THE PHILIPPINES MATRIX PROJECT

THE MAGUINDANAO MASSACRE OF NOVEMBER 2009

philcsc — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 09:47:32 +0000

ARROYO REGIME IN THE PHILIPPINES MOUNTED THE STAGE FOR THE MAGUINDANAO SLAUGHTER

By E. San Juan, Jr.,
Philippines Cultural Studies Center

After the feasting, the bloodletting. Only a few months has passed since de facto president of the Philippines Gloria Arroyo was publicly criticized for wanton spending of thousands of dollars in her dinners in New York City and Washington DC when another political “scandal” explodes, this time a political mass slaughter of defenseless Filipino civilians.

At least 57 victims of a hideous massacre last Nov. 23 were dug from shallow graves. Reporter Carlos H. Conde (New York Times 27 Nov 2009) reported that among the slain were 22 women, 30 journalists, 2 lawyers, and dozens of supporters of Esmael Mangudadatu, a local politician who is challenging the quasi-feudal control of Maguindanao province by the Amapatuan clan. Early forensic analysis indicates that the women were molested or raped, their private parts mutilated, with vehicles and other accessory evidence buried in pits dug by government backhoes (Agence France-Press, “Mayor Charged with Horrific Massacre,” The Nation, 28 Nov 2009, 6A).

Everything now appears to have been premeditated. On that fateful day, with national elections looming, Esmael Mangudadatu, a local politician, dispatched a convoy to the provincial capital Shariff Aguak to file papers to challenge Andal Ampatuan Jr. for the governorship now occupied by Ampatuan Senior. This sizeable convoy included his wife Genalyn, two of his sisters, lawyers and media workers, and their associates. They were stopped in broad daylight in a major highway by police officers and militiamen loyal to the Ampatuans, dragged from their cars and summarily executed, as Dan Murphy of the Christian Science Monitor (Nov. 23) reports. About 15 motorists passing by were also killed, all buried in mass graves dug before the assault.

Who done it?—as the cliché puts it. Three journalists who survived the massacre as well as police officials and civilians directly involved have pointed to the entire Ampatuan clan as the responsible party. Not just one son. This clan rose to power by affiliating with the ruling class of landlords, compradors and bureaucrat-capitalists dominating this U.S. neocolony. Allied with the bloody Marcos dictatorship and active in the anti-communist campaigns of the Aquino, Ramos and Estrada administrations, Ampatuan Senior worked as a paramilitary leader with the Philippine Army’s 6th Infantry Division. In the 1990s he hunted down local militants, both linked with the communist New People’s Army (NPA) as well as with two Muslim insurgent groups: the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).

With his close ties to the military, Andal Senior served in the Philippine Congress and later as governor of Maguindanao province in 2001 “handpicked” by the military—a “military-sponsored warlord” (Murphy’s term). He delivered millions of votes to Arroyo in the 2004 elections, giving her a large margin over popular movie star Fernando Poe Jr. Arroyo admitted this in the infamous “Hello Garci” congressional investigations. In return the Ampatuans received money, guns, and all the apparatus of coercive and consensual rule.

In 2005 Ampatuan’s son Zaldy became governor of the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARRM), a political rubric created ostensibly to give the local population more say over their own affairs and thus neutralize the political appeals of the MILF and the NPA. The Ampatuans guaranteed the elections of Arroyo’s candidates in the 2007 election. After that election, local school administrator Musa Dimasidsing exposed ballot stuffing, for which he was shot in the head. In an area where police and military, and all local officials, serve the Ampatuan clan, no wonder Dimasidsing’s murder hitherto remains unsolved. Alfredo Cayton, the commanding general of the 6th Infantry Division covering the area of the massacre, even assured the Manila paper The Manila Bulletin that it’s safe for the fate convoy to travel (Asian Human Rights Commission Urgent Appeal Case 165, 30 Nov 2009).

How to explain (especially to State Secretary Hillary Clinton, visiting the islands soon) this Ampatuan fiefdom, a relic of the U.S.’s model “showcase of democracy in Asia” during the Cold War? Just a humdrum clan feud among traditional Moro warlords?

Long before the terrorist group Abu Sayyaf came into the scene to justify the hundreds of U.S. Special Forces now operating in thinly disguised bases in the southern Philippines, political feudal fragmentation/clientelism has been perpetuated by U.S. colonial rule. The patronage system is alive and well in elite democracy. After various treaties ending Moro resistance in 1913, the U.S. allowed local chieftains from entrenched tributary clans to exercise its political and economic ascendancy. They worked with the predominantly Christian Manila-based ruling cliques, with the National Police (PNP) and Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP), to maintain the poverty and subordination of millions of Moro peasants, fishermen, workers, women, youth, including other non-Muslim tribal groups called “Lumads.” No wonder Maguindanao and the Sulu Islands remain the poorest in a country where the majority of 90 million citizens live on less than $2 a day.

To continue the exploitation and oppression of the majority, the Washington-supervised AFP lacks manpower and logistics to defeat the organized insurgents. But to squelch any political resistance, the AFP employed the U.S.-recommended strategy of paramilitary groups (the CAFGUs, or Civilian Armed Fore Geographical Units; and CVOs, or Civilian Volunteer Organizations), similar to the U.S.-sponsored paramilitary formations in Colombia, Central America, and elsewhere.

From the start, Arroyo’s electoral cheating and corrupion has been exposed, making her letimacy precarious. She needs periodic shows of violence to buttress the lack of consensual authority, more than previous presidents. In July 2006, Arroyo issued Executive Order 546. This move overturned a clause in the Philippine Constitution barring private armies such as those controlled by the Ampatuans and over a hundred political dynasties such as the Arroyos. The result: local officials like the Ampatuans and the police bureaucracies they control were given the power to create “force multipliers”
in the fight against the NPA, MILF and MNLF, namely, AFP-sponsored “wild guns” of the CAFGUs and CVOs deputized to suppress political opposition. Estimates of the Ampatuan’s local army is about 800-1000 men, aside from those managed by four Ampatuan town mayors. Local analyst Jarius Bondoc and former congressman Michael Mastura have described the impunity of Ampatuan’s fiefdom, their control of all State funds and their clearance of police and military officials assigned to their area.

The Philippine human rights monitor KARAPAAN correctly links this old U.S. counterinsurgency method of “low intensity warfare” to Arroyo’s Oplan Bantay Laya, an inept and state-terrorist strategy to defeat the NPA and MILF. The counterinsurgency program of arming private armies such as the Ampatuans have led to extra-judicial killings of all “enemies of the state,” including those labeled front organizations. This happened with the dreaded U.S.-subsidized vigilante groups allowed by Corazon Aquino during her administration and in covert forms during the current campaign against the Abu Sayyaf.

Arroyo ends her de facto president plagued with corruption scandals and the worst human-rights record of any presidency, even including Ferdinand Marcos’. As of 2001, the Arroyo regime has to its credit 1,118 extrajudicial murders, 204 forcible disappearances, 1,026 tortured, and 1,1932 illegal arrests. These have all been documented by the UN Special Rapporteurs, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other international monitors. The Arroyo regime not only has done nothing to render justice to the victims, but has even continued the policies that have laid the groundwork for these unconscionable violation of human rights. She has the gall to run for Congress next year to forestall any court case against her if thrown out of office.

Cognizant of historical precedents and institutional contexts, KARAPATAN concludes that the “Maguindanao massacre was an event waiting to happen with the continued implementation of this criminal government’s anti-insurgency program….Now the country is jolted by a brutal crime ostensibly committed by a private army of a warlord…For far too long has this regime considered itself a law above the citizens, contravening the laws laid out in the legal instruments of the land so that its coddled political allies have imbibed the mindset that they too can commit such transgressions with impunity. [The Maguindanao massacre] is the result of condoning and tolerating human rights violations.”

KARAPATAN calls on the immediate disbandment of the paramilitary units of the AFP and the gangster private armies of warlords and politicians. It calls on the abolition of the brutal Oplan Bantay Laya counter-insurgency program as a [state-terrorist] method to eradicate the festering insurgency in the land.”

Cynics will dismiss this appeal for sanity and ethical governance. Not only skeptics but commonsensical people will ask: How can the bloody Arroyo government carry out a mandate of giving justice to its citizens when Arroyo and her minions are guilty of crimes worse than the Ampatuans? As commentator Inday Espina-Varona remarked, “who will protest us from our protectors?” Witnesses have now testified that three police officers of Abusana Majid, suspended police chief of Maguindanao province, were at the scene of the killing (as reported by Cecilia Yap and Joel Guinto, 24 Nov. blog in Bloomberg.com). Arroyo adviser Jesus Dureza’s account of his highly comic ritualized “arrest” of Andal Ampatuan Jr. augurs beyond doubt of the eventual whitewashing and forcible “disappearance” of this case. Tragedy threatens to become a “Moro-moro” vaudeville, if not anticlimactic farce.

Symptoms of a failed state? Or just ordinary election-related incidents in a U.S. neocolony? Abuse of power by the Ampatuans cannot be checked by the Arroyo regime whose existence owes its illegitimacy to the electoral frauds in Maguindanao and ARRM territory of the Ampatuans. As Maria Ressa (blog in CNN Amanpour) suggests, charges against Ampatuan’s killing of political rivals have never prospered. Only a special court and international vigilance can sustain any charge against the Ampatuan clan of “crimes against humanity.” Only local mass protests can provoke world conscience and an international tribunal duly formed to investigate and render justice to the victims of this latest horrible product of finance-capital’s globalization scheme (evinced by the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan) to destroy the planet. –##

Posted in COMMENTARY ON CURRENT EVENTS, DISCOURSES ON CONTRADICTIONS, EXTRAPOLATIONS, Race & Ethnic Studies Tagged: Ampauan, Arroyo, Maguindanao, massacre, Mindanao, Moro, Philippines

INTERVENTIONS BY E. SAN JUAN, Jr.

philcsc — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 00:59:40 +0000

TIMELY INTERVENTIONS IN THE CRISIS OF CAPITALIST GLOBALIZATION

Noted Filipino scholar E. SAN JUAN, JR. intervenes again in the urgent debates in racial conflicts and international relations with four scholarly works in the last two years.

In the midst of the flag-waving lunacy afflicting the U.S. after 9/11 and the current racist war on national liberation struggles, San Juan seems to be a solitary “voice in the wilderness.” His new collection of essays on cultural theory and comparative politics, IN THE WAKE OF TERROR: Class, Race, Nation, Ethnicity in the Postmodern World (Lexington Books, 2007), offers critiques of U.S. interventions and the destructive effects of globalized neoliberalism in culture and humanistic studies. It focuses on the dialectic of class, race and ethnicity in the context of global capitalism.

The other important work to be released by Palgrave Macmillan (2008) this September is U.S. IMPERIALISM AND REVOLUTION IN THE PHILIPPINES. Here San Juan reviews the record of U.S. colonialism and neocolonial domination of the Philippines, centering on a critique of the ideological mechanisms of cultural and political control in imperial discourse and practices. The book contains documents on the human-rights violations of the Arroyo regime, including the verdict of the Permanent People’s Tribunal Session 2 at The Hague, Netherlands, last March 2007.

Recently released by the Edwin Mellen Press this year is CRITIQUE AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION: LESSONS FROM ANTONIO GRAMSCI, MIKHAIL BAKHTIN AND RAYMOND WILLIAMS. This work attempts to interpret and evaluyate the historical-materialist critiquye of modern society by three progressive thinkers: Gramsci, Bakhtin and Williams. Precipitated by the early crisis of global capitalism in the 20^th century, the insights of Gramsci into hegemony and national-popular culture ushered the birth of Cultural Studies and a wide-ranging world-systems analysis. Bakhtin’s concept of the “sign as the arena of class struggle” has offered a radical break with the elitist mystifications of deconstructive postmodernism. Deployingh Gramsci’s theory of strategic intervention into the political economy of complex social formations and using Bakhtin’s dialogic imagination, Williams explored the contradictory “structures of feeling” in a world with multi-layered conflicts across class, gender, race, etc.; with diverse communities harboring their singular visions or democratic socialism. Gramsci, Bakhtin, and Williams’ exemplary critical reflectios continue to inspire concerned intellectuals everywhere. From a dialectical inquiry into controversies and arguments engaged by these three major thinkers, E. San Juan’s scholarly project seeks to articulate a transformative praxis useful for all activist cultural workers today confronting the demise of the barbaric neoliberal enpire of fianance-capital headed by the moribund U.S.nation-state.

San Juan’s book TOWARD FILIPINO SELF-DETERMINATION, to be released this August 2009 by the State University of New York Press, Albany, updates his previous works on the Filipino diaspora found in FROM EXILE TO DIASPORA (Westview Press) and AFTER POSTCOLONIALISM (Rowman and Littlefield), with substantial explorations into the situation and plight of Overseas Filipino Workers, now about 9 million scattered around the planet. Is the term/concept “transnational” appropriate to an emergent nation? Perry Anderson gave the most powerful criticism of the neoliberal use of “transnational” in his Editorial Note to NEW LEFT REVIEW, issue 14 (March-April 2002), which many scholars have failed to take heed. San Juan rejects the whole alibi and fraud behind “transnationalism” as well as “cosmopolitanism,” to which Filipinos and Filipino Americans continue to succumb. Apart from this, San Juan provides the only left/radical alternative to the current Filipino-American assimilationist, self-serving, and opportunist tendency in the U.S. academy, as well as those in the Philippines and elsewhere, who seek recognition and kudos from the Western/global North Establishment.

San Juan was previously a Fulbright lecturer at the University of the Philippines, Ateneo de Manila University, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, and visiting lecturer at National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. San Juan’s previous works include The Philippine Temptation (Temple UP); Beyond Postcolonial Theory (Palgrave Macmillan), Racism and Cultural Studies (Duke UP); Working Through the Contradictions (Bucknell UP); and Himagsik (De La Salle UP). Available in the Philippines are:Allegories of Resistance; a re-issue of Toward a People’s Literature, and a new collection of poems, Sapagkat Iniibig Kita, all published by the University of the Philippines Press. Forthcoming are Balikbayang Sinta: An E. San Juan Reader (Ateneo U Press) and From Globalization Toward National Liberation (U.P. Press). San Juan taught at several universities, including the University of California, Brooklyn College of CUNY, University of Connecticut, and Washington State University. He was recently a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center at Bellagio, Italy; 2009 fellow of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. –##

[ Released by PHILIPPINES CULTURAL STUDIES CENTER, 117 Davis Road, Storrs, CT 06268, USA <philcsc@sbcglobal.net> ]

CURRICULUM VITAE (Selected)

Curriculum Vitae

EPIFANIO SAN JUAN

E-mail:

Education

1958 A.B. magna cum laude University of the Philippines

1965 Ph.D. Harvard University

Academic Positions

1965-66 Assistant Professor, University of California, Davis

1966-67 Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of the Philippines

1967-79 Associate Professor of English, The University of Connecticut, Storrs

1977-79 Professor of Comparative Literature, Brooklyn College, City University of New York

1987-88 Fulbright Professor of American Literature and Criticism, University of the Philippines and Ateneo de Manila University

1979-1994 Professor of English and Comparative Literature, The University of Connecticut, Storrs

1994-1998 Professor of Ethnic Studies, Bowling Green State University, Ohio

1998-2001 Professor and Chair, Department of Comparative American Cultures,

Washington State University, Pullman

2002 Fellow of the Center for the Humanities, and Visiting Professor of English, Wesleyan

University

2003 Fulbright Professor of American Studies, Leuven University, Belgium

2004 National Science Council Fellow, National Tsing Hua University, Republic of China

2006 Fellow, Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Study (Fall 2006)

2008 (Spring) Visiting Professor of English & Comparative Literature, University of the

Philippines

2009 (Spring) Fellow, W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University

Honors

1960-63 Fulbright-Smith Mundt Fellowship

1961-63 Teaching Fellow, Harvard University

1964 Comparative Literature Prize, Harvard University

1965 Howard Mumford Jones Award for Best Work in English, Harvard University

1963-65 Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship

1987-88 Fulbright Lectureship in the Philippines

1993 Fellow, The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Edinburgh, Scotland

1993 1993 National Book Award, Association for Asian American Studies

1993 Distinguished Book Award given by Gustavus Myers Human Rights Center

1994 Nominated for the Citizens’ Chair, University of Hawaii

1994 Katherine Newman Award, Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States

1995 Visiting Professor of English, University of Trento, Italy

1995 Scholar in Residence, Institute for the Study of Culture, Society, and Human

Values, Bowling Green State University

1999 Centennial Award for Achievement in Literature, Philippine Cultural Center,

Republic of the Philippines

2000 Visiting Chair Professor, Graduate School, Tamkang University, Taiwan

2001 Keynote Speaker, College English Association (CEA) 2002 Annual Convention

2002 Invited Speaker, American Studies Institute, Dartmouth College, June 2002

2003 Speaker, 12th International Symposium on English Teaching, English Teachers Association, Republic of China, Nov. 7-9, Taipeh, Taiwan; Keynote Speaker, Ninth Quadrennial International Conference on Comparative Literature, National Taiwan University, 19 June 2004

2004 Invited lecturer at 7 universities in Taiwan: Tsing Hua University, Chiaotung University,

Kaohsiung Normal University, Sun-Yat Sen University, National Kaohsiung University, National ChungHsing University, National Normal University, Taipeh

2007 Keynote Speaker, “Gramsci Now”: International Gramsci Conference, Michigan State

University, 9-11 November

BOOKS (Selected)

James Joyce and the Craft of Fiction. New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1972.

Carlos Bulosan and the Imagination of the Class Struggle. Quezon City: University of the Philippines, 1972; reprinted by Oriole Editions, New York, 1975.

Introduction to Modern Pilipino Literature. Boston: Twayne, 1974.

Poetics: The Imitation of Action. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Press, 1978.

Toward a People’s Literature: Essays in the Dialectics of Praxis and Contradiction in Philippine Writing. Quezon City: U.P. Press, 1984. Winner of the Catholic Mass Media Award, 1985; and the National Book Award given by the Manila Critics Circle, 1985.

Racial Formation/Critical Transformations: Articulations of Power in Ethnic and Racial Studies in the U. S. New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1992. Winner of the 1993 National Book Award from Association for Asian American Studies; 1993 Distinguished Book Award, Gustavus Myers Center for Human Rights.

Hegemony and Strategies of Transgression: Essays in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1995.

The Philippine Temptation: Dialectics of Philippines-U.S. Literary Relations. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996.

From Exile to Diaspora: Versions of the Filipino Experience in the United States. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press/HarperCollins, 1998.

Beyond Postcolonial Theory. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.

After Postcolonialism: Remapping Philippines-United States Confrontation. Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Co., 2000.

Racism and Cultural Studies: Critiques of Multiculturalist Ideology and the Politics of Difference. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.

Spinoza and the Terror of Racism. UK: Sheffield Hallam University Press, 2002. A revised version appeared as “Spinoza, Marx and the Terror of Racism,” Nature, Society, and Thought 16.2 (2003), 193-230.

Working through the Contradictions: From Cultural Theory to Critical Practice. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2004.

Filipinos Everywhere. Quezon City: IBON, 2006,

In the Wake of Terror: Class, Race, Nation, Ethnicity in the PostModern World. Maryland: Lexington Books, 2007.

U.S. Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

BALIKBAYANG MAHAL: Passages from Exile. North Carolina: LuLu.com, 2007.

BALIKBAYANG SINTA: An E. San Juan Reader. Quezon City, Philippines: Ateneo de Manila Universiyy Press, 2008.

FROM GLOBALIZATION TO NATIONAL LIBERATION: Essays of Three Decades. Quezon

City: University of the Philippines Press, 2008.

Toward Filipino Self-Determination. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2009.

Critique and Social Transformination. Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2009.

E. SAN JUAN’s new book TOWARD FILIPINO SELF-DETERMINATION

philcsc — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 18:49:35 +0000

Toward Filipino Self-Determination: Beyond Transnational Globalization. By E. San Juan Jr. (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 2009. 184 pp.

by Michael Viola

University of California, Los Angeles

In his latest book, Toward Filipino Self-Determination: Beyond Transnational Globalization, Epifanio San Juan Jr. uncovers the concealed operations of power and the historic inequalities of political economic systems that have impacted Filipinos in an age of globalized crisis and contradiction. While the definition of globalization is often debated, for the majority of people in the Philippines the process of globalization can be more accurately described as “gobble-ization.”[1] Similar to the mass destruction caused in the Philippines at the wake of Hurricane Ondoy, the mechanisms of corporate globalization have enabled an international ruling class to pillage the resources of the islands, leaving behind an entire population submerged in the swollen overflows of structural adjustment, debt, and privatization. The rule of the high water is the doctrine of neoliberalism where every layer of the nation’s social fabric is a site of looting, as the market has become the organizing logic of an entire social sphere. E. San Juan’s book is an important contribution to the fields of globalization, race, and postcolonial studies as he foregrounds the domains of transformative possibility within culture and social life for Filipinos in a global diaspora, a population that has historically been greatly impacted by the tides of capitalist production.

