Celebrating Imperial Education: The 2001 Thomasite Centennial in the Philippines

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.