MY POSITIONALITY

In writing this essay, I would like to start out by saying something about my “positionality.” First, it is as someone who teaches and researches about US and other Pacific empires in the 19th and 20th centuries. In introducing my students (mostly undergraduates) to the concept of empire, I use Stephen Howe’s Empire: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2002). In his first chapter, Howe lays out several characteristics of modern empires: control over a vast territory (whether linked by land or by sea; and this control can be direct or indirect, formal or informal); the establishment of an unequal relationship of power between itself and those that it “rules” or controls; and the creation of a heterogeneous “multi-ethnic” empire. But the most important characteristics for me are: 1) the processes often involved in the creation of such a modern empire, namely, the quest for more markets, which was often accompanied by violence inflicted upon indigenous peoples; 2) the use of cultural ideologies presupposing racial and cultural superiority to justify such conquests; and 3) a genealogy and history that is linked to the rise of European capitalist expansion and colonization back in the 15th century, reaching its apex in the 19th century and continuing with American imperialist projects from the 19th to the 21st centuries.
I make no bones about my “positionality” when talking to my students: the United States is an empire. The problems, “nature,” manifestations, cultures, and history of the American Empire have been written and delineated in many works by a wide range of scholars (e.g., William Appleman Williams, the Americanists Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, the historian Chalmers Johnson, and Filipino post-colonial scholars like Oscar Campomanes and Martin Manalansan). In my own work on the history of the Chinese in the Philippines, I examine how the anti-Chinese and racist policies of the American colonial government contributed to the creation of the dichotomous and oppositional relationship that exists today between the Chinese and the Filipinos. My professional career also extends beyond my teaching and writing to my membership in the Critical Filipina/o Studies Collective, which is composed of young Filipino/Filipino-American scholars actively engaged in intellectual and political work critical of the US empire, both past and present. All of the scholars mentioned above, to varying degrees, implicate the United States as – to use Stephen Howe’s words – the “undisputed leader, symbol, and greatest force of modern-day imperialism.”
My “positionality” is also one of a neo- or post-colonial subject of modern-day US imperialism. As a citizen of a country that has been colonized by not one but four empires (Spanish, British, American, Japanese) since 1565, and one that continues to struggle to shape itself as a strong and united nation-state while trying to shake off its colonial legacies, I can not help but be critical of the role that our colonial past and the US empire played and continues to play in my country’s history and society. I see the “hand” of the US empire continuing to hold sway in the political, economic, and social lives of its former colony: from the agreement it signed in 2002 with the Macapagal government to conduct “joint” military exercises in Mindanao (where there is a Muslim-led insurgency) and fight “global terrorism” to its insistence on the Philippines to follow World Bank and International Monetary Fund guidelines on how to restructure its economy in exchange for loans and more loans; and from its flooding our country with American consumer goods, films, books, and music, to the way it has systematically deported Filipinos in the United States after 9/11 (see Homeland Security Report-CFFSC). All these follow on the heels of a century-long history of US control over the Philippines: its takeover from Spain in spite of the indigenous revolutionary movement that had won its independence; its policy of “benevolent assimilation” while engaging in a bloody campaign to suppress native anti-American resistance in the first decade of American colonial rule in the Philippines; the subsequent “mis-education” of Filipinos, which erased from their historical memory (and from those of Americans as well) the Philippine-American War; the systematic exploitation of the Philippines’ natural resources and the restructuring of its economy designed to benefit and make it dependent upon the American economy; the establishment of military bases, which protected nothing but American interests in the Asia-Pacific region; and its complicity in and support of the Marcos dictatorship, which imprisoned, tortured, and killed thousands of Filipinos and saddled the country with a foreign debt that cannot be paid off. Thus, my experience with “empire” in all its negative aspects was not borne out of associating it with Star Wars or any media-created image of “evil” empires, but rather from my personal experience of having lived in a country whose sordid state is inextricably linked and was mainly a result of its colonial past and neo-colonial relationship with the US empire.
This is not to say that the solution to the country’s woes is simply to blame its colonial legacies and excise them from the face of its society in the name of nationalism. Such an approach has largely been debated in the past by academics and politicians in the Philippines, applied in various acts and policies, and found not only to be foolhardy but also impossible. But I believe that there are a couple of important steps that the Philippines has to take in its efforts at nation-building: 1) to change its educational program in order to make its people aware of the insidious nature of their country’s colonial and neo-colonial relationship with the US; and 2) to challenge its people to find creative but radical ways to change this unequal balance of power. José Rizal, the national hero of the Philippines, once wrote: “Ang hindi marunong lumingon sa kanyang pinanggalingan ay hindi makakarating sa kanyang paroroonan” (One who does not look back to the past cannot understand the future). Without an understanding of how colonialism created a state of dependency in their country, the Filipinos cannot really begin to carve out a future that would place them on equal footing with their former colonial masters. Furthermore, I believe that a change in the educational system of the US needs to be undertaken in order to wipe out the collective amnesia of Americans about their imperial past (see Campomanes).

