education, media, and personal materials in the Philippines and the United States. It will reveal an intensive and systematic depiction of Filipinos as uncivilized but not altogether incorrigible children. Ultimately, the paper will argue that the United States constructed the Filipinos as primitive children in need of America’s benevolent tutelage for modernity and civilization and its governing defense for security. Determined to retain authority over the Philippines as a colonial outpost while dangling the promise of eventual independence, the US utilized public education to cultivate the intellectual, cultural, and moral development of Filipinos. Compared to the former Spanish colonizers that provided private education only for the elites, the US colonial government developed a public school system across the country which radically transformed generations of Filipinos. Education, therefore, served as empire’s most pervasive tool of change and control, and remains as its most enduring legacy in the colony.