Abstract:This essay examines the 2001 Thomasite Centennial in the Philippines, marking the arrival of American teachers who came to the colony aboard the US Army Transport Thomas in 1901 as a site of contemporary negotiations of US colonial history for the needs of the present. As representatives of colonial love, the Thomasites were both admired and criticized by Filipinos and used by the US as exemplifications of American benevolence. Although the centennial, billed as a commemoration of the Thomasites by American diplomats, was demonstrably an instance of soft power led by the US embassy, the Filipinos recruited for the event were multiply positioned subjects, constrained as well as empowered by the situated yet mutable sites they occupied. Analyzing the centennial through its circulation in different discursive registers—journalistic, promotional, historical, diplomatic, and literary—the essay reveals the contested nature of present-day memory-making of US sentimental colonialism in the Philippines, with different state and nonstate actors struggling to claim historical record. Tony Perez's play "A Hundred Songs of Mary Helen Fee," written for the occasion, simultaneously memorializes Fee and instantiates a critique of the centennial by putting the Thomasite memoir on which it was based in conversation with the colonial archive. The essay illustrates the complexities of postcolonial commemoration and shows how the centennial functioned as a contested site of American and Filipino diplomacy, critical interrogation, and a strategic rerouting of Thomasite history by Filipinos.
摘要:本文考察了2001年菲律宾托马西特百年纪念活动,纪念1901年美国教师乘坐美国陆军运输托马斯号来到殖民地,作为当代美国殖民历史谈判的场所。作为殖民爱情的代表,托马斯派既受到菲律宾人的钦佩和批评,也被美国视为美国仁爱的典范。尽管被美国外交官宣传为纪念托马派的百年庆典显然是美国大使馆领导的软实力的一个例子,但被招募参加该活动的菲律宾人是处于多重地位的主体,他们所占据的位置虽然多变,但却受到了限制和授权。这篇文章通过在新闻、宣传、历史、外交和文学等不同话语领域的传播来分析百年纪念,揭示了当今美国在菲律宾的情感殖民主义记忆的争议性,不同的国家和非国家行为者都在努力争取历史记录。托尼·佩雷斯(Tony Perez)为这一时刻创作的戏剧《玛丽·海伦·费的一百首歌》(A Baidu Songs of Mary Helen Fee)同时纪念了费,并通过将其所依据的托马西特回忆录与殖民档案馆对话,来实例化对百年的批判。这篇文章阐述了后殖民纪念活动的复杂性,并展示了百年纪念活动是如何成为美国和菲律宾外交、批判性审讯以及菲律宾人对托马斯派历史进行战略性重新安排的一个有争议的场所。
{"title":"Celebrating Imperial Education: The 2001 Thomasite Centennial in the Philippines","authors":"M. Schueller","doi":"10.1353/aq.2022.0064","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2022.0064","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay examines the 2001 Thomasite Centennial in the Philippines, marking the arrival of American teachers who came to the colony aboard the US Army Transport Thomas in 1901 as a site of contemporary negotiations of US colonial history for the needs of the present. As representatives of colonial love, the Thomasites were both admired and criticized by Filipinos and used by the US as exemplifications of American benevolence. Although the centennial, billed as a commemoration of the Thomasites by American diplomats, was demonstrably an instance of soft power led by the US embassy, the Filipinos recruited for the event were multiply positioned subjects, constrained as well as empowered by the situated yet mutable sites they occupied. Analyzing the centennial through its circulation in different discursive registers—journalistic, promotional, historical, diplomatic, and literary—the essay reveals the contested nature of present-day memory-making of US sentimental colonialism in the Philippines, with different state and nonstate actors struggling to claim historical record. Tony Perez's play \"A Hundred Songs of Mary Helen Fee,\" written for the occasion, simultaneously memorializes Fee and instantiates a critique of the centennial by putting the Thomasite memoir on which it was based in conversation with the colonial archive. The essay illustrates the complexities of postcolonial commemoration and shows how the centennial functioned as a contested site of American and Filipino diplomacy, critical interrogation, and a strategic rerouting of Thomasite history by Filipinos.","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49431070","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Situating J. C. Leyendecker within the Conflicting Narratives of the Gay and Lesbian Past","authors":"M. J. Murphy","doi":"10.1353/aq.2022.0074","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2022.0074","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43273458","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay explores the differing relations to land, time, and history—human and planetary—that organized responses to the New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811–12 and that now characterize responses to the Anthropocene. Indigenous and settler accounts connected the earthquakes to a catastrophic rupture in time, but they located that catastrophe differently. For the US, the disaster was seismic, a geological revelation of human powerlessness. Federal intervention sought to restore the region to the future-oriented time of the nation, while Romantic history and geological fantasy supplemented the inscription of settler-national time on the land by identifying the "Indian" with cultural and geological pasts. Indigenous interpretations connected the quakes to the ongoing rupture that colonialism instantiated. Circulated through the pan-Indigenous revival, the polychronicity of anticolonial assessments of the quakes drew on the energy of prophecy, reflecting what Mark Rifkin identifies as prophecy's ability to gather other-than-chronological possibilities as they interwove the earth's past and the land's present state to make Indigenous futures possible again. Recent approaches to the Anthropocene replicate this division, alternately perpetuating the necropolitics of geological fantasy and embracing a reparative adaptation of what Kyle Powys Whyte (Citizen Potawatomi) describes as "kinship time."