This book, a compilation of essays written after 9/11 serves as a sequel to his influential writings, in particular, From Exile to Diaspora (1998) and After Postcolonialism (2000). Much like these earlier works, E. San Juan’s methodology is a method of dissent that captures the complex social relations and constant motion of the Philippine Diaspora. With such a method, tension is present throughout his analysis engaging more commonly accepted theoretical frames promoted by postcolonial, postmodern, and post-Marxist scholars. He explains,

“We are not transmigrants or transnationals, to be sure, despite the theories of academic pundits and exoticizing media. We are Filipinos uprooted and dispersed from hearth and communal habitat. We will find our true home if there is a radical systemic change in the metropole and, more crucially, a popular-democratic transformation in the Philippines” (xvi).

E. San Juan argues that the struggle to end oppression for Filipinos, women, and people of color both within the United States as well as throughout the Diaspora is not simply a discursive or semiotic liberation but a global social relation. For those familiar with San Juan’s earlier works there is recognizable overlap in the astute critiques that he makes; however, for a reader not exposed to the conditions and history of the Philippines or to social theory, E. San Juan’s reiterations are valuable as he rigorously intervenes in complex arguments.

The chapters “Imperial Terror in the Homeland” and “In the Belly of the Beast” are important historical supplements for youth involved in organizing the popular Philippine Culture Nights (PCN); scholars of Ethnic and Asian American Studies; as well as community organizers interested in furthering political projects that counter the heightened injustices of racism and patriarchy. Throughout these chapters San Juan shows how seemingly disconnected events are linked through systemic exploitation and an international division of labor necessitated by the current global economic order. Such writings serve as a constant reminder that ecological disasters, racist anti-immigrant sentiments, and the escalating violence against women are dialectically related to the motions of capitalist development.

San Juan’s chapter “Subaltern Silence” is especially illuminating for university students as they witness the privatization of their public education, the exorbitant increases in tuition fees, and the reduction of courses offered in the humanities and languages. Even though Filipinos have become one the largest Asian American groups in the United States, Filipino language instruction in the academy is sparse. San Juan argues that the struggle over language in our schools is a struggle over Filipino identity – an identity that must be rooted in the ideas of liberation, democracy, and justice for Filipinos throughout the world. He states, “literacy must be based on the reality of the subaltern life if it is to be effective in any strategy of real empowerment, in the decolonization of schooling for a start” (50). However, the struggle for Filipino languages cannot be confined solely within institutions of higher learning. San Juan argues that the struggle for Filipino languages “cannot be achieved except as part of the collective democratic struggles of other people of color and the vast majority of working citizens oppressed by a class-divided, racialized, and gendered order” (51).

It is this social order that Carlos Bulosan confronted in literature and labor organizing at the beginning of the 20^th century. The influential writings of Carlos Bulosan are widely available due in large part to the research of E. San Juan. In keeping with this work, San Juan builds upon Bulosan’s analysis in an assessment of the irrational conditions that continue to plague Filipinos in America in our present moment. In the chapter titled, “Revisiting Carlos Bulosan” San Juan requests that the reader not examine Bulosan’s writing as a sacred or finished text. Rather, he invites us to resume the unfinished project of Bulosan and the countless “others” who have worked to understand the challenges that confront racialized and subjugated peoples of America in order to prepare for a more humane and just tomorrow. E. San Juan’s examination of Bulosan’s life and legacy is a dialectical endeavor. The author highlights Bulosan’s life experiences that undoubtedly have influenced many. And yet, the author reminds us that individuals do not impose such an influence alone but by generations building on the labor of those who have come before.

The last chapter, “Tracking the Exile’s Flight: Mapping a Rendezvous” San Juan reproduces a speech he delivered to alumni of the Philippine Studies Program, a program that enabled university students from around the United States to gain college credit for their summer studies in the Philippines.[2] San Juan maintains that through critical travel experiences or “exposure trips” one can gain a critical standpoint of neoliberal globalization not provided by corporate media or by mainstream academic textbooks. The author argues that these personal experiences can provide critical points of analysis, especially when widened and applied to the conditions that entire groups of people (Filipinos) are situated. Throughout this chapter, San Juan’s use of historical materialism provides the reader with an important lens to examine the social contradictions of the Philippine Diaspora.

A common theme throughout Toward Filipino Self-Determination is that Filipinos have passed on a rich legacy dedicated to the projects of democracy, liberation, and self-determination. A new generation of culture workers, scholars, activists, and radical feminists is emerging with their own adapted strategies to bring forth a new society from the vestiges of the old.[3] Throughout his book E. San Juan reminds us that we are all located within arenas of battle, “between humanity and barbarism, between oppressed third world peoples fighting for survival and the rule of a dehumanized global capital” (166). He is astute in his analysis that in this historic struggle new ideas, imaginations, and strategies are needed that enables us to transform the world in which we live. This transformation requires understanding and such understanding can be furnished with theory.

Michael Viola is a doctoral student in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies (Urban Schooling) at the University of California, Los Angeles with research interests in critical pedagogy, critical methodologies, race studies, political economy, labor, and the Philippines.

[1] McLaren, Peter and Farahmandpur, Ramin. “Educational Policy and the Socialist

Imagination: Revolutionary Citizenship as a Pedagogy of Resistance.” Educational Policy. 15.343, 2001.

[2] University exchange programs to the Philippines, such as the very popular Philippine Studies Program (PSP) have been widely reduced or cut altogether due to the U.S. State Department travel warnings.

[3] Such examples within the United States include: the academic work of Jeff Cabusao, Peter Chua, Valerie Francisco, and Anne Lacsamana; the cultural production of Habi Arts in Los Angeles as well as the important music of hip hop artists Blue Scholars, Kiwi, and Bambu; and the radical feminism of such collectives as SIGAW in Los Angeles and Pinay sa Seattle, to name only a few.

Posted in COMMENTARY ON CURRENT EVENTS, CRITICAL THEORY, DISCOURSES ON CONTRADICTIONS, EXTRAPOLATIONS, SOCIOCRITICISM, SPECULATIVE PROVOCATIONS

E. SAN JUAN’s RACISM AND CULTURAL STUDIES: A commentary

philcsc — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 20:35:24 +0000

REVIEW OF

Racism and Cultural Studies: Critiques of Multiculturalist Ideology and the Politics of Difference by E. San Juan, Jr. (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002)

By Dr. Jeffrey Cabusao

Dept of Cultural Studies, Bryant University, Rhode Island

… needless deaths, suffering, humiliation, and violation of human rights can be attributed to racism… Racists are worldwide, planting their seed of racial superiority and national chauvinism. The real danger is when racists wield their evil with economic and political power to enforce policies that destabilize others, neutralize others, curtail the self-development and self-determination of others. We must not let the roots of racism spread for it is contagious. We must all work in concert with each other to stop the continuous creation of this dreadful disease– this scourge that has cursed this world. Much of this happens right here in our own backyard… “Our backyard” is USA– quite a large territory, but this is where the concentration of work must be.

–Yuri Kochiyama, Longtime Asian American activist

On October 26, I marched with over 200,000 people in Washington D.C. We passionately and critically denounced the U.S. “war against terrorism,” and proclaimed it to be a racist war. The imminent war on Iraq will destroy the lives of millions of innocent Third World peoples as well as the lives of the U.S. multiracial working class, many of whom will be sent to the front lines to sacrifice their lives for this imperialist war. The attacks on civil liberties and immigrant rights (for example, the racial profiling of Arab-Americans and others who look like “them”) must be situated alongside the recent intensified U.S. repression of national liberation movements in the so-called “Third World” (global South). The Philippines, a U.S. neocolony, has now captured the world’s attention as the second front in the “war against terrorism” after Afghanistan. In 1898 the Philippines (from which E. San Juan, Jr. hails) was violently colonized by the United States; it shares this history with Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, and Hawai’i. Currently, the Abu Sayaaf– a counterinsurgency tool created by the CIA and the Armed Forces of the Philippines– is used to justify the domination of the Philippines by the presence of thousands of U.S. troops. Recently, Colin Powell, whom prominent Afro-Caribbean American performer Harry Belafonte publicly called G.W. Bush’s “house slave,” declared the major progressive insurgency groups, the peasant-based New People’s Army and the Communist Party of the Philippines, part of the coalition called the National Democratic Front of the Philippines, as terrorist groups.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, in his The Souls of Black Folk (1903), DuBois wrote, with extraordinarily keen foresight, that the “problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line– the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea” (16). By centering racism in our critique of U.S. imperialism in the twenty-first century, are we in danger of blatant reductionism? Filmmaker Michael Moore doesn’t seem to think so. In the popular Bowling for Columbine (which is currently playing in movie theatres across the country), Moore attempts to make sense of the senseless massacre at Columbine high school (Colorado) several years ago. Deftly using the technique of collage, Moore situates the question of gun control within the larger context of the historical development of the US nation-state, which includes a long series of bloody U.S. imperialist conquests of Third World countries. In a candid interview, when asked why the United States is the most violent industrialized country in the world, Charleston Heston, the celebrity face of the NRA, pathetically mumbles something about the “ethnic conflict” in this country. Heston not only betrays his racist desire to protect, by bearing arms, his investment in whiteness (and all the psychological and material privileges that come with that subject position), but also touches upon the central nerve of the U.S. imperial imaginary– that of white supremacy and the racist subjugation and exploitation of millions of working and poor bodies of color around the globe. In this milieu of intensified global crisis and emergency, Cultural Studies must broaden its scope to include the hinterlands of Empire and engage with the many worldwide who, because they are deeply concerned with peace, genuine democracy, and social justice, are taking a firm stand to challenge the brutality of U.S. imperial hegemony.

E. San Juan, Jr., one of our most important and prolific Filipino cultural theorists and a major critic of Establishment postcolonial discipline, offers a crucial intervention for our times. In his previous book, Beyond Postcolonial Theory (1998), San Juan argues that the progressive insurgent forces of the Philippine National Democratic mass movement play a vital part of the “postcolonial” subaltern resistance, but have been muted and silenced by post-al studies. San Juan’s latest Racism and Cultural Studies (Duke UP, 2002) expands this critique in fresh and innovative ways that speak directly to our current collective desire for liberation and freedom for all.

Boldly pushing against the historical limitations of fashionable theoretical trends of the academy, San Juan urgently asks us to reclaim the various rich and dynamic Marxist traditions (both Western and Third World Marxisms) of theorizing the connection between culture/knowledge production and the struggle for radical social transformation (the twin tasks of ideological and material struggle). In Racism and Cultural Studies (RCS), San Juan offers a rigorous historical materialist method for regrounding the dominant “new times=new politics” model of contemporary Cultural Studies. This alternative methodology allows us to shift from reified notions of difference to a dialectical regrounding in which difference is conceived as, in the words of Red Feminist Teresa Ebert, “difference within a material system of exploitation” (see her Ludic Feminism for an excellent critique of post-al difference). This shifting of grounds enables San Juan to bring to the fore the importance of analyzing the complex ways in which difference– race, gender, sexuality– is historically produced and reproduced within class society. A leitmotif of this book is the advancement of Marx’s challenge to idealism. It is not enough to interpret the world. We must collectively and creatively struggle for a radically transformed society in which difference will no longer be produced by a racialized and gendered division of labor (exploitative social relations of production). Instead, genuine differences will emerge: so that each can live “according to his/her needs and abilities.”

One of the main goals of RCS is to confront the insidious ways in which racism is gendered, sexualized, and “naturalized” through U.S. nationalism. RCS is an advancement of the central argument of San Juan’s earlier, groundbreaking Racial Formations/Critical Transformations (RF/CT, 1992), now a classic in U.S. Ethnic Studies. There he argues that one of the major achievements of the organizing efforts and the intellectual/cultural production of people of color and their allies during the late 1960s/early 1970s is a deeper and more sophisticated historical materialist analysis of the following: 1.) the United States as a “racial-socioeconomic formation,” and 2.) “race as an international political force” (45). Instead of falling prey to an orthodox Marxist rendering of race as epiphenomenal, race and class are theorized as dialectically intertwined via the concept of internal colonialism (Robert Blauner, 1972). The underlying assumption of this “Third World” political worldview is that “(r)acially categorized groups [within the U.S. nation-state] like Blacks, Chicanos, Native Americans, and Asians are both exploited as workers and oppressed as colonized peoples” (ibid). Using this analytic framework of internal colonialism, people of color within the United States aligned themselves in solidarity with the national liberation movements of the Third World. Asian American activist-teacher Glenn Omatsu recalls that the Asian American movement, which emerged from grassroots organizing, developed an international theoretical perspective. The movement linked, in theory and in praxis, various lessons gained from struggles both within the internal U.S. colonies as well as within the Third World. Asian American activists were drawn to “Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Kim Il-sung, W.E.B. DuBois, Frederick Douglass, Paulo Freire, the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords, the women’s liberation movement, and many other resistance struggles” (31, 1994).

Drawing upon his earlier work in RF/CT and the accomplishments of past insurgent struggles of Third World peoples in the belly of the beast, San Juan posits the thesis of the United States as a racial polity as the cardinal premise of RCS (25). The philosopher Charles Mills proposed this thesis in The Racial Contract (1997); however, scholars of U.S. Ethnic Studies have not engaged it. RCS elaborates the idea of a U.S. racial polity and offers us sharper theoretical tools at a time when our intellectual landscape is almost completely saturated by contemporary ludic globalization theories (Hardt and Negri come to mind) that valorize civil society (abstracted from the state) in ways that culturalize hegemony and ultimately displace collective working class and subaltern agency. RCS, in its examination of U.S. nationalism, emphasizes the civil society/state dialectic in the production and reproduction of US imperial hegemony.

RCS returns us to the basics of understanding the centrality of racism within U.S. society, while simultaneously offering an inventory and an advancement of dialectical methodological approaches that we can use to critique how the U.S. racial polity came to be, so that we can radically transform it. San Juan resituates racism within the larger framework of U.S. and global capitalism. Racism, particularly its justifying ideology of white supremacy, is the organizing principle of the division of labor and unequal distribution of resources and wealth within U.S. society. And, now, given the immense asymmetrical power relations between the global North and South, one can no longer ignore how racism organizes global capitalism (the international racialized and gendered division of labor) and sustains U.S. imperialist aggression around the globe.

Just as Engels, in his Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1880), reminded his readers of the late nineteenth century that the difference between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat is one that is historically created by capitalism in order to maximize profits, San Juan reminds us of how contemporary global capitalism produces and utilizes “difference” (racialized and gendered) to reproduce itself as a system of exploitation. San Juan acknowledges that we do, however, live in “new times,” but this “new-ness” must be properly contextualized: “New post-Cold War realignments compel us to return to a historical-materialist analysis of political economy and its overdeterminations in order to grasp the new racial politics of transnationality and multiculturalism” (42). Richard Appelbaum’s meditation on capitalism and “difference” can help us contextualize our “new times.” He argues that capitalism “has always reinforced class divisions with divisions based on race, ethnicity, gender, and other forms of ascription” (Appelbaum quoted in RCS, 42). San Juan refers to recent scholarship that illustrate Appelbaum’s claim. Edna Bonacich (1996) critiques how multiculturalism, as an ideology, ultimately justifies the exploitation of the surplus labor of immigrant women of color in the Los Angeles garment district. Glenn Omatsu (1994) examines the role of racism in a “one-sided class war” against the U.S. multiracial working class. Racism divides people of color, for example Korean Americans and African Americans in Los Angeles, in order to bolster the “fierce class war waged by the U.S. corporate elite against both the U.S. working masses and their international rivals (Japan, Germany)” (RCS, 42). Transnational corporations, under the control of the U.S. corporate elite, are able to move across borders to exploit the surplus labor of Asian and Latina women in the internal colonies of the United States as well as in the “free-trade zones” of the global South. It is time that those on the U.S. Left who believe in international proletarianism must reckon with the fact that 8 million Filipina domestic workers, or overseas “contract workers” (OCWs), are exploited all around the globe– the Middle East, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, various European countries (ibid). On an average, four OCWs return daily to the Philippines in coffins (Aguilar, 2002). To be sure, many Third World peoples do not have time for ludic games that posit transnational corporations (TNCs) as “free floating signifiers,” a post-al reading that renders TNCs completely unaccountable to any one nation-state. What is needed is an unflinching critique of the U.S. nation-state and its ideology of white supremacy/racism. U.S. imperialism, then, must be at the center of our analysis if we are truly committed to the struggle for social justice.

RCS unequivocally argues that the problem of the 21^st century continues to be the color-line, and that we must advance the race-class dialectic, developed by past insurgent subaltern struggles, for our contemporary times. This project includes not only grasping the historical trajectory of the U.S. nation-state as a racial order, but also seriously critiquing the purpose and function of U.S. nationalism in late global capitalism. In other words, given the re-composition of global capitalism within our post-Cold War moment, we must give priority to interrogating the race/nation dialectic upon which the U.S. nation-state operates. The way to understand this particular dialectic is twofold. First, we must understand how the U.S. nation-state developed as a racial formation within the context of global capitalism (in relation to other nation-states, the formation of a core and periphery, etc.). The U.S. nation-state continues to rely upon its racialized genocidal history, which is situated “around the axis of white supremacy,” in order to legitimate its imperial hegemony around the globe. Second, we must then understand how U.S. nationalism– “the self-identification of peoples based on the perceived commonality of symbols, beliefs, traditions, and so on” (Giddens quoted in RCS, 36)– functions as the very ideology that produces and reproduces racialized class exploitation within and without the boundaries of the U.S. nation-state. This process of disentangling U.S. nationalism and the U.S. nation-state as separate, yet interconnected historical constructs, is extremely useful for our efforts in fusing both ends of the civil society/state dialectic against the current of ludic post-al logic. The overarching emancipatory vision of RCS is one that anticipates the collective counterhegemonic struggles that must, and will, emerge from the U.S. internal colonies. A crucial task for the U.S. Left is expressed in the following:

What is imperative for the oppressed working masses, especially the internally colonized people of color in the United States, is a radical critique of U.S. nationalism as the enabling ideology of racialized class domination (Giroux 1995; San Juan 1999b). White supremacist practices inform the functional core of this ideology. Given the historical specificity of U.S. capitalism, class struggle cannot be theorized adequately outside the conjunctures of the racial formation in which it acquires valency (RCS, 33).

One of the movements for social justice that is currently evolving from within the U.S. internal colonies is one for Black reparations. Prominent African American activist-academic Manning Marable argues that the demand for Black reparations exposes how racism has deeply penetrated both U.S. civil society and the state: “the unequal distribution of economic resources, land, and access to opportunities for social development, which was sanctioned by the federal government.” The demand for Black reparations forces white society to confront the violent history of the United States, and how that history (genocide, slavery, colonization) is replicated, by the state and its various ideological and repressive apparatuses, in the daily lives of people of color. Without a doubt, the fight for Black reparations is a necessary first step toward the abolition of “whiteness” and white supremacy within U.S. society (see Roediger, 1994). RCS emphatically argues for the need for a radical structural transformation of our racist class society: “without a thoroughgoing overhaul of the social division of labor and legally sanctioned property relations sedimented in state and civil society, any claim to achieving genuine equality will remain a hypocritical formality” (RCS, 27). Mobilizing for this kind of structural transformation also requires a flexible, yet historically concrete analysis of ideology, culture, and the development of collective human agency. This is where Cultural Studies can intervene.

Cultural Studies must engage itself with current movements for social justice, both here and abroad, if it is committed to social transformation. Only social movements (Black reparations, anti-war mobilization, multiethnic labor struggles, working-class and peasant based Third World national liberation movements, international Palestinian support movement, etc.) have the power to break open a space for intellectuals to unlock the liberatory potential of cultural studies. The history of Cultural Studies (CS)– from working-class British Cultural Studies to U.S. Ethnic, Women’s, and Lesbian/Gay Studies– proves this point. By aligning itself with, and committing itself to building, mass movements for radical social transformation, CS will be able to challenge how it has been institutionalized by the corporatized academy and eventually claim its historic responsibility. Marx reminds us that it is within the site of culture that oppressed and exploited women and men begin to challenge their dehumanizing conditions. It is that space where they struggle to make sense of the racialized and gendered contradictions of class society. Gramsci’s theories of hegemony and counterhegemony are extremely useful as we attempt to critique the ideology of U.S. nationalism. At this historical moment, only a multiethnic united front mass movement against the U.S. drive to war with Iraq can liberate the repressed radical traditions of struggle within the field of Cultural Studies, ranging from Raymond Williams and Jean-Paul Sartre to radical U.S. “Third World” cultural workers of color such as Carlos Bulosan and Audre Lorde. The emerging anti-war movement will be able to envision a radical alternative to global capitalism only if people of color/Third World peoples play a central role, and only if white progressives challenge, with every fiber in their bodies, their investment in whiteness/white supremacy, which undergirds the U.S. nationalism of this impending imperialist war.