THE “NEW IMPERIAL HISTORY” AND ITS APPLICATION TO THE PHILIPPINE EXPERIENCE – POINTS OF AGREEMENT

In writing my thoughts about the editorial essay, I would like to start out with what I deem as “points of agreement.” I do agree with the essay’s assessment that the field of post-colonial studies tends to focus “exclusively on cultural practices through which empire as a form of power is realized, while ignoring the problem of the relations between structures, such as nations, states, collective identities, etc.” But this certainly does not mean that works in this field are unimportant. The importance of post-colonial scholarship lies in its power to challenge dominant discourses that are often skewed toward maintaining an imbalanced status quo. Combined with other studies that are more structural in their approach, post-colonial studies has the capacity to truly transform a society by retrieving the voices of historically subjugated groups of peoples. Moreover, if the problem with post-colonial studies, as the essay points out, is its “reluctance… to pay attention to the problem of horizontal interactions between different elements and their ‘fetishization’ of the opposition East-West in the conception of Orientalism,” I dare say that in the case of the Philippines, we need more post-colonial scholarship because too much attention has been given to the horizontal interactions between the US and the Philippines, and the lack of the “fetishization” of the opposition between the two.
I further agree with the statement that the negative connotations of empire were borne in the 19th century, and that these “continued gradually and irregularly as the political, international, and socio-cultural order of modernity was being born.” But while it may be true that the “nationalists” in post-colonial societies and those found in the “former metropolises” had a hand in constructing “empire” in a negative way in order to “conceptualize the development of nationalism” in their newly independent states, this does not mean that their analyses were erroneous. Their analyses are particularly important if they can serve to help remove or understand the ills facing post-colonial states. As I mentioned earlier, there have been many debates within academic and political circles in the Philippines as to whether the problems in the country were caused by its long history of colonialism, or by the indigenous people/leaders themselves, who seemingly cannot simply follow the example of other post-colonial states whose citizens managed to “advance” or improve themselves. But it is precisely in my own experience as a Filipino that I cannot subscribe to the idea that “if you only work hard enough then you’ll progress,” because I can see how mired we are in a situation from which it is very difficult to extricate ourselves, i.e., a situation of perpetual poverty and dependency. For many Philippine colonial historians like myself, “empire” is both a structure and a diagnosis (albeit not the only one) in trying to understand the problems of the country. We are hard pressed to find a new “theory” to “explain the fact of empire’s disintegration” when millions of Filipinos continue to be affected by the prevalence and persistence of empire.
I must point out, then, that the one glaring difference between the position of the writers of this essay and mine is this: that they are writing from the vantage point of European (particularly Russian) experiences of “empire” and “the nation-state.” Thus, they have a point when they write that recent developments in Europe, such as the creation of the European Union, and the encroachment of some states over the sovereignty of other states, put into question the preponderance of the “nation-state” over “empire” and the “nation-state” as the “basic instrument in the organization of political space.” However, in the Philippine experience, one cannot even speak of a sovereign nation-state, because it is still in the process of defining itself as one, and its relationship with the United States cannot be compared with the relationship of, say, Poland with the European Union.
It is from my “positionality” that I still have to comprehend what the essay means by “zones of interaction,” and “mutual influences, common experiences and reactions to common challenges” that need to be explored, and that will hopefully lead us to the “investigation of processes of Europeanization,” or to what it refers to as “the problem of ‘horizontal’ interactions between different elements” that we need to pay attention to. In my opinion, this new “imperial theory” may be applicable to Europe, but not to the US and its imperial reach in different countries or regions like the Philippines, Latin America, and the Middle East. Nevertheless, I would be very interested in finding out more about what the essay refers to as this new imperial history’s “multidimensional view of social, political, and cultural actors, and of spaces in which they function.” It might help me understand other dimensions of empire as they relate to the US empire and its relationship with countries like the Philippines.^[1]