{"title":"Unsettled Ground: Indigenous Prophecy, Geological Fantasy, and the New Madrid Earthquakes","authors":"Dana Luciano","doi":"10.1353/aq.2022.0059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2022.0059","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay explores the differing relations to land, time, and history—human and planetary—that organized responses to the New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811–12 and that now characterize responses to the Anthropocene. Indigenous and settler accounts connected the earthquakes to a catastrophic rupture in time, but they located that catastrophe differently. For the US, the disaster was seismic, a geological revelation of human powerlessness. Federal intervention sought to restore the region to the future-oriented time of the nation, while Romantic history and geological fantasy supplemented the inscription of settler-national time on the land by identifying the \"Indian\" with cultural and geological pasts. Indigenous interpretations connected the quakes to the ongoing rupture that colonialism instantiated. Circulated through the pan-Indigenous revival, the polychronicity of anticolonial assessments of the quakes drew on the energy of prophecy, reflecting what Mark Rifkin identifies as prophecy's ability to gather other-than-chronological possibilities as they interwove the earth's past and the land's present state to make Indigenous futures possible again. Recent approaches to the Anthropocene replicate this division, alternately perpetuating the necropolitics of geological fantasy and embracing a reparative adaptation of what Kyle Powys Whyte (Citizen Potawatomi) describes as \"kinship time.\"","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42620070","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Enslavers and their allies wrote in terrified, apocalyptic terms about slave revolts, particularly in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century US. This essay suggests that by consistently framing slave revolt in these ways, proslavery white Americans constructed and reproduced a dominant, normative narrative about the meaning of Black self-determination, which this essay calls a "reactionary romance." This "romance" deemed Black self-determination an apocalypse-signaling antagonist against which the privileged body politic must continually and violently struggle in order to reproduce itself. It perversely drew on the rebellious actions of Black people as a way to enclose the prospect of Black freedom in a shroud of terror, rendering the suppression of Black self-determination an esteemed civic duty for the American citizen. This essay critically and historically analyzes this romance as it functions in archival documentation of the 1811 German Coast Uprising in southeastern Louisiana, the largest slave revolt in US history. The way that Louisiana planters told the story of the 1811 Uprising weaponized the reactionary romance to compel an expanding American empire (and its citizens) to protect and expand both the social and material structures of plantation slavery and the limits on moral and political imagination that attended these structures.
{"title":"The Reactionary Romance of American Slave Revolt: Scripting the Unthinkable in the Archive of the 1811 German Coast Uprising","authors":"Nicolas Farrell Bloom","doi":"10.1353/aq.2022.0060","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2022.0060","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Enslavers and their allies wrote in terrified, apocalyptic terms about slave revolts, particularly in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century US. This essay suggests that by consistently framing slave revolt in these ways, proslavery white Americans constructed and reproduced a dominant, normative narrative about the meaning of Black self-determination, which this essay calls a \"reactionary romance.\" This \"romance\" deemed Black self-determination an apocalypse-signaling antagonist against which the privileged body politic must continually and violently struggle in order to reproduce itself. It perversely drew on the rebellious actions of Black people as a way to enclose the prospect of Black freedom in a shroud of terror, rendering the suppression of Black self-determination an esteemed civic duty for the American citizen. This essay critically and historically analyzes this romance as it functions in archival documentation of the 1811 German Coast Uprising in southeastern Louisiana, the largest slave revolt in US history. The way that Louisiana planters told the story of the 1811 Uprising weaponized the reactionary romance to compel an expanding American empire (and its citizens) to protect and expand both the social and material structures of plantation slavery and the limits on moral and political imagination that attended these structures.","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49170327","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:This essay theorizes the role of referral photography, photographs sent to prospective adoptive parents upon assignment of a child, in the formation and racialization of kinship within transnational adoption from Asia. Because the practice is used across domestic and transnational adoption, adoption from Asia offers a case study for which to understand how systems like photography can function as, what I call, a technology of family that has the potential not only to record or represent kinship but also to actively participate in its construction in new and racializing ways. Using archival accounts of adoption from China alongside Korean adoptee Deann Borshay Liem's film In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee, this essay analyzes referral photographs as narrative objects that perform a particular role in the kinship formation process, one that facilitates the affective inclusion of the child into the family while racializing the child within a system of interchangeability. I also show how these photographs can be used beyond their initial function to discover new forms of "adoptive" kinship.