Far from advocating a return to economically deterministic, vulgar Marxism, San Juan’s RCS provides a breathtaking inventory and synthesis of various figures from both Western and Third World Marxist traditions– running the gamut from Antonio Gramsci to Frantz Fanon– that provide examples of how to dialectically challenge current post-al ludic temptations of abstracting civil society from the state, culturalizing hegemony, divorcing nation from class, and conflating the nationalism of oppressed neocolonial nation-states with the nationalism of oppressor nation-states. Each chapter within RCS expands upon the critique of the US nation-state as a racial polity. San Juan addresses an extraordinarily broad range of critical topics within Cultural Studies such as the following: sexuality and US nationalism within late global capitalism, Asian American literary studies, critiques of ethnicity paradigms, postmodern and postcolonial literary and cultural criticism, the interchange between Western and Third World Marxisms (San Juan provides an absolutely brilliant reading of Raymond Williams and Frantz Fanon).

The extended afterword, which focuses on the current Philippine mass movement for genuine national sovereignty in relation to the Filipino Diaspora, illustrates the dialectical method of global cognitive mapping proposed throughout the book. Here, San Juan unleashes a powerful critique of the use of post-al theories of transnationalism within contemporary studies of Filipina/o experiences (see San Juan’s critique of Nicole Constable’s Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Filipina Workers, 366-368). The use of this sort of anti-foundationalist analytical framework, whether intentional or not, ultimately flattens the unequal relations of power between the United States and the Philippines (the latter being a neocolony of the former). Political economy and history are sacrificed for micro-politics. The agency of the Filipina domestic worker, then, is located purely in the politics of consumption (asking for more catsup and napkins at McDonald’s, an example from Constable’s work). The politics of production– and the process by which exploitative social relations of production can be transformed– are completely erased. Filipina subalterns have always spoken, but, unfortunately, theories of transnationalism only muffle their voices of struggle and disregard their potential for collective transformation. The dialectical interaction between organized forms of resistance within the Diaspora and the progressive mass movement for genuine national sovereignty in the Philippines will ensure the development of collective Filipina/o agency (RCS, 380-381).

An interdisciplinary tour de force, Racism and Cultural Studies offers timely critiques and suggestions for advancing a unique “methodology of the oppressed” that may, for the moment, seem submerged or repressed in the industrialized global North, but is, as I write, being tested and refined in the overexploited global South where the wretched of the earth have been proclaiming through protracted organized mass struggle (based on a worker-peasant alliance) that “another world is possible.” In the “Third World,” subalterns have uttered this expression long before it became the clarion call of the young and courageous anti-globalization movement in the North. I urge all of us to engage San Juan’s Racism and Cultural Studies– to learn from his lessons in dialectical analysis and his suggestions for creating strategies for cognitive mapping, to listen to his impassioned appeal to activists, insurgent intellectuals (both organic and academic), and all democratic minded people to critique the central roles that racism and U.S. nationalism play in the process by which global capitalism wrecks havoc on the daily lives of millions all over the world. After a careful reading of this book, one will appreciate its ability to articulate in new and imaginative ways a politics of hope in these perilous times– its ability to provide an intervention that can, to quote Raymond Williams, “make hope practical, rather than despair convincing” (quoted in RCS, 313).

References:

Aguilar, Delia D. “ Globalization, Feminism, and Filipino Diaspora.” 2002. Forthcoming in The Red Critique. http://www.redcritique.org

Appelbaum, Richard P. “Multiculturalism and Flexibility: Some New Directions in Global Capitalism.” In Mapping Multiculturalism, ed. Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

Blauner, Robert. Racial Oppression in America. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.

Bonacich, Edna. “The Class Question in Global Capitalism.” In Mapping Multiculturalism, ed. Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

DuBois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. New York: Vintage Books/Library of America,

1990.

Ebert, Teresa. Ludic Feminism and After. Ann Arbor, Michigan UP, 1996.

Engels, Friedrich. Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. 1880, 1892. In The Marx-Engels Reader. 2^nd ed. Robert C. Tucker, ed. New York/London: WW Norton & Company, 1978.

Kochiyama, Yuri. “Challenges of Diversity: Talking the Talk to Walking the Walk” (Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, November 2, 1996.) InDiscover your Mission: Selected Speeches & Writings of Yuri Kochiyama. Russell Muranaka, et al (eds.) Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 1998.

Marable, Manning. “In Defense of Black Reparations.” November 09, 2002. ZNet Commentary http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2002-10/30marable.cfm

Mills, Charles. The Racial Contract. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Moore, Michael. Director/Producer/Writer. Bowling for Columbine. Alliance Atlantis and United Artists Presentation; Salter Street Films and VIF 2 Production; A Dog Eat Dog Films Production, 2002.

Omatsu, Glenn. “The ‘Four Prisons’ and the Movements of Liberation.” In The State of Asian America: Activism and Resistance in the 1990s. Karin Aguilar-San Juan, ed. Boston, MA: South End Press, 1994.

Roediger, David. Towards the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics, and Working Class History. London; New York: Verso, 1994.

San Juan, Jr., E. Racism and Cultural Studies: Critiques of Multiculturalist Ideology and the Politics of Difference. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002.

_____________. Beyond Postcolonial Theory. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.

Posted in COMMENTARY ON CURRENT EVENTS, CRITICAL THEORY, DISCOURSES ON CONTRADICTIONS, EXTRAPOLATIONS, Race & Ethnic Studies, SPECULATIVE PROVOCATIONS, UNTIMELY OBSERVATIONS Tagged: cultural studies, E. San Juan, ethnic studies, Marxism, Racism

INTERVENTIONS by E. San Juan, Jr.

philcsc — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 16:13:04 +0000

TIMELY INTERVENTIONS IN THE CRISIS OF CAPITALIST GLOBALIZATION

Noted Filipino scholar E. SAN JUAN, JR. intervenes again in the urgent debates in racial conflicts and international relations with four scholarly works in the last two years.
In the midst of the flag-waving lunacy afflicting the U.S. after 9/11 and the current racist war on national liberation struggles, San Juan seems to be a solitary “voice in the wilderness.” His new collection of essays on cultural theory and comparative politics, IN THE WAKE OF TERROR: Class, Race, Nation, Ethnicity in the Postmodern World (Lexington Books, 2007), offers critiques of U.S. interventions and the destructive effects of globalized neoliberalism in culture and humanistic studies. It focuses on the dialectic of class, race and ethnicity in the context of global capitalism.
The other important work to be released by Palgrave Macmillan (2008) this September is U.S. IMPERIALISM AND REVOLUTION IN THE PHILIPPINES. Here San Juan reviews the record of U.S. colonialism and neocolonial domination of the Philippines, centering on a critique of the ideological mechanisms of cultural and political control in imperial discourse and practices. The book contains documents on the human-rights violations of the Arroyo regime, including the verdict of the Permanent People’s Tribunal Session 2 at The Hague, Netherlands, last March 2007.
Recently released by the Edwin Mellen Press this year is CRITIQUE AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION: LESSONS FROM ANTONIO GRAMSCI, MIKHAIL BAKHTIN AND RAYMOND WILLIAMS. This work attempts to interpret and evaluyate the historical-materialist critiquye of modern society by three progressive thinkers: Gramsci, Bakhtin and Williams. Precipitated by the early crisis of global capitalism in the 20th century, the insights of Gramsci into hegemony and national-popular culture ushered the birth of Cultural Studies and a wide-ranging world-systems analysis. Bakhtin’s concept of the “sign as the arena of class struggle” has offered a radical break with the elitist mystifications of deconstructive postmodernism. Deployingh Gramsci’s theory of strategic intervention into the political economy of complex social formations and using Bakhtin’s dialogic imagination, Williams explored the contradictory “structures of feeling” in a world with multi-layered conflicts across class, gender, race, etc.; with diverse communities harboring their singular visions or democratic socialism. Gramsci, Bakhtin, and Williams’ exemplary critical reflectios continue to inspire concerned intellectuals everywhere. From a dialectical inquiry into controversies and arguments engaged by these three major thinkers, E. San Juan’s scholarly project seeks to articulate a transformative praxis useful for all activist cultural workers today confronting the demise of the barbaric neoliberal enpire of fianance-capital headed by the moribund U.S.nation-state.
San Juan’s book TOWARD FILIPINO SELF-DETERMINATION, to be released this August 2009 by the State University of New York Press, Albany, updates his previous works on the Filipino diaspora found in FROM EXILE TO DIASPORA (Westview Press) and AFTER POSTCOLONIALISM (Rowman and Littlefield), with substantial explorations into the situation and plight of Overseas Filipino Workers, now about 9 million scattered around the planet. Is the term/concept “transnational” appropriate to an emergent nation? Perry Anderson gave the most powerful criticism of the neoliberal use of “transnational” in his Editorial Note to NEW LEFT REVIEW, issue 14 (March-April 2002), which many scholars have failed to take heed. San Juan rejects the whole alibi and fraud behind “transnationalism” as well as “cosmopolitanism,” to which Filipinos and Filipino Americans continue to succumb. Apart from this, San Juan provides the only left/radical alternative to the current Filipino-American assimilationist, self-serving, and opportunist tendency in the U.S. academy, as well as those in the Philippines and elsewhere, who seek recognition and kudos from the Western/global North Establishment.

A Filipino resident in the U.S., San Juan is an internationally recognized cultural critic whose works have been translated into French, German, Russian, Chinese, Spanish, and other languages. San Juan’s two previous books, Racial Formations/Critical Transformations (Humanity Books), now a classic in ethnic studies, and After Postcolonialism: Remapping Philippines-U.S. Confrontations (Rowman and Littlefield), won the Myers Human Rights Awards. He has also received a MELUS award and the Asian American Association Prize for distinguished contributions to the discipline of cultural studies.
San Juan was previously a Fulbright lecturer at the University of the Philippines, Ateneo de Manila University, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, and visiting lecturer at National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. San Juan’s previous works include The Philippine Temptation (Temple UP); Beyond Postcolonial Theory (Palgrave Macmillan), Racism and Cultural Studies (Duke UP); Working Through the Contradictions (Bucknell UP); and Himagsik (De La Salle UP). Available in the Philippines are:Allegories of Resistance; a re-issue of Toward a People’s Literature, and a new collection of poems, Sapagkat Iniibig Kita, all published by the University of the Philippines Press. Forthcoming are Balikbayang Sinta: An E. San Juan Reader (Ateneo U Press) and From Globalization Toward National Liberation (U.P. Press). San Juan taught at several universities, including the University of California, Brooklyn College of CUNY, University of Connecticut, and Washington State University. He was recently a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center at Bellagio, Italy; 2009 fellow of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass. –##

[ Released by PHILIPPINES CULTURAL STUDIES CENTER, Storrs, CT 06268, USA ]

Posted in COMMENTARY ON CURRENT EVENTS, REVIEWS Tagged: E. San Juan, Filipino Amerians, Filipino Diaspora, Sonny San Juan

AFRICAN AMERICAN SOLDIERS IN THE PHILIPPINE REVOLUTION

philcsc — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 15:34:08 +0000

AFRICAN AMERICAN SOLDIERS IN THE PHILIPPINE REVOLUTION (1899-1903):

SOLIDARITY IN PRACTICE AGAINST THE U.S. EMPIRE

by E. San Juan, Jr.

2009 Fellow, W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University

Let him never dream that his bullet’s scream went wide of its island mark,

Home to the heart of his darling land where she stumbled and sinned in the dark.

–WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY, “On A Soldier

Fallen in the Philippines” (1901)

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in American and the islands of the sea.

–W.E. B. DU BOIS, The Souls of Black Folk

(1903)

God damn the U.S. for its vile conduct in the Philippine Isles.

–WILLIAM JAMES (1899), Anti-Imperialist League Records

Unless news of a disaster grabs the headlines—the eruption of a volcano that drove the US military forces from Clark and Subic bases two decades ago, or of American missionaries kidnapped by the Muslim separatists, the Abu Sayyaf (labeled a terrorist group by the US State Department in 2003), the Philippines scarcely figures in the U.S. public consciousness. Not even as a tourist destination, or as the source of mail order brides and domestic help. Some mistake the Philippines as islands in the Caribbean, or somewhere near Hawaii or Tahiti; others wondered then if “them Philippians were the folks St. Paul wrote the epistle to.”

September 11, 2001 changed this somewhat. When U.S. occupation troops in Iraq continued to suffer casualties every day after the war officially ended, pundits began to supply capsule histories comparing their situation with those of troops in the Philippines during the Filipino-American War (1899-1902). A New York Times op-ed summed up the lesson in its title, “In 1901 Philippines, Peace Cost More Lives Than Were Lost in War” (2 July 2003, B1)). An article in the Los Angeles Times contrasted the simplicity of McKinley’s “easy” goal of annexation with George W. Bush’s ambition to “create a new working democracy as soon as possible” (20 July 2003, M2). Immediately after the proclaimed defeat of the Taliban and the rout of Osama bin Laden’s forces in Afghanistan, the Philippines became the second front in the U.S.-led war on terrorism, with hundreds of US “Special Forces” re-invading the former colony.

Necrological Rites

Few Americans know about the Spanish-American War of 1898—school textbooks allow only a few paragraphs for this “splendid little war.” After Spain’s surrender in the Treaty of Paris, December 1898, the US Empire began with the military rule over Cuba, and annexation of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam and later on, Hawaii and parts of Samoa. Fewer know about the Filipino American War which began in February 1899 and lasted until 1913, with the Filipino Muslims sustaining the heaviest casualties in publicized massacres. This chapter in US history is only now beginning to merit some attention in the wake of the adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan (Boot 2002; Kaplan 2003).

My story of African American soldiers in the Philippine revolution—US officials called it “an insurrection”—might begin with President William McKinley.While there was public support for the war against Spain, pitched as a crusade to liberate the Cubans from Spanish tyranny, there was fierce debate over acquiring the Philippine Islands. This expansionist zeal of the “yellow journalists,” commercial houses, and militarists was opposed by an organized nation-wide group called the Anti-Imperialist League. It counted Andrew Carnegie, former president Grover Cleveland, George Boutwell, co-founder of the Republican Party; and numerous personalities such as Mark Twain, William James, William Dean Howells, Jane Addams, George Santayana, and others. Besieged by such a crowd, McKinley confessed to a visiting delegation of Methodist church leaders how he sought the light of “Almighty God” to advise him what to do with the Philippines, and God told him that, among other things, “there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace to do the very best we could by them….and then I went to sleep, and slept soundly” (quoted in Schirmer and Shalom, 1987, 22-23). It was this sound sleep and McKinley’s policy of “Benevolent Assimilation” that led to US casualties of 4, 234 soldiers killed, about 3,000 wounded, and anywhere from 250,000 to 1.4 million “new-caught sullen peoples” of the islands forever silenced.

With the 1898 Treaty of Paris, Spain agreed to cede—that is, sell—the Philippines to the United States for $20 million, even though it had already lost control of the islands except for its Manila garrison. But the Filipinos, as William Blum puts it, “who had already proclaimed their own independent republic, did not take kindly to being treated like a plot of uninhabited real estate. Accordingly, an American force numbering initially 50,000 [126,500, all in all] proceeded to instill in the population a proper appreciation of their status,” gaining for the US its “longest-lasting and most conspicuous colony” (2004, 39). Admiral Dewey himself, the hero of the battle of Manila Bay, reflected on how the Peace Conference “scarcely comprehended that a rebellion was included with the purchase.” Henry Adams wrote Theodore Roosevelt to express his alarm that the US was ready “to plunge into an inevitable war to conquer the Philippines, contrary to every professor or so-called principle in our lives and history. I turn green in bed at midnight if I think of the horror of a year’s warfare in the Philippines where…we must slaughter a million or two of foolish Malays in order to give them the comforts of flannel petticoats and electric railways” (Ocampo 1998, 249).

While postmodern scholars today expound on the need then of Americans to assert manhood, moral superiority, and so on, material interests were indubitably paramount in the turn-of-the-century discourse on progress and civilization. U.S. policy decisions and consequent practices were framed in a “regime of truth” based on the now well-known politics of colonial representation. Roxanne Lynn Doty (1996) describes this discursive economy that has since framed North-South relations, in Foucaultian terms, as the denial of the transcendental international signifier, sovereignty, to Filipinos and other newly conquered indigenes; that is, the denial of the capacity to exercise agency. Force is justified because the annexed or colonized are unruly, undisciplined, rebellious, disposed to resist the laws established by the civilizing missionaries . What stood out in the cry for colonial possession is the need for a naval port and springboard for penetrating the China market and demonstrating American power in the Asia/Pacific region. This ideological legitimacy for the occupation was voiced by Senator Alfred Beveridge, among others. After rehearsing the profits to be gained from trade and natural resources, he repeated a familiar refrain from past conquests of the Native Americans, the Mexicans, and other indigenes:

They [natives of the Philippines] are a barbarous race, modified by three centuries of contact with a decadent race. The Filipino is the South Sea Malay, put through a process of three hundred years of superstition in religion, dishonesty in dealing, disorder in habits of industry, and cruelty, caprice, and corruption in government. It is barely possible that 1,000 men in all the archipelago are capable of self-government in the Anglo-Saxon sense (Schirmer and Shalom 1987, 25)

This was echoed by General Arthur McArthur who thought the natives needed “bayonet treatment for at least a decade,” while Theodore Roosevelt felt that the Filipinos needed a good beating so they could become “good Injuns” (cited in Ignacio 2004). The “barbarous” natives, however, resisted for a time longer than anticipated, offering lessons that still have to be learned, even after Korea and Vietnam, and the quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite neoconservative revisionists that the US “savage war of peace” in the Philippines was humane, humanitarian, and honorable under the circumstances, US intervention to annex the Philippines continues to haunt the conscience of some humanists and historians of international relations.

Counting the Victims

Current controversy among scholars surrounds the tally of Filipino victims of US pacification. Journalist Bernard Fall cited the killing three million Filipinos in “the bloodiest colonial war (in proportion to population) ever fought by a white power in Asia,” comparable to the carnage in Vietnam. Describing it as “among the cruelest conflicts in the annals of Western imperialism,” Stanley Karnow, author of the award-winning In Our Image, counts 200,000 civilians and 20,000 soldiers (1989, 194), while others give 600,000. Filipina historian Luzviminda Francisco arrives at the figure of 1.4 million Filipinos sacrificed for Uplift and Christianization—in a country ruled by Christian Spain for three hundred years. While Kipling at the outbreak of the war urged the US to “take up the White Man’s burden” and tame the “new-caught sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child,” Mark Twain wrote some of his fiery pieces denouncing “Benevolent Assimilation” as the “new name of the musket” and acidly harped on the “collateral damage” of the US “civilizing mission”: “Thirty thousand [US soldiers] killed a million [Filipinos]. It seems a pity that the historian let that get out; it is really a most embarrassing circumstance” (1992, 62). Recently Gore Vidal stirred up the hornet’s nest when he wrote in the New York Review of Books:

Between the years 1899 and 1913 the United States of America wrote the darkest pages of its history. The invasion of the Philippines, for no other reason than acquiring imperial possessions, prompted a fierce reaction of the Filipino people… 400,000 Filipino “insurrectos” died under the American fire and one million Filipino civilians died because of the hardship, mass killings and scorched earth tactics carried out by the Americans. In total the American war against a peaceful people who fairly ignored the existence of the Americans until their arrival wiped out 1/6 of the population of the country….Our policy in the Philippines was genocide. We were not there to liberate or even defend a ‘liberty-loving’ people, we were there to acquire those rich islands and if we had to kill the entire population we would have done so. Just as we had killed the Indians in the century before (some of our best troops in the Philippines were former Indian fighters) and as we would kill Southeast Asians later in this century (1981).

In Search of the Dissenter

Whatever the exact figures of the dead, this landscape or theater of war was surely surveyed and closely inspected by one corporal David Fagen, an African American soldier, after he landed in June 1899. The Filipino revolutionary army was beleaguered and on the defensive, having suffered several defeats in Manila, Caloocan and Malolos, and the US was on the way to winning the war. It was only a matter of time that superior force would reign supreme.

Fagen was one among fifteen to thirty deserters from four regiments of “Buffalo Soldiers”—the 9^th and 10^th Cavalry, and the 23^rd and 24th Infantry– dispatched to the Philippines in July and August 1899. Seven thousand African Americans were involved in the war. After fighting the Native Americans as “Buffalo Soldiers,” these four regiments were mobilized for the Spanish American War. As the New York State Military Museum reminds us, the use of black soldiers by the War Department conformed to the belief that black soldiers were “naturally adapted to survive the tropical climate.” In fact, the 7^th, 8^th, 9^th and 10^th US Volunteer Infantry were later formed in response to the government need for soldiers “immune to tropical diseases.” Incidentally, it was members of the 10^th Cavalry that used its “Indian fighting skills” to save Theodore Roosevelt and his “Rough Riders” from certain extermination. But they never received recognition equal to Roosevelt’s. When the Philippine resistance proved tougher than the officials estimated, the War Department recruited two regiments of black volunteers, the Forty-Eight and Forty-Ninth Infantry and sent them to the Philippines in early 1900 to stay up to the official end of the war.