{"title":"A Technology of Family: Photography and Kinship Formation in Transnational Adoption from Asia","authors":"L. Johnson","doi":"10.1353/aq.2022.0063","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2022.0063","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay theorizes the role of referral photography, photographs sent to prospective adoptive parents upon assignment of a child, in the formation and racialization of kinship within transnational adoption from Asia. Because the practice is used across domestic and transnational adoption, adoption from Asia offers a case study for which to understand how systems like photography can function as, what I call, a technology of family that has the potential not only to record or represent kinship but also to actively participate in its construction in new and racializing ways. Using archival accounts of adoption from China alongside Korean adoptee Deann Borshay Liem's film In the Matter of Cha Jung Hee, this essay analyzes referral photographs as narrative objects that perform a particular role in the kinship formation process, one that facilitates the affective inclusion of the child into the family while racializing the child within a system of interchangeability. I also show how these photographs can be used beyond their initial function to discover new forms of \"adoptive\" kinship.","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47776972","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Abstract:Developing a fuller understanding of US imperialism requires engagement with settler colonial and Indigenous studies. I expand Amy Kaplan's analysis of US empire as "riddled with instability, ambiguity and disorder" to consider how settler colonialism is fortified via walls. Walls stake settler claims and scale from individual property (home) to national borders (homeland). Examining Donald Trump's US-Mexico border wall and a sea wall in front of beachfront property Barack Obama has purchased in Hawai'i reveals the inherent instability and impermanence of settler colonialism, and thus this particular form of imperialism. That instability manifests in three ways: (1) settler colonial anxious, repetitive insistence on its dominion, its claims, especially via the law and physical intervention; (2) the multiple ways human and other-than-human actors resist the walls, refuse capture/containment, call out the fiction/myth of the border and sea wall's power to divide; and (3) the way "once and future ghosts" haunt settler claims, unsettle territorial and temporal assertions of possession/domination/belonging. Based on this finding and analysis drawn from Indigenous and settler colonial studies, I argue that settler colonialism, and thus US imperialism, ultimately fails because of its inherent unsustainability and the myriad of ways it is resisted. What succeeds instead is Indigenous resilience and radical resurgence.
{"title":"Imperial Dis-ease: Trump's Border Wall, Obama's Sea Wall, and Settler Colonial Failure","authors":"Judy Rohrer","doi":"10.1353/aq.2022.0051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2022.0051","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:Developing a fuller understanding of US imperialism requires engagement with settler colonial and Indigenous studies. I expand Amy Kaplan's analysis of US empire as \"riddled with instability, ambiguity and disorder\" to consider how settler colonialism is fortified via walls. Walls stake settler claims and scale from individual property (home) to national borders (homeland). Examining Donald Trump's US-Mexico border wall and a sea wall in front of beachfront property Barack Obama has purchased in Hawai'i reveals the inherent instability and impermanence of settler colonialism, and thus this particular form of imperialism. That instability manifests in three ways: (1) settler colonial anxious, repetitive insistence on its dominion, its claims, especially via the law and physical intervention; (2) the multiple ways human and other-than-human actors resist the walls, refuse capture/containment, call out the fiction/myth of the border and sea wall's power to divide; and (3) the way \"once and future ghosts\" haunt settler claims, unsettle territorial and temporal assertions of possession/domination/belonging. Based on this finding and analysis drawn from Indigenous and settler colonial studies, I argue that settler colonialism, and thus US imperialism, ultimately fails because of its inherent unsustainability and the myriad of ways it is resisted. What succeeds instead is Indigenous resilience and radical resurgence.","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44987717","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Power of Truth: Why Some Fear Histories of the US-Mexico Border","authors":"Monica Martinez","doi":"10.1353/aq.2022.0052","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2022.0052","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41664396","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Representing Muslims, One Crisis at a Time","authors":"Evelyn Alsultany","doi":"10.1353/aq.2022.0034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2022.0034","url":null,"abstract":"the logic of and","PeriodicalId":51543,"journal":{"name":"AMERICAN QUARTERLY","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66308529","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}