We know the names of seven of about twenty-nine African Americans who deserted—their names have been expurgated from ordinary historical accounts. Deserters from the military are never mentioned in official histories, much less in approved textbooks and government documentaries. Only Fagen of Company I of the 24^th Infantry seems to have survived in civic memory because he joined the revolutionary army of General Emilio Aguinaldo, the beleaguered president of the first Philippine Republic. Fagen’s courage and skill as a guerilla leader earned him the trust of his Filipino comrades. As captain of his unit, Fagen led skirmishes against the pursuing troops of General Funston who offered a $600 reward for his head. A report of his “supposed killing” failed to convince even the U.S. Army, so Fagen continues to live on, at last arriving at his niche in the American National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2000).

Before describing the circumstances surrounding Fagen’s defection, I should state at the outset that my interest is not so much in the personal life and biographical circumstances of Fagen as in his position as an indexical sign, a pedagogical signifier ( if you like) of intersubjective or interethnic relations. It would of course be useful to have complete biographical details about Fagen and his other companions, and a full disclosure of all government documents on all the incidents of the war in which the soldiers participated. My interest, however, is in the political, ethical, and philosophical—dare one use the term “ideological”– issues. What I am concerned with in this historic event in which Fagen and seven other African American soldiers were involved, is its potential as an allegorical trope, an exemplary figure (for some, an exemplum), of the politics of self-determination for enslaved and subjugated communities.

From the conventional optic, Fagen’s decision to join the Philippine anti-colonial revolution was a treasonous act, a violation of his oath of loyalty to the US military and government. But given the situation of African Americans at that time in US post-reconstruction history, in the context of what some describe as an apartheid caste-system sanctioned by the 1896 Plessy versus Ferguson judgment and other laws, one might ask: Is Fagen’s status that of a full citizen whose word to uphold the authority of the state is uncompromised? Is Fagen’s decision to fight the invasion (under Filipino leadership) simply that of a soldier citizen, or could it not be read as an allegory of the black nation’s struggle for self-determination? If the United States’ war against the Philippine republic that had virtually wrested power from colonial Spain a war of colonial conquest, within this framework, can we not regard Fagen’s refusal to be part of the State’s violence a quintessential act of political dissent and his joining the enemy as an act of rebellion against the racial State?

Given the domination of white-racial supremacy, Fagen’s act may be taken as a complete repudiation of that juridical-political order. His refusal to surrender confirms his choice as a moral and political act of self-determination—both on a personal and collective dimension. To commit oneself to join a revolutionary movement resisting a colonial power and its history of slavery and racialized subjugation of African Americans, is to reaffirm the right of collective self-determination. It is to reaffirm a long durable tradition of revolt against a slave-system. Further, in contradistinction to the maroon revolts of the past which sought to restore a pre-capitalist or pre-feudal order in an isolated place, Fagen’s decision to join the Filipino anti-colonial struggle—a struggle comparable to Haiti’s revolution against the French, with the qualification that the U.S. in 1899 was a fully industrialized capitalist power–is to reaffirm a new level of dissent which, at the threshold of the era of finance-capital and wars for the division of the world into colonies and imperial metropoles, acquires a global transnational resonance. This concrete universality of Fagen’s individual revolt taken as a symbolic act at the beginning of the century of revolutions and intercontinental wars, is what I would like to explore further in connection with a quite distinct strain in African American political thought, dating back to Frederick Douglass and earlier reflections on slave revolts up to W.E. B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, C.L. R. James, Harry Haywood, Harold Cruse, Nelson Peery, and others. This is a modest exercise in a transformative critique of cosmopolitan, possessive individualist—shall we say, neoliberal– reason.

Historical Panorama

Before focusing on the figure of Fagen as an African American rebel-soldier, it might be useful to paint him against the historical landscape of the time. The war against the Spanish Empire was quite brief—indeed, “a splendid little war,” in John Hay’s terms. After Theodore Roosevelt’s “fabled” storming of San Juan Hill and the surrender of the Spanish forces in Santiago, Cuba, followed by the passage of the Teller amendment, that episode might have concluded with the Treaty of Paris in December 1998. But strong opposition to colonial annexation of the Philippines delayed its Senate ratification.

Why would the United States want to acquire a colony? The major reason is the need of the ascendant commercial, industrial and military interests to penetrate the markets and natural resources of Asia. The initial desire (as expressed by Senator Beveridge, among others) was for a gateway to China. The Philippines offered a strategic location for a naval base, a military launching-pad, in addition to the immense value of its raw materials, above all mineral deposits. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge emphasized the potential market of the Philippines’ ten million inhabitants, thus carrying out McKinley’s adherence to “the great American doctrine of protection to American industries.” President McKinley—whose wife was obsessed in converting the pagan “Igorottes”– pushed for colonization under the slogan of “Benevolent Assimilation” of the colonized subjects under US sovereignty (for a summary of the historical context, see Constantino 1970, 67-91).

By the time Commodore George Dewey destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay in May 1998, the Filipino revolutionary forces under General Emilio Aguinaldo had practically liberated the whole country and was besieging the Spanish garrison in the Walled City of Manila. Dewey held Aguinaldo at bay with false promises of US support. The Spaniards, after a mock battle already agreed upon, decided to surrender to General Merritt on August 13. Earlier, on June 12, General Aguinaldo formally proclaimed the independence of the Philippines from Spain; and on June 23, a revolutionary government was formed with provisions for administration of the entire country. Thus before the arrival of the first US expeditionary troops on June 30, there was already a functioning Philippine government operating nationally and locally, which commanded the loyalty of the people. But despite Aguinaldo’s desire to negotiate some kind of compromise with the U.S., McKinley and his military officials proceeded to build up the occupation forces until fighting broke out on February 4, six months after the Spanish surrender, and a few weeks after the inauguration of the Philippine Republic on January 23, 1899.

From June 29, 1898, McKinley’s policy sought to enforce “the absolute domain of military authority” on people who had just won their freedom with arms. He knew that Aguinaldo and his followers, the bulk of which came from the landless peasantry and impoverished middle strata, would never surrender their newly won independence. Fifty to seventy troops were needed to pacify and “benevolently” assimilate the islands. The Filipinos resisted in frontal battles from February to March, 1899. Meanwhile, in July 1899, the first of 6,000 segregated African American soldiers arrived in the Philippines. The US began to occupy Jolo and other Muslim povinces once guarded by isolated Spanish forts in the southern Philippines.

On November 13, 1899, after losing the capital of Malolos and substantial fighters, Aguinaldo disbanded the regular army and switched to guerilla warfare. Military governor General Otis did not understand this new strategy and believed that the insurrection was suppressed with the capture of Malolos, the headquarters of Aguinaldo’s government. Before he was replaced by General Arthur McArthur, father of General Douglas McArthur, who was forced to abandon Bataan and Corregidor to the invading Japanese forces in 1942, Otis wrote to the War Department in April 1900 that we are no longer dealing “with organized insurrection, but brigandage,” which would require police action by a quarter of a million soldiers (Pomeroy 1970, 86), Mark Twain’s suspicion, shared by a large majority, was that “we do not intend to free, but to subjugate, the people of the Philippines” (Putzel 1992, 52). On May 2, 1900, Otis was replaced by General McArthur who imposed martial law on December 20, 1900.

Waterboarding and Other Gory Business

There is general consensus that the pacification of the Philippines is one of the bloodiest wars in imperial history. After two days of fighting, the Filipinos on Manila’s perimeter and nearby provinces sustained a casualy of nearly 10,000. Aguinaldo’s officers schooled in European manuals followed positional warfare along classic military lines; but they were forced to resort to mobile warfare, utilizing their knowledge of the countryside and universal support from the populace in the face of vastly superior US firepower. The inaugural model of anti-colonial “people’s war” may be found here, as well as its ruthless antidote, “low-intensity” warfare.

As we saw, Otis and his officers thought that the insurrection would be over in a matter of weeks. Mobile tactics and eventually guerilla strategy reduced the US garrisons to easy targets, with the US troops finding themselves ill-suited and ill-equipped to confront their enemies lacking adequate firearms, often fighting with bolos—long bladed knives—and spears. The Filipino insurgents resembled the proverbial fish swimming in the ocean of their sympathizers so that by subterfuge and hand-to-hand combat, the rebels overcame the odds against them. After protracted fighting with unconscionable losses, the US army began to treat all the “niggers” as enemies, whether armed or not; it resorted to destroying villages and killing civilians. In the second year of fighting, 75,000 troops escalated the war against the Filipino masses, not just the sporadic guerillas in the “boondocks”—the term adopted from the Filipino word, “bundok,” contested mountainous terrain.

General MacArthur observed that guerilla warfare was contrary to “the customs and usages” of civilized warfare,” hence those captured are no longer soldiers but simple criminals, brigands, etc. They are “are not entitled to the privileges of prisoners of war.” This accords with the US Army “Instructions” (General Order 100) issued during the Civil War, defining “war rebels” who “rise in arms against the occupying or conquering army” as “high robbers or pirates” (Pomeroy 1970, 87). Those rebels would be today’s “unlawful combatants” not deserving of Geneva Convention guidelines. By placing Filipino resistance outside the bounds of recognized warfare, William Pomeroy notes, “the American military authorities in effect and in practice gave sanction to barbarous methods,” among them the infamous “water cure,” rope torture, and others (1970, 88). Such atrocities flourished in the racialist ethos of the conduct of the war.

The US pacification campaign against the insurrectos, argues Jonathan Fast, “degenerated into a grisly slaughter of non-combatants” (1973, 74). From April 1901 to April 1902, four successive “depopulation campaigns” were carried out. The first occurred in Northern Luzon, described by one American Congressman: “Our soldiers took no prisoners, they kept no records; they simply swept the country and wherever and whenever they could get hold of a Filipino they killed him” (quoted in Wolff 1968, 352). Then in August 1901, in Panay island, the same procedure was adopted. US troops cut an area 60 miles wide from one end of the island to the other, burning everything in their path. In September and October, US troops swarmed into Samar, with orders from General Jacob Smith to burn and kill everything over ten,” as a reprisal for the ambush of 48 American soldiers in the town of Balangiga. His subalterns fulfilled his vow to make the whole island “a howling wilderness.”

The climax is rather unsurprising. In December, the entire population of Batangas (about 500,000) was forced into concentration camps. Frustrated by Filipino perseverance in resisting US sovereignty, General J. Franklin Bell who masterminded the Batangas campaign stated that he intended to “create in the minds of the people a burning desire for the war to cease—that will impel them to join hands with the Americans….” For this purpose, it was necessary to keep the people “in such a state of anxiety and apprehension that living under such conditions will soon become unbearable” (Storey and Codman 1902, 71-73). Due to the brutal conditions in the detention camps, to hunger and diseases, over 100,000 died in Batangas alone. Later on, General Bell calculated that over 600,000 Filipinos in Luzon alone had been killed or died as a direct result of the pacification campaign. This estimate made in May 1901 does not take into account the victims of the other four campaigns listed above. The extermination of almost the entire population of Samar remains emblematic of how the US administered the stick without the carrot. General Jacob Smith wiped out the town, summarily executed prisoners, and devastated the whole province–probably the longest and most brutal campaign on record. His method could not be considered exceptional, as Linn and others argue, because it had been repeated many times. Although Roosevelt declared the war over on July 4, 1902, the fighting lasted until 1910 when the last guerilla leader was captured in Luzon; and Muslim uprisings continued until 1916, punctuated by the massacres of Bud Dajo in 1906 and of Bud Bagsak in 1913.

Orientalist Theater of Cruelty

Harsh measures such as “reconcentration” or hamletting of civilians became official policy in fighting Aguinaldo’s guerilla forces. The most notorious practitioners were Gen. Bell who inflicted it in Batangas and southern Luzon and Gen. Jacob Smith who turned Samar into a “howling wilderness.” Recently, in the controvery over the use of torture such as “waterboarding,” Paul Kramer rehearsed again what a British witness called “the murderous butchery” of the US “pacification” campaign. Except for such apologists of the McKinley and Roosevelt policies, such as Brian McAllister Linn (whose claim to neutrality in his book, The Philippine War 1899-1902, is quite a feat of Olympian hauteur), the general consensus is that the atrocities committed by the invading US army is out of proportion to the resistance of the revolutionary guerillas of the Philipine Republic, even allowing for the desperate measures Filipinos took to retaliate in kind. Of course, it is easy to say that both are guilty. But that is to abandon the search for historical clarity if not some measure of provisional objectivity. Kramer recounts some of the findings of the Senate committee that inquired into the reports of “cruelties and barbarities” earlier revealed through letters sent to newspapers. At one hearing, the testimony of Charles Riley of the 26^th Volunteer Infantry described in detail a scene of “water cure” that he witnessed, but after the ritual of a court martial, the guilty officer Capt. Edwin Glenn was suspended for a month and fined fifty-dollars; in 1919 he retired from the army as brigadier general.

At one hearing. William Howard Taft, head of the second Philippine Commission sent to the islands and first Civil Governor of the Philippines, was forced to admit that “cruelties have been inflicted” and the “water cure” administered, but countered that military officers have condemned such methods. Elihu Root, Secretary of War, excused the cruelties because the Filipino insurgents were guilty of “barbarous cruelty, common among uncivilized races.” One stark leitmotif in this narrative centering on Fagen is the question of civilization. Filipinos were not only an “uncivilized race,” they were savages, barbarous, treacherous, wild devils, and so on. In one Senate hearing, Senator Joseph Rawlins asked General Robert Hughes whether the burning of Filipino homes by advancing US troops was “within the ordinary rules of civilized warfare,” to which Hughes replied curtly: “These people are not civilized” On January 9, 1900, Senator Beveridge already reminded the U.S. public not to worry about the cruel conduct of the war because “We are dealing with Orientals.” This strain appeared again in Senator Lodge’s ascription of “Asiatic” cruelty to all Filipinos. Harvard U philosopher William James accused McKinley’s camp of hypocrisy and cant and said: “God damn the U.S. for its vile conduct in the Philippine Isles” (Zinn 1980, 307). Systematic extermination of homes and inhabitants occurred in the destruction of Caloocan before Aguinaldo switched from positional to guerilla warfare. The general sentiment of the occupying army was captured by one volunteer: “We all wanted to kill ‘niggers’…beats rabbit hunting…”In November 1901, the Manila correspondent of the Philadelphia Ledger reported: “The present war is no bloodless, opera bouffe engagement; our men have been relentless, have killed to exterminate men, women, children, prisoners and captives, active insurgents and suspected people from lads of ten up, the idea prevailing that the Filipino as such was little better than a dog…” (Zinn 1980, 308).

Were it not for a persisting amnesia or selective forgetting in the national psyche, the catalogue of gruesome facts would be a perverse imposition. Aside from Twain, Vidal and others, Gabriel Kolko rendered one of the most cogent reflections on the “enormity of the crime” of force and chicanery accomplished by officers most of whom were veterans of the Indian campaigns:

…Against the Indians, who owned and occupied much coveted land, wholesale slaughter was widely sanctioned as a virtue. That terribly bloody, sordid history, involving countless tens of thousands of lives that neither victims nor executioners can ever enumerate, made violence endemic to the process of continental expansion. Violence reached a crescendo against the Indian after the Civil War and found a yet bloodier manifestation during the protracted conquest of the Philippines from 1898 until well into the next decade, when anywhere from 200,000 to 600,000 Filipinos were killed in an orgy of racist slaughter that evoked much congratulation and approval from the eminent journals and men of the era who were also much concerned about progress and stability at home. From their inception, the great acts of violence and attempted genocide America launched against outsiders seemed socially tolerated, even celebrated (1976, 287).

Race War

One might venture the proposition that even before the Filipino American War started, it was already a thoroughly racialized conflict. This is no longer news. Historian Richard Welch observed that the attitudes of the invaders then demonstrated “colorphobia,” and the Filipinos to be subjugated were considered “monkey men” and “niggers” (1979, 101). A recent book by Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government, elaborates on what W.E.B. Du Bois observed about the “race questions” of the United and those of the world becoming tightly “belted” together by imperialism. Du Bois identified the US “ownership of Porto Rico, and Havana, our protectorate of Cuba, and conquest of the Philippines” as constituting the “greatest event since the Civil War,” confirming how the space between America “and the islands of the sea” was dissolving, and with it, the former boundaries between the “race questions of the United States, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. He urged the unity of “Negro and Filipino, Indian and Porto Rican, Cuban and Hawaiian,” to struggle for “an America that knows no color line in the freedom of its opportunities” (1997, 102).

Kramer’s book is one of the most sustained exposition of how race and imperial ideology coalesced to produce the exceptionalist politics of US global hegemony, with the conquest of the Philippines as a kind of experimental laboratory for its invention. It rehearses what many previous historians have noted: the racial formations in the US were exported and renegotiated anew in the Philippine scene, with the Filipino savages labeled “niggers,” “gugus” (forerunner of “gooks”), Indians, etc., but with a difference in function. The racial imaginary justified extermination of the enemy race. Though self-limited in its focus on “race” as an amorphous, protean concept, Kramer convincingly demonstrates that on all sides, the US conquest of the Philippines was a “race war” with profound implications that resonate up to today’s thinking about ethnicity, racial relations, and a viable multicultural democracy.

Let us situate Fagen in the context of a “race war” that initially claimed to be a civilizing, benevolent project, but no longer a mission to liberate the Philippines from Spanish tyranny. The US, as Du Bois says, seized this “group of colored folks half a world away….[to rule] them according to its own ideas” (1970, 184). It is certain that Fagen experienced the bitter race hatred that black soldiers experienced when they were in Tampa, Florida, where a race riot began; black soldiers retaliated against drunken white soldiers. Twenty-seven African American soldiers and three whites were severely wounded. The chaplain of a black regiment in Tampa asked: “Is America any better than Spain?…Has she not subjects in her own borders whose children are half-fed and half-clothed, because their father’s skin is black…Yet the Negro is loyal to his country’s flag.” That loyalty was severely eroded and dissolved in Fagen when he landed in the Philippines in 1899 to help carry out a “regime change.”

From the start, African Americans in the media and the leadership of civil-society groups demonstrated strong opposition to the colonial intervention. The ambivalence toward the war in Cuba was replaced with vigorous opposition to the war in the Philippines. As part of the Anti-Imperialist League (founded on October 17, 1899), Du Bois condemned the war as an unjust imperialist aggression, the slaughter of Filipinos a “needless horror.” The League recalled Fredrick Douglass’ view, enunciated sixty years earlier, that the interests of the Negro people were identical with that of the struggling colonial peoples: “We deny that the obligation of all citizens to support their government in times of grave national peril applies to the present situation” (Foster 1954, 415). In Nov. 17, 1899, the American Citizen, a black paper in Kansas City, Kansas, stated that “imperialist expansion means extension of race hate and cruelty, barbarous lynchings and gross injustice to dark people.” Bishop Henry Tuirner of the African Methodist Episcopal Church called the US occupation of the Philippines an “unholy war of conquest” (Welch 1979, 110). Another newspaper (Broad Ax, Sept. 30, 1899) called for the formation of a “national Negro Anti-Expansionist, Anti-Imperialist, Anti-Trust, Anti-Lynching League.”

On July 17, 1899, a meeting of African Americans in Boston protested the “unjustified invasion by American soldiers in the Philippine Islands.” They resolved that “while the rights of colored citizens in the South, sacredly guaranteed them by the amendment of the Constitution, are shamefully disregarded; and, while the frequent lynching of negroes who are denied a civilized trial are a reproach to Republican government, the duty of the President and country is to reform these crying domestic wrongs and not to attempt the civilization of alien peoples by powder and shot” (The Boston Post, July 18, 1899). Whether Fagen knew or was aware of this sentiment, can not be ascertained for now. But he certainly was aware that in general US troops treated Filipinos as “niggers” who were “therefore entitled to all the contempt and harsh treatment administered by white overlords to the most inferior races,” as a correspondent of the Boston Herald wrote (Schirmer 1971, 21).

Fagen no doubt shared many of the sentiments expressed by black soldiers who felt they were sent to the Philippines to take up “de white man’s burden.” One of them wrote in a letter of 1899: “Our racial sympathies would naturally be with the Filipinos. They are fighting manfully for what they conceive to be their best interests.” A black infantryman wrote from Manila in June 1901 to an Indianapolis paper: “This struggle on the islands has been naught but a gigantic scheme of robbery and oppression.” Amid the burning of villages and massacre of supporters of the insurgents in Batangas and Samar, African Americans in Massachussetts addressed a message to President McKinley about how Negroes in Wilmington, North Carolina, “guilty of no crime except the color of their skin and a desire to exercise the rights of their American citizenship, were butchered like dogs in the streets;” and how black men were hunted and murdered in Phoenix, South Carolina,” while McKinley catered cunningly to Southern race prejudice” (Zinn 1980, 312-13).

Lifting the Veil

It was in this environment suffused with racialized exterminist sentiments that David Fagen enters the scene. I cannot describe all the varied and forceful sentiments expressed by African American soldiers and other participants in the war found in letters compiled by Willard Gatewood,”Smoked Yankees” and the Struggle for Empire: Letters from Negro Soldiers, 1898-1902—an extremely valuable primary sourcebook. As a sample, I cite an anonymous black soldier complained that white troops, after seizing Manila, began “to apply home treatment for colored peoples: cursed them as damned niggers, steal [from] them and ravish them” (Gatewood 1987, 279). Patrick Mason, a sergeant in Fagen’s 24^th Infantry regiment, wrote to the Cleveland Gazette: “I feel sorry for these people and all that have come under the control of the United States. I don’t believe they will be justly dealt by. The first thing in the morning is the “Nigger” and the last thing at night is the “Nigger”…You are right in your opinions. I must not say as much as I am a soldier”(Gatewood 1987, 257). A black lieutenant of the 25^th Infantry wrote his wife that he had occasionally subjected Filipinos to the water torture (Dumindin 2009). Capt. William Jackson of the 49^th Infantry admitted that his men racially identified with Filipinos but stated that “all enemies of the U.S. government look alike to us…hence we go on with the killing.” Fagen occupied the same position, but he drew a necessary demarcation between his being a soldier for the Empire, and his being an insurgent for an occupied community on the defensive, struggling for national/communal self-determination.

Most often quoted is the statement of Sgt. Maj. John W. Galloway who accused whites of “establish[ing] their diabolical race hatred in all its home rancor in Manila.” He wrote about how white soldiers told Filipinos of “the inferiority of the American blacks—[their] brutal natures, cannibal tendencies” (1987, 253); and speculated that “the future of the Filipino, I fear, is that of the Negro in the South.” As a reprisal and warning to African Americans, the US military accused Galloway of sympathizing with the insurgents. He was jailed, deported, and discharged dishonorably.

Completely informed of the history of racial conflict in the U.S., the Filipino resistance used what one black soldier called “affinity of complexion,” revealed, for example, by a comment made by a Filipino lad: “Why does the American Negro come…to fight us when we are much a friend to him…Why don’t you fight those people in America who burn Negroes, that make a beast of you?” The Filipino resistance claimed to speak as “black brothers” of African Americans, distributing pamphlets addressed “To the Colored American Soldier” with the appeal:

It is without honor that you are spilling your costly blood. Your masters have thrown you into the most iniquitous fight with double purpose—to make you the instrument of their ambition and also your hard work will soon make the extinction of your race. Your friends, the Filipinos, give you this good warning. You must consider your situation and your history; and take charge that the blood of…Sam Hose proclaims vengeance (Gatewood 1997, 258-59).

Another soldier wrote on Christmas Eve, 1900, to Booker T. Washington: “These people

are right and we are wrong and terribly wrong.” One African American enlisted man learned from his experience that “Filipinos resent being treated as inferor” and thus set “an example to the American negro.” After surveying the archive of sentiments expressed by numerous participants, Anthony Powell concludes that throughout the war African American soldiers would be continually plagued by misgivings about their role in the Philippines…Their racial and ideological sympathy for colored people struggling to achieve freedom seemed always to be at war with their notions of duty as American citizens and their hope that the fulfillment of that duty would somehow improve the plight of their people at home” (1998).

One might interpolate here that during the war years, an epidemic of anti-black violence

swept the South. Howard Zinn notes that between 1889 and 1903, “on the average, every week, two Negroes were lynched by mobs—hanged, burned, mutilated” (1980. 308). In Lakeland, Florida, during that same period, black soldiers confronted a white crowd because they were refused service by a drugstore owner. Du Bois described the outburst of racist violence, such as the lynching of Sam Hose in Newnan, Georgia, in 1899. These and other incidents were known to the Filipino revolutionaries. Despite the Filipino appeal of racial solidarity against white oppressors and the offer of commissions to defectors, there were only twenty-nine desertions among the four regiments of African American regulars; and only nine actually defected to the rebels (Robinson and Schubert 1975, 73). Other researchers cite 20 defectors, seven of them blacks (including Fagen). Various reasons dissuaded them, among others, their long-standing loyalty, the hazards of war, severance of cultural/social ties, the threat of long imprisonment, capture and certain death. Why and how David Fagen surmounted these risks and dangers, remains a persistent subject of speculation, speculators attracted to the personality rather than to the convictions or collective meanings invested in his actions.

Journey to the Liberated Zone

Born in 1875 in Tampa, Florida, Fagen’s early life is unknown. Described as a “dark brown young man with a carved scar on his chin, standing five feet six inches tall,” Fagen worked then at Hull’s Phosphate Company. At the age of 23, on June 4, 1898, Fagen enlisted in the 24^th Infantry, one of the four black regiments based in Tampa at that time, and was sent to Cuba. Upon its return, Fagen accompanied the regiment to Fort Douglas, near Salt Lake City, Utah, where he was discharged. After his father died, Fagen re-enlisted on February 12 at Fort McPherson, Georgia, where his character was validated as meeting “all requirements.” He trained at Fort D.A. Russell, near Cheyenne, Wyoming, before behind shipped to the Philippines from San Francisco in June 1899. Immediately after his arrival, he was engaged in a major campaign in the fall of 1899. General Samuel Young led the northeast thrust to Central Luzon, fighting the insurgents near Mount Arayat and then garrisoning key towns in the vicinity. Fagen’s Company 1, together with three others, occupied San Isidro, the principal town of Nueva Ecija province, from which President Aguinaldo fled.

It is said that Fagen encountered difficulties with his superiors. But the cause could not be incompetence since he was promoted to corporal in the months after his arrival at Fort Russell. Reports indicate that he could have been court-martialled for refusing to do all sorts of “dirty jobs.” While a person does not form important decisions based simply on personal discomfort, this adversity may have reinforced that sharpened awareness of how thoroughly racist the war was conducted, with Filipinos regarded as “black devils,” “niggers,” thieves, and other insults. All these converged in that “particular solution” to a dilemma that Fagen selected on November 17, 1899. There is no doubt that his decision to defect was prepared and planned in advance. Assisted by a rebel officer with a horse waiting for him at the company barracks, Fagen cut off his ties with Company I and headed for the guerilla sanctuary.

Subsequent reports describe how Fagen wreaked havoc on the invading army. One veteran recounts how Fagen, in the midst of raging battles, would taunt US solders; during one encounter, he reportedly shouted, “Captain Fagan’s done got yuh hite boys now” (Ganzhorn (1940, 191). But there was more to it than getting back at white supremacists. Instead of simply escaping to an isolated native community and withdrawing from the conflict, Fagen embraced the revolution with such boldness and energy that no one could be blind to the depth of his commitment to the Filipino cause, especially in the light of George Rawick’s reminder that Afro-American slaves “do not make revolution for light and transient reasons.”

From November 1899 to September 1900, we have no record of Fagen’s activity as a leader of the Filipino resistance. On September 6, 1900. General Jose Alejandrino, commander of the Republic’s army in Nueva Ecija, promoted Fagen from first lieutenant to captain “on account of sufficient merits gained in campaigns.” His valor and audacity, as well as popularity, were acknowledged by his soldiers who referred to him as “General Fagen.” The New York Times (October 29, 1900) deemed Fagen important enough to cover his exploits, remarking that Fagen was a “cunning and highly skilled guerilla officer who harassed and evaded large conventional American units and their Filipino auxiliaries. From August 30, 1900 to January 17, 1901, Fagen figured in eight clashes with the US army. In one daring raid, he led 150 rebels in capturing a steam launch loaded with guns on the Rio Grande de la Pampanga river and escaped unhurt into the forest before the American infantry arrived. In two of the skirmishes mentioned, Fagen clashed with General Frederick Funston, the US army’s famous guerilla hunter. John Ganzhorn, a member of General Funston’s elite scouts, recalled confrontations with Fagen whose shrewd tactics led to successful ambushes (Ganzhorn 1940, 190-92; Funston 1911, 380).

A new development alarmed the US military. In February 1901, six members of the 9^th Cavalry regiment deserted and joined the insurgents in the province of Albay: John Dalrymple, Edmond DuBose, Lewis Russell, Fred Hunter, Garth Shores and William Victor. Except for Dalrymple, who died of a fever, the five others surrendered with the other Filipino insurgents. All were court-martialled, only DuBose and Russell were publicly hanged before a crowd of three thousand people on February 7, 1902. Records prove that their execution was deliberately agreed upon by the military to serve as a warning to soldiers not to emulate Fagen. The Judge Advocate General reported to the Secretary of War that the execution of the two black soldiers was necessary because “great injury has been done the United States by deserters from the service, chiefly of foreign birth or of colored regiments, who have gone over to and taken service with the enemy” (quoted in Brown 1995, 171). The other soldier, Fred Hunter was killed while trying to escape; Victor and Dalrymple were sentenced to life imprisonment in Leavenworth. Shores and another soldier from the 25^th Infantry regiment were sentenced to death for entering “the service of the insurrectionists,” but President Roosevelt commuted their sentence to dishonorable discharge, forfeiture of pay, and imprisonment at hard labor for life (Powell 1998). In May and June 1901, two volunteer regiments of African American troops were shipped home.

Of some twenty deserters sentenced to death, only these two black privates were executed (Robinson and Schubert 1975, 78). While the insurgency continued for more than a decade, Roosevelt had to terminate that “dirty war” (Boehringer 2008) on July 4, 1902 to allay public sentiment against the war and prevent further desertions.

Birth of a Legend

In March 1901, Funston captured Aguinaldo by devious means, thus emerging as one of the few heroes of the ugly and brutal war. As recorded in his memoirs, Funston’s frustration at his failure to capture or kill Fagen became an obsession, contributing to the rise of a collective phantasy.. Throughout 1901, Funston continued to pursue Fagen around Mt. Arayat—sightings of him were reported by the Twenty Second Infantry in February and April. Rumors of his exploits, stories of his cunning and audacity, led to the creation of a public image, a myth larger than the man—not unlike Nat Turner’s. While the infantry was chasing him in Nueva Ecija, a Manila Times report narrated his visit to a brothel in the capital city, with the following account:

[Fagen] wore a crash blouse, similar to those of the native police, with a broad white trimming such as officers wear. The insignia on the shoulder straps were a paid of Spanish bugles. His trousers were dark in color, neat fitting, and topped a pair of patent leather shoes. A brown soft felt hat completed his apparel (Feb. 26, 1901).

When two civilians approached him, Fagen supposedly “rose from the chair, placing his foot upon it, and grasping his concealed revolver in his right [hand] and a small sword or bolo in his left.” His escape from the military cordon around the city is considered “as daring as he is unscrupulous,” He is even reported to have recklessly boarded a troop ship headed back to the United States.

American prisoners of Fagen also repudiated the charges of atrocities and brutalities. At least two of them, George Jackson, a black private of the Twenty-fourth Regiment, and white Lieutenant Fredrick Alstaetter, testified that they were treated kindly by Fagen. Nonetheless, Funston and other officers called him “a wretched man,” “a “rowdy soldier,” “good for nothing whelp,” lacking intelligence because of his “unusually small head,” and so on. Belying these rather malicious dismissals is the gravity with which senior officers like General Adna Chafee (veteran of the ferocious and brutal suppression of the Boxer rebellion in China) expressed grave concern about black turncoats and defectors. Of the twenty defectors, black and white, who were condemned to death, only two were actually executed: the two black privates noted earlier. President Roosevelt supported these executions while commuting all other death sentences for other guilty soldiers. The other victim of this drive to persecute disloyal soldiers involved Sergent Major Galloway (already mentioned earlier), also from Fagen’s regiment. His letter to a Filipino acquaintance condemning the war as immoral was captured in a raid on the Filipino residence and used to judge him as “exceedingly dangerous” and a “menace to the islands,” for which he was jailed, demoted to private, and dishonorably discharged.

Fagen operated as a guerilla commander, persisting in a relentless and protracted struggle against the US army, even when his immediate superior, General Alejandrino, surrendered on April 29, 1901. During the negotiation for his surrender, General Alejandrino asked an American officer if Fagen and two other deserters would be allowed to leave the islands; the answer was negative. When Alejandrino’s successor, General Urbano Lacuna himself surrendered to Funston on May 16, 1901, General Lacuna also sought amnesty for Fagen. Funston’s response was not surprising: “this man could not be received as a prisoner of war, and if he surrendered it would be with the understanding that he would be tried by a court-martial—in which event his execution would be a practical certainty” (1911, 431).

Prophecy of An Ending

On March 23, 1901, General Emilio Aguinaldo was captured by Funston. He accepted US sovereignty and called on his followers to do so. His generals, Lacuna and Alejandrino, soon followed. But not Fagen. It was reported that he left the revolutionary camp with his Filipino wife and a small group of nationalist partisans for the mountains of Neva Ecija. Throughout the year, Fagen was hunted as a bandit, with a reward of $600 for his head, “dead or alive.” Funston rejoiced over Fagen’s branding as a common criminal, “a bandit pure and simple, and entitled to the same treatment as a mad dog.” Civilian bounty hunters and civilian law enforcement agencies joined forces in pursuing Fagen.

On December 5, 1901, a native hunter Anastacio Bartolome turned up at the American outpost of Bongabong, Nueva Ecija, with a sack containing the “slightly decomposed head of a negro,” which he claimed was Fagen’s. He also produced other evidences, such as weapons and clothing, Fagen’s commission, and the West Point class ring of Fagen’s former captive, Lt. Frederick Alstaetter. But the military officers who reviewed the report were not convinced, and called the official file “the supposed killing of David Fagen.” And there is no record of payment of a reward to Bartolome. There are two explanations for what happened: Either Bartolome found Fagen’s camp and stole the evidence he presented, together with the head of an Aeta, a tribe of black aborigines; or Bartolome colluded with Fagen in order to fake his death and thus get relief from further pursuit. Fagen could then have fled further to live with the natives in the wilderness of northern Luzon where Jim Crow could not pester him. Shrouded in mystery, Fagen’s “death” becomes the birth of his legendary career in academic minds. On October 30, 1902, a Philippine Constabulary unit recounted their pursuit of Fagen and other insurgents ten months after he had allegedly been hacked to death by Bartolome. The most plausible explanation, assuming Bartolome’s story as fabricated, is that Fagen survived and remained for the rest of his life with the aborigines and local folk with whom he identified.

Our pioneering biographers, Michael Robinson and Frank Schubert, conclude that Fagen’s rebellion is significant in revealing the “intensity of black hostility toward American imperialism,” a militant act of self-determination that can cross boundaries and seize opportunities anywhere:

[Fagen’s] career illustrates the willingness of Afro-Americans to pursue alternatives outside the caste system when such options become available. Militance does not distinguish him from the civilians who razed Tiptonville, Tennessee. The difference is in the circumstance. The Philippine insurrection offered him a choice similar to the one Nat Turner gave Southampton slaves and the Seminole wars gave escaped slaves like Abraham (1975, 82).

The editor of the Indianapolis Freeman supplied an obituary to Fagen’s supposed death on December 14, 1901, by attempting to extenuate the “traitor’s death” with the plea that he was a man “prompted by honest motives to help a weaker side, and one to which he felt allied by ties that bind.”

Indeed, the specific historical circumstance inflected individual choice. Unlike the slaves who revolted from the plantations in South America and the Caribbean and formed runaway communities—maroons, cimmarones, quilombos—Fagen joined a community already up in arms against an invading and occupying power. In that process of affiliation, his rebellion from a white-supremacist polity mutated into a revolutionary act. His decision exemplified what Eugene Genovese calls (in his study of how Afro-American slave revolts helped fashion the modern world) a visionary emblem of dialectical transformation: “Ignorant and illiterate as the slaves generally were, they grasped the issue at least as well as others, for their own history of struggle against enslavement in the world’s greatest bourgeois democracy led them to recognize and to seize upon the link between the freedom of the individual proclaimed to the world by Christianity and the democratization of the bourgeois revolution, which was transforming that fateful idea into a political reality” (1979, 135).

Subaltern Testimony

Before returning to the socially symbolic and prefigurative value of Fagen’s act, I want to cite here the testimony of the Filipino general under whom Fagen served. General Jose Alejandrino wrote a memoir in Spanish entitled La Senda del Sacrificio (The Price of Freedom, published in 1933). He recounts how when he confronted Funston to discuss the terms of his surrender, Funston brusquely demand that his surrender cannot be accepted without his first delivering Fagen, otherwise he remains a prisoner. Alejandrino refused because it would be an infamy since (as he told Funston) if you catch him, “you would be capable of bathing him in petroleum and burning him alive” (1949, 173).

General Alejandrino met Fagen around August 1899 when Aguinaldo was in full retreat. Alejandrino provides us ingredients for a portrait of Fagen that might flesh out the legend, tid-bits loved by the spinners of our mass media infotainment industry:

Fagen was a Negro giant of more than six feet in height who deserted the American Army, taking with him all the revolvers that he could bring, and who served in our forces with the rank of captain. He did not know how to read or write, but he was a faithful companion. He was very affectionate and helpful to me, going to the extent of carrying me in his arms or on his shoulders when I, weakened by fevers and poor nutrition, had to cross rivers or to ascend steep grades. The services which he rendered to me were such that they could only be expected from a brother or son.

I had heard narrations of the feats of valor and the intrepidity of Fagan, but his most outstanding characteristic was his mortal hatred of the American whites.….

They told me that when Fagen went with his guerillas, whenever he was on horseback, it was a sign of advance or resistance, but when he got down from his horse, his soldiers already knew that it was the sign to retreat. I asked him the reason for this custom and he answered me that, while advancing in search of the enemy or while fighting he did not want to tire his legs unnecessarily, but when it came to retreating, he had to leave the horse behind because his feet are faster than those of his horse. Besides, he could squeeze himself into and pass places which a horse could only go with great difficulty.

Fagen was very fond of carousals and drinking. In one of his escapades he arrived in a small village on the banks of the Rio Chico of Pampanga. He looked for a guitar and, with some members of his guerilla, be began to drink and to serenade the women of the place. When the night was already very late, he went to bed in a small hut, sleeping with a companion. After a short while his companion woke him up, telling him that he was hearing footsteps and voices of Americans. Fagen, who was half-asleep, answered him that he was dreaming and that his fear induced him to hear and see visions. Inasmuch, however, as his companion insisted, Fagan reluctantly stood up to peep out of the window, and there he really saw that the hut was surrounded by Americans. He lost no time in jumping out of the window and, taking advantage of the circumstances that the Americans could not fire for fear of wounding their own men in the dark, he selected the site nearest to the forest and with a revolver he shot his way out and escaped.

Fagan spoke Tagalog very vividly and lived in the camp with a woman. One morning this woman presented herself to me crying and showing one cheek bitten off and saying that Fagen had done it. I sent for Fagan and asked him what happened.

“I was only dreaming,” he answered.

He related to me that he had dreamed that he was being surprised by the Americans and, not having the intention to be caught alive, he resisted as much as he could with punches, kickings and bitings, but his fury against the enemy had been rained on his woman companion.

When our surrender was effected, I really felt very sorry in having to leave Fagen. I left him some twelve rifles for his defense. Later on, I learned that the Americans put a price on his head and he was assassinated, according to versions, in the mountains of Bongabon ( 1949, 174-76).

After Fagen’s “supposed death” in December 1901, he was still being blamed for inflaming the Filipino resistance, as in the Balangiga, Samar, disaster in September 1901, and the renewed fighting in the other islands. His legendary figure begins to haunt popular memory and civic conscience. We might encounter Fagen again in the persons of African Americans who found themselves in the Philippines when the US army returned to “liberate” the colony from the Japanese occupiers, with the son of Gen. Arthur McArthur leading the forces to liberate the colonized from Japanese tyranny. Their sense of affinity was no longer based on complexion but on shared ideals and political solidarity.

Alternative Interventions

After a hundred years, the situation of David Fagen and six other African Americans who were labeled by the Manila Times as “vile traitors” still await understanding and judgment by the peoples in the United States and the Philippines, as well as by the international community. This topic is still a tabooed subject, too dangerous to handle. Ngozi-Brown reminds us again of their “extremely difficult situation,” serving as “foot soldiers for a racist ideology in which white Americans characterized Filipinos as they did African Americans as inferior, inept, and even sub-human. When the United States military occupied the Philippine islands, it installed a racist society which alienated Filipino and African American soldiers” (1997, 42). The official authorities of course have pronounced them traitors and renegades, though one novelist, Robert Bridgman (author of Loyal Traitors) believed that their commitment to American ideals compelled them to resist the immoral course of their country and that a “higher patriotism” prompted them to commit treason (Powell 1998). Can such ambivalence of judgment be maintained? After the war, over 1,200 African Americans opted to stay in the Philippines. One soldier explained why those soldiers preferred to make the Philippines their home and explains why: “To an outsider or one who has never soldiered in the Philippines the question would perhaps be a hard one to answer, but to the initiated the solution is easy and apparent at once… They found [the Filipinos] intelligent, friendly and courteous, and not so very different from themselves” (1901).

World War II gave the opportunity for African American soldiers to “return,” as it were, to the Philippines as part of MacArthur’s “liberation” army. In his autobiography, Black Bolshevik, Harry Haywood mentions his brief sojourn in Manila, Philippines, where he met a group of revolutionary students and intellectuals with ties to the Hukbalahap, Communist-led anti-Japanese guerillas. He was told how American troops disarmed these peasant guerillas in the underground who helped in the capture of Manila. Writes Haywood: “They were bitter and sharply critical of MacArthur’s hostility toward the popular democratic movement. His clear intention was to return to the status quo of colonialism” (1978, 526), a return to the days of his conquering father, General Arthur MacArthur, and his notorious “stringent” and “drastic” measures under General Order 100, punishing non-uniformed guerillas as criminals (Linn 2000, 213).

During the same period, Nelson Peery, bricklayer and political activist, participated in World War II as a soldier in the all-black 93^rd Infantry Division. He details the momentous political awakening that he experienced in the Philippines in the first volume of his autobiography, Black Fire (1994). Peery made contact with the same groups and confirmed Haywood’s observation. The entire apparatus of the US State, its intelligence agencies and armed forces, had mounted a ruthless plan to crush the national liberation movement as they did forty-five years before. Peery noted that MacArthur quickly moved to re-establish a fascist, privileged officer corps in the Philippine army to protect the investments and control the islands for the United States.” Peery recalls how the activists knew the story of David Fagen and how the “US army would never have allowed this talented black soldier to become an officer. Captain Fagen, with his black comrades, fought to the death for Philippine independence” (1994, 277).

Peery goes on to indict the hundred thousand US mainly Southern white soldiers, who slaughtered over a million Filipinos, introduced the water cure, burning of villages, killing of civilians as part of the “scorched earth” tactics, while they “routinely brutalized the black troops.” Nevertheless, he goes on: “the black Twenty-fourth and the Twenty-fifth Infantry murdered right along with them. The Philippine people would not surrender. In 1914, black troops were sent in to crush the Moro rebellion. This time, however, the black soldiers refused to fight their black Filipino brothers. The people of Mindanao never forgot that” (1994, 278).

Peery’s testimony arrives at this eloquent judgment that, in my view, delivers a powerful rhetorical thrust that is quite unforgettable and prophetic at the same time in terms of what is going on right now in the Philippines:

If the Americans had never committed genocide against the Indian; if they had never incited wars of annihilation between the native peoples of this land; if there had never been a Trail of Tears; if America had never organized and commercialized the kidnapping and sale into slavery of a gentle and defenseless African people; if it had never developed the most widespread, brutal, exploitative system of slavery the world has ever known, if it had never held carnivals of torture and lynching of its black people; if it had never sundered and fractured and torn and ground Mexico into the dust; if it had never attacked gallant, defenseless Puerto Rico and never turned that lovely land into a cesspool to compete with the cesspool it had created in Panama; if it had never bled Latin America of her wealth and had never cast her exhausted peoples onto the dung heap of disease and ignorance and starvation; if it had never financed and braced the Fascist dictatorships; it if had never pushed Hiroshima and Nagasaki into the jaws of hell—if America had never done any of these things—history would still create a special bar of judgment for what the American people did to the Philippines (1994, 276-77).

Although Peery did not join the Huks (the Filipino communist guerillas) then, he may be said to have traced Fagen’s footsteps in forging solidarity with Filipino revolutionaries opposing US neocolonialism, imperialism mediated through the native client oligarchy. A politics of linkages and reciprocity afforded a new internationalism, a global perspective, a synthesizing”double-consciousness.” Kevin Gaines observes that the Spanish-American War and the Philipine campaign accomplished little in the way of improving African American social conditions since political disfranchisement persisted, culminating in the Atlanta Race Riot of 1906. However, Gaines believes that African American soldiers, even within their contradictory position in an imperialist war and within a segregated army, provided symbols of heroism and “a boost of morale” (Interview PBS). The fusion of the struggle for civil rights at home and self-determination for colonized peoples abroad constitutes a paradigm-shift from the dualistic polarity of isolationism and messianic nation-building, from the social-Darwinistic and evolutionistic stance of Anglo-Saxon, Eurocentric triumphalism.

Theorizing Elective Affinities

The most incisive formulation of this transformation may be found in Harold Cruse’s reflections on his passage through World War II as a soldier radicalized by contact with the anti-colonial movement in the French colony of Algeria. Chiefly responding to Albert Camus’ existentialist theory of metaphysical rebellion in a 1966 essay published in Sartre’s review, Le Temps Moderne, Cruse’s project of conceptualizing the black “idea of revolt” germinated from his part in the war effort. It was a unique catalyzing experience that connected fragments of his world picture into some kind of concrete universality. Cruse’s perception of the global arena pervaded by revolution and counter-revolution crystallized from a reflexive rationality:

The Army was the beginning of my real education about the reality of being black. Before the war, being black in America was a commonplace bore, a provincial American social hazard of no particular interest or meaning beyond the shores of the Atlantic. It was simply a national American disability—a built-in disadvantage to us all that we had to put up with, similar to a people that has to endure the constant imminence of droughts, floods, famines, or native pestilences. Race in America is her greatest “natural calamity,” but it has today become internationalized into a global scandal because she is so rich in everything else, including democratic pretensions. A global war has made all this a global fact. But it is also a fact that it took this global war to initiate a personal metamorphosis that has culminated in what I am in 1966, as an American black (1968, 169).

Cruse’s metamorphosis parallels Fagen’s, except that Fagen and his fellow African Americans were plunged into a war of colonization, while Cruse was engaged in the fight against fascism and reaction. But Cruse’s realization of his collective plight and the ethico-political imperatives required to resolve the division between his abstract citizenship and his humanity, between his racialized self and his potential species-being, resembles Fagen’s. It approximates what Frantz Fanon would refer to as the passage from the racial/national sensibility to a liberatory social consciousness transcending national boundaries and other socially constructed differences. This is not the occasion to elaborate on this Fanonian theory of collective self-determination.

I would like here to add the insight of C.L. R. James on how the revolt of the colonized subalterns in Africa, Latin America and Asia, joining the insurrection of the racially oppressed peoples/nations (African Americans, indigenous communities, etc.), could act as the “bacilli” or ferment that would mobilize the proletariat and usher the beginning of world revolution against capitalism. Whether this is still applicable today or not, remains to be discussed. In any case, Fagen’s metamorphosis prefigured what Cruse and others went through as their minds entered the stage of world-history, in a moment when the Owl of Minerva (to use Hegel’s worn-out trope) has not yet awakened from the night of the problematic, duplicitous Enlightenment and its contradiction-filled “civilizing mission.”

From Solidarity to Community

After more than a hundred years of Americanization, however, the attitude of the “natives” would no longer be hospitable to Fagen, or even to Haywood, Peery, and their kind. Filipinos have chosen to be on the other side of the Veil, have exchanged their identity for that of their erstwhile colonizers. That is, they have chosen to be “white” in body and soul, a testimony to a century of McKinley’s not-so-“Benevolent Assimilation.” The majority of Americanized Filipinos seems to confirm the fructifying power of what scholar David Joel Steinberg called “the U.S. policy of self-liquidating colonialism, in which the ‘little brown brother’ [Taft’s patronizing epithet] was permitted to achieve independence when he grew up, a maturation process that took forty-five years” (1982, 50). Nonetheless, Filipinos have celebrated some other personalities of foreign descent, including two Spaniards who served as generals of the Philippine army (Generals Manuel Sityar and Jose Torres Bugallon), and a Chinese (Gen. Jose Ignacio Paua), but Fagen has so far eluded such recognition. The reason is simple: the Philippine elite, vulnerable to blandishments, corruption, and patronage, has absorbed American Exceptionalism and perpetuated the Veil, fearing that to elevate Fagen to heroic stature would offend the fabled “special relations” with Washington and stir up the guardians of White Supremacy. Maybe the presidency of Barack Obama will begin to change this century-old prejudice and finally give proper homage to David Fagen and his comrades who, even in the face of certain defeat, cast their lot with their brothers and sisters in the Philippine revolution.

Allow me to quote, in conclusion, two sentences from W.E.B. Du Bois “Address to the Nations of the World” issued in 1900, about the time when Fagen together with the Philippine insurgents were resisting the US military’s relentless advance in the plains of Northern Luzon to capture General Aguinaldo, the moment when Fagen separated himself from this occupying army. Du Bois wrote: “[T]he modern world must remember that in this age when the ends of the world are being brought so near together the millions of black men in Africa, America, and the Islands of the Sea, not to speak of the brown and yellow myriads elsewhere, are bound to have a great influence upon the world in the future, by reason of sheer numbers and physical contact… Let the nations of the world respect the integrity and independence of the free Negro states of Abyssinia, Liberia, Hati, and the rest, and let the inhabitants of these states, the independent tribes of Africa, the Negroes of the West Indies, and America, and the black subjects of all nations take courage, strive ceaselessly, and fight bravely, that they may prove to the world their incontestable right to be counted among the great brotherhood of mankind” (Bresnahan 1981, 193-94).

REFERENCES

Alejandrino, Jose. 1949. The Price of Freedom. Tr. Jose M. Alejandrino. Manila: Solar

Publishing Corporation.

Blum, William. 2004. Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since World War II. Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press.

Boehringer, Gill. 2008. “A Magnificent Seven and an Unknown Soldier: Black American Anti-Imperialist Fighters in the Philippine-American War.” Bulatlat viii.12 (April 27-May 3, 2008).

Boot, Max. 2002. The Savage Wars of Peace. New York: Basic Books.

Bresnahan, Roger. 1981. In Time of Hesitation. Quezon City: New Day Press.

Constantino, Renato. 1970. Dissent and Counter-Consciousness. Quezon City Malaya Books.

Cruse, Harold. 1968. Rebellion or Revolution. New York: William Morrow & Co.

Doty, Roxanne Lynn. 1996. Imperial Encounters. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press.

Du Bois, W.E.B. 1997. The Souls of Black Folk. Boston: Bedford Books.

—. 1970. W.E.B. DuBois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses 1890-1919. Ed. Philip Foner. New York: Pathfinder Press.

Dumindin, Arnaldo. 2009. Philippine-American War, 1899-1902. Website.

Fast, Jonathan. 1973. “Imperialism and Bourgeois Dictatorship in the Philippines.” New Left Review 28 (March-April): 69-96.

Foster, William Z. 1954. The Negro People in American History. New York: International Publishers.

Funston, Frederick. 1911. Memories of Two Wars: Cuban and Philippine Experiences. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Ganzhorn, John. 1940. I’ve Killed Men. London: Robert Hale Limited.

Gatewood, Willard Jr. 1987. “Smoked Yankees” and the Struggle for Empire: Letters from Negro Soldiers, 1898-1902. Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press.

Genovese, Eugene D. 1979. From Rebellion to Revolution. New York: Vintage Books.

Haywood, Harry. 1978. Black Bolshevik. Chicago: Liberator Press.

Ignacio, Abe, Enrique de la Cruz, Jorge Emmanuel, and Helen Toribio. 2004. The Forbidden Book. San Francisco, Ca: TBoli Publishing.

Kaplan, Amy. 2003. “Confusing Occupation with Liberation. Los Angeles Times (October 24). http://www.latimes.com.news/printededition/opinion/la-oe-kaplan24oct24,1,1990516.story Accessed December 29, 2005.

Karnow, Stanley. 1989. In Our Image. New York: Random House.

Kolko, Gabriel. 1976. Main Currents in Modern American History. New York: Pantheon Books.

Kramer, Paul. 2006. The Blood of Government. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

—. 2008. “The Water Cure.” The New Yorker (Feb 25). < http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/02/25/080225fa_fact_kramer> Accessed February 26, 2009.

Linn, Brian M. 2000. The Philippine War, 1899-1902. Lawrence: The University Press of Kansas.

Miller, Stuart Creighton. 1982. . “Benevolent Assimilation” The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903. New Haven and London: Yale University Press

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Ngozi-Brown, Scot. 1995. “White Backlash and the Aftermath of Fagen’s Rebellion: The Fates of Three African-American Soldiers in the Philippines, 1901-1902.” Contributions in Black Studies 13.5 (1995/1996): 165-73.

—. 1997. “African-American Soldiers and Filipinos: Racial Imperialism, Jim Crow and Social Relations.” The Journal of Negro History, 82.1 (Winter 1997): 42-53.

—-. 2000. “Fagen, David.” American National Biography Online (February). http://www.anb.org.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/articles/05/05-00227.html Accessed February 1, 2009.

Ocampo, Ambeth R.1998. The Centennial Countdown. Pasig City: Anvil.

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Pomeroy, William. 1970. American Neo-Colonialism. New York: International Publishers.

Powell, Anthony L. 1998. “Through My Grandfather’s Eyes: Ties that Bind: The African American Soldier in the Filipino War for Liberation, 1899-1902.” Paper presented at the 1997 National Conference of African American Studies and Hispanic and Latino Studies, Houston, Texas. <http://boondocksnet.com/sctexts/powell98a.html > Accessed Dec. 29, 1999.

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18-21.

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Colophon Books. -###

_______________________

Copyright 2009 by E. San Juan, Jr.

Prof. E. San Juan, Jr.

117 Davis Road, Storrs, CT 06268

Posted in COMMENTARY ON CURRENT EVENTS, CRITICAL THEORY, DISCOURSES ON CONTRADICTIONS, EXTRAPOLATIONS, SPECULATIVE PROVOCATIONS, UNTIMELY OBSERVATIONS

MELISSA ROXAS’ AFFIDAVIT ON HER TORTURE BY ARROYO MILITARY

philcsc — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 15:55:26 +0000

A FFIDAVIT ON THE TORTURE OF MELISSA ROXAS, U.S. CITIZEN, BY STATE SECURITY AGENCIES IN THE PHILIPPINES REPUBLIC OF THE PHILIPPINES) QUEZON CITY……………………) s.s.

I, Melissa C. Roxas, of legal age, a Citizen of the United States of America, and temporarily residing at Quezon City, Philippines, after having been sworn to in accordance with law, do hereby depose and state that:

1. I am a graduate of the University of California San Diego with a BS in Animal Physiology and Neuroscience and a BA in Third World Studies with a Minor in Health Care and Social Issues;

2. I applied for an exposure program in the Philippines being the home country of my parents with Bayan – USA of which I am a member for the purpose of gathering materials for my writing project being also a member of Habi Arts, a community based artist organization based in Los Angeles, California;

3. Bayan – USA endorsed me to Bayan –National and Bayan – National endorsed me to Bayan – Central Luzon which toured me around the provinces and towns of Central Luzon and on April 2009, Bayan – Central Luzon endorsed me to Bayan – Tarlac where I was to join with their members at La Paz, Tarlac to conduct an initial survey of the place for a future medical mission;

4. I brought along with me my camera with a memory card, an external hard disk, a laptop, an Ipod, a journal, a blood pressure sphygmomanometer, a stethoscope, thermometers, medicines, my watch, and a wallet with money in the amount of Ps. 15,000.00;

5. On May 19, 2009, while resting from a survey at a friendly house, the owner of which gladly accepted our request that we rest at his house and while watching a noon time Television program, at around 1:30 p.m., I and my two companions, John Edward Jandoc and Juanito Carabeo, heard a banging on the front door and a voice asking that the door be opened. I immediately went to see what was going on and found about 15 men in civilian clothes armed with high power rifles and wearing ski masks or bonnets surrounding the house and in a little while, the door was forcibly opened and armed men swarmed into the house coming from the front door and the back door and ordered us to drop face flat on the ground;

6. I did not obey them and I wanted to stand up to protest the intrusion but an armed man held my head and forced it down pushing me to a squatting position then pushed me on the ground. I asked them why they were doing this to us and I saw that everybody in the house was on the ground flat;

7. They attempted to tape my mouth but I was able to wrench it and they wanted to handcuff me but I resisted and about five of the armed men were ganging up on me, holding my hands and my legs but I continued resisting them and shouting to the owner of the house, “Kuya, help me.”

8. I then started to shout my name, repeating it again and again, I was punched repeatedly at my right rib cage while my two companions who were already blindfolded and taped at the mouth were herded to a blue van about 15 meters from the house door and I with all my strength tried to stop the armed men from putting me into the van and they instead started to drag me bruising and wounding my arms and my legs wounding severely my left knee cap while I continued shouting my name;

9. When they started to force me inside the van via the side door, I locked my feet on the door sidings and they needed more than 5 men to push me. But then, they finally were able to push me inside the van; I was made to sit between two of the armed men and was immediately blindfolded and handcuffed to the back. But they could not tape my mouth because I was already retching and vomiting;

10. When the van started moving, my head was put down so that I could not be seen from the outside;

11. After more than an hour, we stopped and we were told to step down and because I was still retching, they made me sit or half lie on a kind of lounging chair made of bamboo slats and at that point, I did not know where my two companions were;

12. After more than 5 minutes sitting down in that bamboo lounging chair, I was brought into a room with a screen metal door and the room sounded like it had a kitchen as there was running water and I could hear cleaning activities but I was still vomiting and I heard a command was made to a woman to clean my vomit and a man asked me whether I was pregnant but I did not answer him;

13. Another man who I felt was in command asked me if I knew why I was there and I answered him that I knew my rights and that I demanded for my lawyer and he laughed telling me that in the said place there was no availing of a lawyer (walang abogado-abogado dito) and told me that “malinis ka naming nakuha at alam mo naman bakit ka nahuli?” (we got you smoothly and you know why you were captured?)

14. Then he told me that I was a member of the CPP-NPA and I retorted that I was not and I demanded for my lawyer again and I felt that there were other men inside;

15. I was made to enter a room which I felt was a jail cell because as I entered the room, they had to open a door with iron bars and for my two days stay inside that cell, I sensed that my bed was a single wooden bed without mattress, with a length of 6 feet and I was always made to lie down with my head positioned on the wall where the iron barred door was located and at my foot was a low partitioned space where a toilet bowl was and after it was a wall where there were holes serving as windows. I discerned that in the room before entering the jail cell was a bunk but I do not know the whole contents of that room;

16. When I was made to enter the jail cell, I was still blindfolded and handcuffed to the back and I remained in such position until the dawn of the next day when they changed the position of my hands to be handcuffed to the front and because of which my wrists were severely cut and bruised;

17. It must be stated here that throughout my abduction, I was always blindfolded and handcuffed even in my sleep except for those few times when I was made to take a bath;

18. During my two days there, I heard construction activities – blowtorching, hammering and the construction bustle – and these stopped in the late afternoon and I also heard gunfiring as though in a firing range and planes taking off and landing and it was loud and I could also hear goats bleating;

19. Later in the evening, I was brought out of my cell and I was confronted by two burly men in ski mask or bonnet and they shone their flashlights on my face and after a short while, they put me back into my cell and said, “ punta tayo sa kabilang gate.” (let’s go to the other gate); 20. I slept light that first night, determined to always know the time, and when morning came, I was interrogated and no breakfast nor lunch was given to me and I was asked repeatedly if I knew why I was there and was told by them that I was abducted because I was a member of the CPP NPA and I also repeatedly told him that I have rights and that I demanded for my lawyer and then he told me that even a year will pass, no lawyer would be seeing me and told me repeatedly that it was because of people like me who are the costing the government so much money and people like me are the ones who are making it difficult for the government, so that they are resorting to what they are doing and asked me who my lawyer was and I told him that it was Atty. Romy Capulong and he seemed to be stymied by my answer;

20. He continued asking me questions which I was not listening to and I was not answering and after 30 minutes of that he stopped and left;

21. After a while, another person entered and interrogated me along the same lines of questions and I did not listen and did not answer but instead told them that I knew my rights and that I wanted my lawyer and about 15 minutes of that, he left and I was already feeling hungry but no food was forthcoming and in the afternoon, many people were going in and out of the room and in and out of my cell and in the evening, I was made to eat and I ate little and then one of the men asked me if he could bathe me and I of course refused but there was this woman who was kind of assisting the men in attending to me and who I came to know later as Rose and she directed me to take a bath and brought me to another building (passing through a sometimes grassy and sometimes graveled pathway) where I saw through my blindfold two double decked beds and I assumed that it was a female barracks and there was a bath room with a jalousie typed window and I took a bath with one hand free from its cuff but with a hanging cuff on the other and my eyes free from the blindfold;

22. I was brought back to my cell blindfolded again and handcuffed at the front and I was made to lie down and after a short while, the iron barred doors were banged making clanking sound and I was taken aback and two men entered my cell with one of the man calling the other, “Tatay”, and a man pulled my cuffed hands up raising me on a sitting position and then a fist struck me at my upper sternum and it hurt and then a thumb was pressed strongly to my throat (I heard somebody saying “huh!…huh…huh.” ) choking me, making me suffocate for quite a time and when he released the pressure I gagged and I coughed and then he struck me with his fist on my left jaw ringing my ears and numbing my jaw and they were telling me, “Ang tigas ng ulo mo. Sasagot ka na sa mga tanong.” He kept repeating the questions and his pressure on my throat and fists to my jaw. An hour after, they left. But before they left, he said, “matigas ‘to. Barilin na lang natin” and I prepared for the worst;

23. It must have been very late night or early dawn, when he came back to me and he dragged me to the first room and I sensed that there was a kind of leader of the group who kept on whispering on that person who was manhandling me and two other men and the man who got me from my cell asked me, “handa ka bang mamatay?” and I answered, “Opo” and then he told me, “bago namin patayin ang isang tao, mapapaihi at mapapatae muna namin siya”;

24. The whispering man kept whispering questions to be asked and the manhandling man kept asking the questions and I told him that I have rights and that I was demanding for my lawyer but when he asked me about my name, I told them but when they asked other questions, I did not answer and he would hit me on the chest strongly and I would lose breath and gasped for air after and then he would press my throat with his thumb and say “Huh…huh…huh!” and I would gag and then he would hit me on my jaws, ringing my ears and numbing my jaws and he repeated this and added another one by holding my head with his two hands and banging the back of my head repeatedly and each time it hit the wall, I would see a flash of white bright light and ringing in my ears and again the pressure to my throat with the “Huh … huh…huh.” And saying to me, “ayaw mo pa din magsasalita” and then punched me in my rib cage and I crumpled but the other men forced me up. This torture continued and every time I crumpled the other men would force me up.

25. I was having a streaming thought that I was going to die there and then, they held my feet and my hands down and doubled up plastic bags were pulled down on my head and face and closed on my neck and I started to suffocate and I could not breath anymore and I was seeing white and thinking I was going to die and then he released the hold and I could breath but I was faint and weak (lantang lanta) and he patted me in the back and several men carried me to my cell;

26. Several hours later and when it was light, a person entered and although I was still very weak and lying down he started to interrogate me again and I said that I was tortured and I knew my rights and he told me that it was not his responsibility if there were other men who would torture me but I forced myself to sit up to face him and he was asking me what was my position in the organization and I was not answering and he told me, “akala mo ba may magagawa ang Canadian Government sa iyo?” and he called me, “Maita” and I told him that I was not Maita;

27. This was May 21, 2009 and the interrogation continued non-stop with one interrogator replaced by another after every hour and I was not given lunch although, there was a brief respite from the questions during lunch but it continued after lunch with that man who kept on his way of threatening me by saying, “Huh…huh…huh.” and this interrogation continued to the night and I remembered one interrogator who introduced himself as Dex and he talked about religion and asked me to return to the fold (“bagong buhay”) telling me that they were “kasangkapan ng Diyos para mag-bagong buhay ang mga rebelde” and I told him that I do not believe him and told him that the God I knew did not condone torture and violence and I was tortured and he gave me 24 hours to decide whether I would return to the fold;

28. After Dex, the religious interrogator, the next interrogator had a Visayan accent and talked about the evils of communism to me and kept on banging the glass on the table and after an hour of lecture, he told me, “maghintay ka na lang mamaya,” and I expected then for the worst to happen and I anticipated that I would be tortured physically again and I called for Rose with the plan that I would talk to her to delay the expected torture they would do to me and I talked to her long into the night and thinking that the only way to mitigate the torture was to play that I was returning to the fold, I told Rose that I would like to return to the fold but despite that after my talk with Rose another interrogator came in and it was this time I heard that there were other units who would like to borrow me and there was no dinner given to me;

29. I had again a light sleep and on May 22, 2009, at the break of day, the interrogation started and intensified and I was brought to another building to what I perceived to be opposite of the female barracks with the jail cell as the fulcrum and I was given some breakfast and a late lunch at the building, I felt I was in a room used as an office and I was facing a panel of interrogators and I sensed that Dex was one of them and that beside me was Rose and another man and aside from the questions and the lecture on anti-communism and religion, they were asking me to sign a document but which I refused but I asked for Dex and went along with the Religion talk;

30. Because of my refusal to sign, I was brought into another room (I heard the voice of Juanito Carabeo when I entered the room) where a bright and hot light was shone on my face and the interrogator started to ask me questions and while asking questions he gripped and pressed my right shoulder hard and it was very painful because there was a dislocation and he knew I had that dislocation and when he was telling me that I was hardheaded he pounded his pointer finger on my forehead and it hurt and then suddenly, he changed his tone and tune and told me he believed that I wanted to return to the fold and we started talking about literature and asked me about magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and he even gave me a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel, Love in Times of Cholera, and the Bible of the King James Version and I told him that I was in the area because I was looking for and gathering materials for my novels and that was why I joined the Bayan – USA and applied for an exposure program with Bayan – Central Luzon and Bayan – Tarlac volunteered for that initial survey at La Paz, and that I believed in God and I have to insist on that to go along with the Religious talk of Dex and he told me that they were interested in knowing how I got involved;

31. I was made to drink an orange soda and after a while I started to become groggy and another interrogator came to replace the literary interrogator but Dex was coming in and out of the interrogation and I started to talk about my family, my parents and my address in the United States and I was told that my name was in the Order of Battle and that I told them that I wanted to cooperate in order to return to the fold and later, Dex was again the interrogator and talked to me about religion and it was there that I felt so sleepy and before I could fall asleep I was transferred to the female barracks and was made to sleep in the floor but I was now given a mattress, a blanket and a pillow and I slept heavily and woke up when the light was already bright;

32. This was May 23, 2009 and I got angry with myself for losing control of the time and by sleeping long and deep and the interrogation continued trying to pry from me information of people I visited when I was with Bayan Central Luzon and Bayan Tarlac but I refused saying that I don’t want to put other people in harm’s way and an interrogator who introduced himself to me as RC took over and he talked about religion like Dex and said that they were merely tools of God for making rebels return to the fold and I told him that my God do not torture people and he told me that those who tortured me came from the SOG, the special operations group, and they were responsible for the “pagdukot” and for what happened to me and he asked me, “let us start from zero, ha?…ha? …ha?” and I realized he was the one who was torturing me and he continued to ask me how I came to get involved with Bayan – USA and I told him about my interest in the third world and poverty therein and I started to search the internet and I came to the site of Bayan – USA and that got me started. Sometime in the afternoon, they forcibly took a photo of me and looked for the mole on the left side of my face;

33. On this day, the interrogators were Dex and RC and they rotated between themselves interrogating me and I was playing along the religion line and finally I was told that their boss would be making the final evaluation of whether I was really returning to the fold and I slept lightly on the night of the 23rd and in the morning of the 24th, I was interrogated by the a person whom they called Boss and addressed as “Sir” and the interrogation lasted for the day and I answered their questions about me but not about other people and the Boss told me that if I did not cooperate I would be borrowed by other units whose personnel wouldn’t be as nice as Dex and RC and this interrogation and conversations continued until the night; the Boss also said to me that if I saw him, I’d be surprised and that he knew a lot about me and who I was;

34. At night, RC approached me and told me that I would be going home the next day but I did not believe him and I slept lightly on the night of the 24th; at early dawn of the 25th, I was awakened by Rose who told me to bath and I was given a sim card for use in contacting them and I was given a slip of paper where a new email address RC created for me was written with the password __________and I was given a bag where biscuits were placed and the books that were given were also placed and also the handcuffs used on me and Rose gave me her blouse and shoes for me to use in going home and RC told me that, “hindi tayo magkaaway, gusto ko magkaibigan tayo, ha” and he told me to beware of Karapatan because it will tell you to go against us and will talk with your family and that I should not let Karapatan talk with their family, otherwise, something will happen and that they would like to talk with my uncle and after which, I boarded a different vehicle than that of the van that brought me there as it was more spacious and I was seated on the center with Rose on my left and RC on my right with the driver and a passenger on the passenger side of the front seat and I sensed that there were about more than two people at the back and that I could hear communications with another car which was in convoy with us ordering not to drop me in front of our house in Quezon City as there was an activity but the car I was riding passed by and stopped in front of our house and I was asked to lift my blindfold to take a look at the house and to affirm whether it was my house and I confirmed and my blindfold was placed back and the car turned around and finally I was dropped at the corner nearest the house and I was told to face where I was dropped and to count up to one hundred before walking to my house and RC told me that they will be monitoring all my actions and something bad will happen to me if I do not cooperate that made me more afraid and I did what they told me after they took off my blindfold and I was dropped on the sidewalk and I was facing a wall and I did not move around even just to turn my head as I was very afraid that they would get me again and I did not move even after a count of a hundred until my phone rang and it was RC who instructed me that I could already walk which I did and arrived home to my uncle’s warm and relieved welcome;

35. But my travails did not end there, RC continued to talk to me through the phone where the Sim card he gave was inserted and I was so afraid to go out believing that they were just around monitoring me that I just stayed inside the room not even going out of that room and because of that my cousin bore upon me to throw the bag and the sim card to the trash which I did but the books, the clothes of Rose, the handcuffs, the slip of paper containing the email address RC created for me and the password I retained thinking of filing a case against them;

36. I was traumatized and the fear is still in me and I execute this affidavit to state the truth of the foregoing facts and for purposes of filing a Petition for a Writ of Amparo and Habeas Data to protect me and my family and my uncle and his family now and in the future and for possible other legal cases. IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I hereunto affix my signature this 2th day of May 2009 at Quezon City, Philippines. MELISSA C. ROXAS SUBSCRIBED AND SWORN TO BEFORE me this 29th day of May 2009 at Quezon City, Philippines by affiant who showed to me her U.S. Passport no. 443307364, with expiry date on June 1, 2018 and issued at the US Embassy Manila.-##

DEMAND THE INVESTIGATION OF THIS OUTRAGEOUS AND TERRIBLE CRIME! THE ARROYO MILITARY RECEIVES MILLIONS OF TAXPAYERS’ DOLLARS EVERY YEAR. DEMAND OBAMA AND THE US CONGRESS AND JUSTICE DEPARTMENT TO RENDER JUSTICE TO MELISSA ROXAS BY PUTTING THE CRIMINALS ON TRIAL.–Philippines Cultural Studies Center

Posted in COMMENTARY ON CURRENT EVENTS

NICK JOAQUIN: An Introduction

philcsc — Mon, 25 May 2009 19:58:17 +0000

Celebrating the Virgin and Her City:
AN INTRODUCTION TO NICK JOAQUIN

by E. SAN JUAN, Jr.

What, then, is revealed in the quarrel between Remus and Remulus is the way in which the city of man is divided against itself, whereas, in the case of Cain and Abel, what we see is the enmity between the two cities, the city of man and City of God.
-St. Augustine

Life should be changed because the state of the world will be changed . . . . We shall not be what we have been, but we shall begin to be other.
-Joachim of Floris

Justice cannot exist where all the best things in life are held by the worst citizens; nor can anyone be ham where property is limited to a few, since those few are always uneasy and many are utterly wretched.
-St. Thomas More

WRITING AT THE TURN OF THE CENTURY his now classic autobiography (The Education of Henry Adams, 1900) where the Philippines is a place from which he was, in a manner of speaking, “glad to escape,” Henry Adams marvelled at the dynamo in the Paris Great Exposition of 1900 as a “moral force,” a “symbol of infinity.” In that incandescent metropolis, Adams “had studied Karl Marx and his doctrines of history with profound attention, yet he could not apply them,’ leaving him perplexed, “his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.” He reflects that in America the dynamo of the classical and medieval past—Venus and Virgin—neither “had value as force—at most as sentiment.” The author of Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1913) muses further:

The Woman had once been supreme; in France she still seemed potent, not merely assentiment, but as a force. Why was she unknown in America? . . . She was goddess because of her force; she was the animated dynamo; she was reproduction—the greatest and most mysterious of all energies . . . this energy was unknown to the American mind….
All the steam in the world could not, like the Virgin, build Chartres . . . . Symbol or energy, the Virgin had acted as the greatest force the Western world ever felt, and had drawn men’s activities to herself more strongly than any other power, natural or supernatural, had ever done.1

Eighty-three years later, Adams’ compatriot Harvey Cox, theologian at Harvard University, upholds anti-Virginal secularization as “the unappreciated offspring of the prophets, including the prophet of Nazareth, who railed against religiously sanctioned injustice with as much fervor as any anticleric.”2 But since times have changed, Cox appreciates more than other postmodernist thinkers the persistence of the female image of the divine in a culture such as Mexico where Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Christian version of the Aztec fertility goddess, Tonantzin, becomes the site of a raging battle between the Church hierarchy and the masses of the faithful. Popular and learned consensus testifies that the Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, “La Vida,” continues to radiate a dynamic force replicated in liberation theology and in the fiestas of popular religion in Latin America and the Third World at which Henry Adams would have marvelled today even as he becomes anxiously sensitized to the tremors of an impending nuclear apocalypse. Without in any way adducing direct influence or indirect acquaintance, Nick Joaquin uncannily offers an inverted, more precisely, dialectical refraction of Henry Adams’ historicist schizophrenia.

On first reckoning, Joaquin’s world view is polarized into two apparently divergent but ultimately complementary tendencies. First, the mythologizing and intrinsically aestheticizing tendency to reconcile opposites and to explain complex historical events by a metaphysical and idealizing schema whose most densely charged chronotopic figure is the Virgin of the Rosary enshrined at Sto. Domingo church. Practically the entire thematic and symbolic strategy in Joaquin’s fiction and drama gravitates around, and is permeated by, the figure of the Virgin Mother. This is the realm of utopian extrapolation. Second, the crudely mechanistic and technological determinism that informs such discourses as “Culture as History,” “History As Culture,” “Technology: The Philippine Revolution,” and numerous magazine articles. Of course, this is a synoptic view made up for exigent analytic purposes, ignoring the chronology and circumstantial matrices of each text. Logically, if the proposition expressing the first tendency means what it says, then we can characterize the organizing principle, the controlling vision, of Joaquin’s art at its best as a postmodernist reaffirmation of utopian desire, taking the term “utopian” here to signify the collective social project of humanizing and naturalizing Henry Adams’ dynamo by establishing its organic linkage with the feminine dimension of the psyche and cosmic life; and at its worst, an apologia—that is what the inaugural key text in the Joaquin canon, “La Naval de Manila,” essentially is—for patriarchal institutions and hierarchic power.

I submit that “Nick Joaquin” as the authorial simulacrum generated by an ensemble of texts embodies the multiple historic contradictions of contemporary Philippine society, reproducing these contradictions, inflecting and conjugating them in highly idiosyncratic ways, modifying and altering them, in the same process that the class divisions and the multilayered mode of production—that is, the social relations of production in the total Philippine formation—powerfully shape and overdetermine the ideas, forms, conventions, metaphors, and language structured in the body of texts ascribed to “Nick Joaquin.”

Contextualized thus, “Nick Joaquin’ is both an aesthetic problem to be posed and analyzed, and equally an ethicopolitical problematic reflecting our own national predicaments, sufferings, traumas, struggles, dreams and aspirations: what Filipinos are, have been and will be, insofar as beauty and freedom—following Schiller’s insight—share a common destiny and are inseparably linked in praxis.

From his first important essay “La Naval de Manila” written in October 1943 to the most recent dramatic piece The Beatas dated 1975 and Cave and Shadows published in 1984, the central figure of the Virgin (and mother-daughter combinations) deciphered as the symbolic condensation of the utopian and unconscious stands out with all its contradictory implications and resonance. In Christian mythology, as Alan Watts and Mircea Eliade point out, Mater Virgo signifies “the Prima Materia prior to its division, or ploughing, into the multiplicity of created things.” As Stella Maris (Star of the sea; mare = Mary), the Sealed Fountain, “the immaculate womb of this divine font,” she is the water over which the Spirit moved in the beginning of time.3 She takes on the identities of the Axle-Tree of the World, with the serpent at its roots and bearing alike the fruits of death and life (see “The Legend of the Virgin’s Jewel”); the Rose and the Lily, flowers symbolic of the receptive aspect of man’s spiritual transformation; as the Chalice or Grail which receives Christ’s lifeblood; as moon-goddess; as Space, “the Womb in which the Logos comes to birth”—a process captured by the breathless periodic and hypotactic syntax of Joaquin’s style; and in the thick, embedded phrasing of the conclusion of “La Naval de Manila.”

So the Virgin then stands for matter, elemental substance (matria, matrix, mater); maternal womb of the universe, chaos, abyss of dark and formless matter cognized as feminine in contrast to Spirit symbolized by air and fire cognized as masculine. The Virgin is the original womb of creation, analogous to Maya in Hinduism and Buddhism; that “no-thing” which, when divided by the Logos, becomes separate things.4 The theme of the imagination acting on matter (the body, earth, water) ramifies also into the necessity of sacrifice so as to give birth to the new, with the new “fallen” creation redeemed in turn by a repetition of the sacrifice-history as cultural ritual ingeniously rendered in A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino, in the two novels, The Beatas, and elsewhere:

Thus it is prophesied of Mary, “A sword shall pierce through thy own soul also,” since in all the great traditions creation is always through a sacrifice; the multiplicity of things is the One dismembered and divided. By yet another sacrifice the One is remembered—“Do this in re-membrance (anamnesis) of Me”—for the original Unity is restored when the sacrifice is repeated, because the repetition is a recollection of what was done “in the beginning.”5

In that brief description of the myth by Alan Watts is secreted Joaquin’s conception of history illustrated in 0 his writings. Sacrifice, dismemberment and mutilation of what is whole, denoting the power of the Word or Logos, is what leads to the primal Mother’s emergence, thus subordinating her (by “the Child on one arm”) to the masculine Creator. History consequently appears as a manifestation of male power.

What has happened in actual history is the suppression of this thoroughgoing materialism, so dangerously heretical to the imperial post-Constantinian faith, by the promulgation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin (distinguished from Eve the sinner) since she is “the Servant of the lord,” her Son. Simone de Beauvoir comments on this fateful reversal: “For the first time in human history the mother kneels before her son; she freely accepts her inferiority. This is the supreme masculine victory, consummated in the cult of the Virgin—it is the rehabilitation of woman through the accomplishment of her defeat.”6 That treacherous circle—a virtual overthrow of the primacy of the body, matter, production—is marked by Joaquin’s ethical dualism in “La Naval” between matter (tribal custom and taboo entailing “dreaminess, “ “our incapacity for decisive thought or action”) and consciousness, in this case the medieval Christian military fanaticism in subduing heretics, Calvin, Islam.

Founded on the assumption that the pre-Spanish aboriginal inhabitants of the archipelago had no “history” for the simple reason that they had not benefited from the saving impact of Christianity, deprived of “this awakening of the self, this release and expansion of the consciousness, “Joaquin’s thesis posits that Spanish colonial domination is responsible for our national identity: “The content of our national destiny is ours to create, but the basic form, the temper, the physiognomy, Spain has created for us.”7 Note, however, that not only the form but also the significance and content are supplied by the traditional paradigm epitomized here by the exemplary cult of patron saints. How is this tradition formed? By the commemoration of events such as the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 and the Spanish naval victory of 1646 against the Dutch, both epochal successes attributed to the intervention or intercession of the Virgin. A sleight-of-hand maneuvering occurs here when those two events are juxtaposed so that by spatial contamination and shift, the Queen of the Most Holy Rosary traverses chronological distance and geography to save the “tiny Rome growing up by the Pasig” from “Calvin’s shadow.’ The content of Philippine destiny is predicated on the Spanish military victories to safeguard the colony from other European powers, sacrifices marked by feasts such as La Naval, “which is purely ours,” says Joaquin. While the text argues that Spain imbued the Filipino nation with self-consciousness, a sense of history and autonomy, that consciousness depends on its sacrifice to a perpetual repetition of an originary, archetypal event: “There is indeed no Philippine town or village, however humble, that does not feel peculiarly itself, as belonging to that spot of ground and no other, because of some patronal cult traditional to the locality, some holy image there venerated and investing the site with legend and association.”8 This mode of spatializing reflections dictated by the submerged or suspended materialism of the Virgin cult refutes Joaquin’s thesis: “If Lepanto was its last act, our colonial history may be termed as oriental epilogue to the miracleplace of the West.’ Here rears the head of rampant “Orientalism” (Edward Said’s term) that dogmatically affirms Western primacy by subordinating/marginalizing the Other: where are the natives who are supposedly creating the content of their national destiny?9

In describing the Image, Joaquin states that she “is arrayed as a royal lady at the court of the Felipes’ unlike the dark Virgin of Guadalupe; her majestic queenly bearing, however, conflicts with the subsequent detail: “the face is individualized, is warmly human, and was surely chiseled by the Chinese catechumen.” Surrounding this image, by metonymic exfoliation, is a wealth of childhood memories rendered in sensuous imagery evoking communal solidarity so that, on closer analysis, it is not the ethicopolitical and ideological stakes—the war between heathen fate and Christian freedom—that haunts the text but time and death itself, the “despair” coincident with self-consciousness, that very same isolated free will that threatens to shatter the unity of time and space. And when we recall Joaquin’s fear of the “blood’s memories of the communal tribe-house” encroaching and predetermining all action, his fear of “those submerged longings for the tight, fixed web of the tribal obedience” as contrasted with “the pain and effort of responsible and personal existence,” then we see how the ironic twist of textual labor unleashes the political unconscious and releases the repressed in those intensely remembered tribal feasts and celebrations of the two Navals as an evocation of childhood innocence devoid of the “pain and effort of responsible and personal existence,’ more poignantly visible in the ecstatic surrender of a self-possessed Cartesian rational ego to the tumultuous mind-blowing music of the procession and the fiery blaze of vision, the conscious discrete self dissolving utterly in that amorphous oneiric space on which is inscribed the Prima Materia undercut here at the last moment by the idealizing phallic will: “Oh, beautiful and radiant as an apparition! — the Presence at Lepanto, Lady and Queen and Mother of Manila, the Virgin of the Fifteen Mysteries.”

That the text of “La Naval” and its technique of montage splicing metaphor, synecdoche and metonymy distorts the more fluid and plastic reality of the historical past, homogenizing the Dionysian materia in an Apollonian structure (to adapt Nietzsche’s terminology), and ironically subverts its thesis of unveiling the truth, is now more familiar to a contemporary audience rehearsed in the deconstructive theoretical play of Derrida, Foucault and other poststructuralist critics. In The New Science, Vico suggests that “men are naturally impelled to preserve the memories of the laws and institutions that bind them in their societies.”10 Opposed to Nietzsche’s nomadic impulse, however, is Vico’s insight into history as shaped and reproduced by human actions, not by intervention of a sacred transcendental power; actions which are repeated, filiative and genealogical. Such repetition coalescing reason with raw experience provides the means whereby humans represent themselves, disclosing in the act an objective, supraindividual rationality: “Men mean to gratify their bestial lust and abandon their offspring, and they inaugurate the chastity of marriage from which the families arise. The fathers mean to exercise without restraint their paternal power over their clients, and they subject them to the civil powers from which the cities arise.”11 This historical-materialist purposiveness, the dialectic of consciousness and mode of production, may be said to animate the tensions in all of Joaquin’s fiction and also situate the ironic discrepancy of form and intention I have briefly alluded to in “La Naval’ in its roots: the actual lived contradictions of class, gender, race, etc.

Unfortunately it is not Vico’s problematic of repetition and of mind as historical memory capable of infinite articulation and change that has instigated Joaquin’s excursions into pop anthropology but the reductive technicism or scientistic determinism of Marshall McLuhan, abetted by the obscurantist fatalism of Oswald Spengler. And this is the hyperbolic irony of all, considering Joaquin’s quite correct insistence in rejecting the notion of “timeless” essences and his positive though somewhat ambiguous emphasis on existential becoming, on a dynamic and creative view of cultural appropriation, on metamorphosis, in his treatise “Culture as History.”

Although now changing the rhetorical tactic of “La Naval” into a more empirical and outwardly scientific recasting of the basic argument that the Spanish introduction of tools and the Faustian spirit (strange epiphenomenon of sixteenth and seventeenth baroque!) in 1521 and 1565 forged the “basic outlines” of Filipino identity, Joaquin’s essay “Culture as History” reduces “culture” into tools and technological sophistication which, rearticulated via McLuhan as “communication,” makes possible not only the Asianization of the Filipino but also his maturation as citizen of the modern world. The birth of the Filipino is categorically dated to 1565 after which “we can be nothing but Filipino,” and by Filipino is meant adobo, pan de sal, ati-atihan, Moriones, tropical gothic and baroque—in other words, an aggregate total or accumulation of practices empirically observed in specific times and places.12

With this massive accumulation of media—the wheel, plough, road, etc.—Joaquin finally locates the “sense of history” in the mediating institution of craft guilds or communities of technicians and artisans sharing the same knowledge, skills; such craft mastery, he speculates, “may have contributed to the formation of a national consciousness.” So it is this “sense of social solidarity” that Joaquin postulates as the mediating agency or vehicle of our unification as a nation composed of various regional and ethnic groupings, allowing him in a subsequent essay, “History as Culture,” to rehash the now fallacious contention that it was the elite or educated middle strata (ilustrados) and their ilk, who were singlehandedly responsible for creating a distinctly Filipino culture—an embarrassingly naive chauvinism anathema to the multiethnic and multiracial nationalist movement today involving Igorots, Moros, atheists, naturalized Filipinos, and others.

What remains disguised in Joaquin’s idiosyncratic program of rearguard apologetics for the Christianization of the native, notwithstanding appreciations of the heathen elements syncretized in folk festivals zestfully described in “The Santo Nifio in Philippine History,” “A Theory on the Sinulog,” and especially in Almanac for Manilenos, is the fundamental episteme or problematic which, as I have suggested above, is prefigured by the symbolic richness of the Virgin cult.

Confronted with the profound temporality and alienation of modern existence, Joaquin realizes that the devaluation of the Goddess-technical knowledge, Logos, cannot but be masculinist will-is temporary; her disappearance is explained by Orthodox doctrine as a falling asleep (dormitio) and by Roman Catholic teaching as the Assumption of Mary-her elevation to heaven, bypassing death. She has temporarily relocated in another space, temporarily exiled if you will, but engaged in frequent incursions, showing forth in unexpected sites, speaking and communicating. This Marian figure of space lays the groundwork for conceiving a modality of time which has been ascribed (by Julia Kristeva and others) to a specifically female subjectivity: “repetition” as experienced in gestations, natural cycles of recurrence; and “eternity” or monumental duration, cosmic temporality. The two modalities conjoined trigger a hallucinatory jouissance that drowns linear consecutive clock time. Kristeva notes how the Virgin incarnates and sanctions this experience of cosmic, mystical time which in essence can only be textualized in space: “One is reminded of the various myths of resurrection which, in all religious beliefs, perpetuate the vestige of an anterior or concomitant maternal cult, right up to its most recent elaboration. Christianity, in which the body of the Virgin Mother does not die but moves from one spatiality to another within the same time via dorrnition (according to the Orthodox faith) or via assumption (the Catholic faith).”13

One can elucidate the narrative and parabolic function of Nenita Coogan’s body and her mysterious death vis-à-vis the epiphany of the earth-goddess and her avatars in Cave and Shadows, and the mother-daughter polarity in The Women Who Had Two Navels in the light of Marian temporality characterized by the experience of time metamorphosing into space. In a note to “The Art of Ancient Egypt,” Joaquin betrays this antinomic consciousness when he mistakenly equates Egyptian art’s urge to deny mortality by equating “the will to endure” with “history.”14

The most elaborate virtuoso performance ofjoaquin’s diacritical sensibility where a precapitalist epistemology of space and time operates to program the style and structure of the text is Almanac for Manilenos. Using the calendar convention of amalgamating discordant facts and incompatible topics for utilitarian purpose, Joaquin superimposes a cross-referential analogical unity on a vast encyclopedic catalogue of material through the device of astrology. Immediately the empirical and the supernatural are yoked together in a metaphysical conceit reminiscent of baroque poetics, each planetary or astral sign lending intelligibility to the montage of otherwise discrepant, incongruous, trivial or indifferent data. Thus, for the month of January, the commentary opens with a headnote detailing the physiognomy of people born under the horoscope sign—such headnotes serving as a figured bass, or dominant chord, to the composition. Time is filled with a succession of information: iconography of Janus, the primitive rites of passage, the chimera as oxymoronic emblem, the event of the Japanese occupation in January 1941, descriptions of downtown Manila in the past, the feast of the Nazarene in Quiapo followed by the feasts of the Sto. Niiio in Tondo and elsewhere, a meditation on the etymology of place-names, a note on the 1872 Cavite uprising tied,,N,,ith a fiesta for La Virgen del Carmen, and finally a retrospective lament on the decline of Bilibid Viejo. Take another example, the month of May which begins (after the astrological headnote) with an account of the Battle of Manila Bay in May 1898, followed by notes on May Day festivals in England, May fiestas in various city districts, a note on the emerald, the legend of the Santacruzan, the fall of Corregidor, followed by Bonifacio’s execution, a description of Sta. Ana and then of Marikina, of Chinese Mandarins in Manila, and finally a description of indigenous Maytime rituals centering on the earth-goddess and the Virgin cornucopia, anatomy, Borges’ Library, Joycean palimpsest-the Almanac codifies for Joaquin the semiotics and grammar of the quintessential Filipino experience.

Unlike its genre, this almanac suspends the utilitarian and fetishizes the simultaneous. Addressed specifically to Manilefi6s, it intends to synthesize past and present happenings under the hegemonic sign of the city, a city vaporized into impressions, auras, fashions, cliches and personified by folk heroes and celebrities, a metropolis (no longer Intramuros but sprawling Metro Manila) that Joaquin celebrates less as locus of events than as a figure of the conjunction of linear/chronological time and cosmic/repetitive time—a symbol then of what for him is a project addressed to the Other: the always deferred sacramental constitution of Filipino subjectivity.

But what is fascinatingly unique and symptomatic in the contrivance of this project is the experimental handling of the almanac as a religious calendar of festivities crossed with that typically modernist invention, the newspaper and illustrated weekly with their unrelenting, rigorous flattening out of everything—the petty, the accidental, the numinous—into exchangeable counters. But in Joaquin’s almanac, old news is always new; and the recent never gets obsolete as it oscillates in the general circulation of the ephemeral and the cosmic, all the antipodes and contraries fused in the simultaneity of a frozen mosaic. This experience of reading the almanac, subtly effecting a decentering of the subject, corresponds to Joaquin’s notion of the world citizen in “Culture as History’: “Shouldn’t we rather recognize that each person is a sort of unconscious anthology of all the epochs of man; and that he may at times be moving simultaneously among different epochs?”15

Now, the model of the unintentionally oxymoronic and levelling effect of the newspaper exercises its appeal for Joaquin because it is the unprecedented textualization of the modern city in the age of industrial capitalism, a textualization comparable with the polysemous and analogical texture of Christian art and philosophy but only insofar as it can be subsumed within an ideology already surpassed by the logic of the expanded reproduction of capital. Can the Virgin and the Dynamo be wedded together in fruitful coexistence, as Joaquin strives to do in the Almanac and elsewhere? Can the Faustian spirit (Goethe’s symbol of the ruthless hustler of capitalist property-values) which Joaquin idolizes as the legacy of 1565 (another bizarre hybridization!) bejoined as the loving consort of the Great Mother Goddess hymned in the entries for May and October in the Almanac?

Such questions Joaquin has probably answered when, at the end of his discourse “The Santo Nino in Philippine History,” he apostrophizes the Holy Spirit as “the heavenly dynamo.” One extraordinarily illuminating Approach to this pervasive antinomic temper of Joaquin’s art and thought, which I have tried to formulate elsewhere as the inescapable predicament of the organic intellectual of the backward-looking but fiercely independent Filipino petty bourgeois class crushed by U.S. monopoly business but horrified by the resurgent masses of workers and peasants, can be derived from the incisive distinctions between the classical/feudal matrices of time and space and those of industrial capitalism proposed by Nicos Poulantzas
in State, Power, Socialism.

Poulantzas explains that the spatial matrices of ancient and feudal societies share common features stemming from precapitalist relations of production and the social division of labor: continuous, homogeneous, symmetrical, reversible and open. Instead of differentiation and hierarchy, the geometric topographical orientation reproduced in the political organization of the polis allows slave and master to share the same space:

The points at which power is exercised are replicas of the sovereign’s body. In fact, it is this body which unifies space and installs public man within private man: it is a body with no place and no frontiers. All roads lead to Rome in the sense that Rome is at every point of the sovereign’s moving around…. [What is outside, the barbarians, belongs to a non-site or no-land.]
Both the towns and feudal demesnes or fiefs were open and turned out, through a number of epicentres, towards that umbilical centre, Jerusalem. As Marx pointed out, the relations of production were such that religion played the dominant role in feudal social formations; it was directly present in the forms of the exercise of power and it patterned space by setting the seal of Christianity upon it…. As in Antiquity, people do not change their position: between the fiefs, large villages and towns, on the one hand, and Jerusalem and its diverse earthly incarnations on the other, between the Fall and Salvation, there is no break, fissure or distance. Frontiers and such intermediary points of demarcation as walls, forests and deserts refer not to a distance that has to he crossed in order to pass from one segment to another (one town to another), but to crossroads of a single route. The pilgrim or crusader—which is what every traveler is after a fashion—does not actually go to the holy places and Jerusalem, because these are already inscribed in his body. (This is also the case with Islam.) The body -politic of each sovereign incarnates the unity of this space as the body of Christ-the-King, and space is marked out by the paths of the Lord.16

In contrast, the spatial matrix of capitalism produces “the serial, fractured, parcelled, cellular and irreversible space which is peculiar to the Taylorist division of labor on the factory assembly line.” Thus a territory like the Philippine archipelago can only become national by means of, and in consonance with, the power of the capitalist State apparatus.

Following Poulantzas’ characterization of these two opposed spatial matrices, we can see that underlying the textual strategies of Joaquin’s fiction and drama is the organizing category of the medieval/feudal spatial matrix colliding or interpenetrating with that of the capitalist spatial matrix, an occurrence typical of the unevenly developed Philippine formation. To put it another way, the figure of the Virgin as the harmonizing principle of the city is made to reconcile what is reversible and homogeneous with the successive fracturings, gaps, breaks, closures, frontiers and segmentations of modern urban experience.

In a previous article, “From Intramuros to the Liberated City: Salvaging the Aesthetics of the Polis” (included in my book Crisis in the Philippines), I attempted a sketchy mapping of Joaquin’s use of the city as thematic content and organizing technique based on the binary rhetorical antithesis of metonymy and metaphor, the paradigmatic and synchronic. Let me offer supplementary qualifications here. In The Women Who Had Two Navels, the experience of the city is dispersed, symmetrical, reversible, ultimately equated with the polymorphous feminine. The situation of Paco Texeira, the object of the agon between the Vidal women and the outsider, exemplifies this production of space: “By the time he met the senora de Vidal he had become deeply interested in Manila and was ready to be interested in any woman who most piquantly suggested that combination of primitive mysticism and slick modernity which he felt to be the special temper of the city and its people” (p.27). Opposed to elevated Hong Kong, the’lerusalem’of Aguinaldo’s exile and the site of Connie Vidal’s hallucinatory redemption (her virginal “assumption”), the city opens out to the countryside which it incorporates as overlapping utopian prefiguration: “the mountains, and the woman sleeping in a silence mighty with myth and mystery—for she was the ancient goddess of the land (said the people) sleeping out the thousand years bondage: but when at least she awoke, it would be a Golden Age again for the land: no more suffering; no more toil; no rich and no poor.” What the novel superbly enacts is the fabled dialectics of Christian “free will” and politicogeographical determinisms in a surface where all movement unfolds with reversible directions, so that the spiritual impasse and psychological blockages dissolve when the old Monzon experiences a rapturous home-coming—he has not really moved his place or position because history is inscribed in his body—where the city and the Virgin (now indigenized) occupy the horizon and fulfills time: “Here he was, home at last. Behind him were the mountains and the Sleeping Woman in the sky, and before him, like smoky flames in the sunset, the whole beautiful beloved city” (p. 223).

In the post war years when Joaquin conceived and wrote his first novel, the national territory had just been formally separated from the U.S. empire but the weakness or false autonomy of the State as well as the dependent nature of the comprador-landlord-bureaucratic ruling bloc did not promote deterritorialization: the separation of the direct producer from his means of labor (peasantry; petty commodity and artisanal production), the persistence of personalistic bonds and kinship/familial ties, archaic religious practices. These material conditions, coupled with the 1949 victory of the Chinese workers and peasants which serves as the terminus ad quem of the 1899 Filipino-American War (Battle of Tirad Pass, etc.), underpin the expressive-realist structuring of the novel and its nostalgic clinging to the voice of the authoritative narrator still anchored to a stable, mythical world view.

By the eighties, when Joaquin completes his second novel Cave and Shadows, the peripheral underdeveloped formation has entered a crisis in which the great urban insurrections called “First Quarter Storm” of 1970 serve as prelude to the liberation of the city by the solidarity of individual solitudes (the people) and a new reterritorialization. Authoritarian manipulation of space and time now mocks feudal practices and fosters the duplicities of transnational domination. In ideology and program, the fascist dispensation shows all the traits that Poulantzas attributes to modern totalitarianism: “separation and division in order to unify; parcelling out in order to structure; atomization in order to encompass; segmentation in order to totalize; closure in order to homogenize; and individualization in order to obliterate differences and otherness.”17 What is at stake are certain liberal institutions and Enlightenment principles justifying laissez-faire enterprise now grown obsolescent with the avid transnational drive of profit accumulation and made precarious with the internal competition among the developed nations and the intensified rivalry between the U.S.-led bloc and the “socialist” sphere in the era of late capitalism.

With the collapse of the traditional liaisons and fraternizing between outsiders and insiders (between Paco and the Monzons, between Macho and the Vidals, and the adversarial ethos they represent)-a mutation dramatized in “Candido’s Apocalypse” and “The Order of Melkizedek”—the traditional categories and norms suffer a cataclysmic upheaval so that the conceptual coordinates of reversibility, homogeneity, symmetry, continuity and repetitiveness lose relevance. The ideals of national self-determination and the possibility of real historical change, and the question of who is going to articulate them, now occupy center stage in the struggle of class and sectoral forces, of the national-popular will against the moribund power bloc and imperialist hegemony.

In this light, Cave and Shadows may be read as a belated response to the crisis in its structuring of time shifts and the choice of a detective-mystery thriller convention, contraposing the temporal-spatial matrices of the ancient and medieval order to the capitalist transformation of psyches, lifestyles, criteria of values and tastes, and traditions. The symptoms of the city’s displacement are clear with the deterritorialization of the mag’or protagonists: Jack Henson resides in Davao and returns to it after his ordeal and pilgrimage, Alfonso Gatmaitan is mayor of a suburban town where the cave is found, the Manzano mansion “collapses” with the breakup of the clan. These comprise so many telltale signs that the capitalist temporal matrix consubstantial with its social division of labor and relations of production is overthrowing the archaic and feudal, a transitional moment in which the conflict between the Manzanos and Gatmaitans (representing distinct social classes or fractions thereof) may be read as representations of the former, and the mythical-historical archive projecting the goddess in her various manifestations (Nenita Coogan and the Ginoong Ina as dei ex machina?) serve as a poetic figure for the latter. In parts 2, 4, 6 and 8, time moves backward and forward in a reversible and continuous sequence, so that whatever privileged moments occur in those flashbacks are absorbed in eternity (Christianity) or chance (archaic societies). Governed by a concept of time as eternal recurrence, the unfolding chronicle of the legendary fertility goddess contains no events in the strict sense, and moves in a circular direction; the past is always reproduced in the present, the essence is manifested in the here and now: “The present is included in the origins, chronology remaining a repetition of the genesis, if not actually a genealogical transfer.’ One can say that this novelistic drive to trace the origin of a sequence or progression testifies to a scheme to wrest an original omniscience belonging to God.

Once again, Poulantzas offers us a heuristic anatomy of feudal ideology applicable to our critical analysis of Joaquin’s literary mode of production:

Over and above the dependence of temporalities on the “natural time” peculiar to essentially agrarian societies (seasons, work in the fields, and so on), what matters is the temporal matrix underlying the agricultural, artisan, military or clerical times, that appear as so many singular times. While each of these involves certain datings, the various chronologies are not ordered throughout times that are divisible into equal segments; and nor do the various moments have a numerical frame of reference. These chronologies refer instead to a continuous time which, placed under the aegis of religion, appears as a time of eternity punctuated by second meanings, acts of piety, and belfry-chimes inserted into the rhythm of the mass. Rooted in this temporal matrix, a linear materiality of time does, of course, come forth as distinct from the cyclical materiality of Antiquity: history now has a beginning and end, located between the creation and the Last judgment. But it is still a present time: beginning and end, before and after are fully co-present in the constant essence of the Divine. Whether it is a question of immutable truth or of progressively revealed truth, and whether individual salvation is predetermined or not, all that is ever involved is a repetition or bringing-up-to-date of the origins. Here where the irreversibility of time is a mere illusion, to reach for the end is always to regain the beginning.18

Simultaneity of before and after, past and future distilled in the present, is what exactly characterizes the Almanac’s textualization of time and the city, the reversibility of scenes in “Guardia de Honor,” “May Day Eve,” “Three Generations,” A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino; the knowledge or enigma that crystallizes in Jack Henson’s mind as he tries to pursue the origin of his dilemma; the entrance/exit to the labyrinth where Nenita Coogan’s body or its simulacrum lies entombed, etc. Finally, the present and future rejoin the mythical past when the renegade Christian and the pagan priestess reenact their roles through their “degraded” surrogates Pocholo Gatinaitan and Ginoong Ina in Cave and Shadows.

When the city in this second novel is eclipsed by the deterritorializing process in which the revivalist impulse and nationalist activism begin to challenge the centralizing function of the church itself and its rituals, Joaquin is compelled to draw on the Virgin figure and her chthonic energies (expressed in the popular religion surrounding Ginoong Ina) to counter the atomized, fracturing and reifying forces of bureaucratic capitalism and its differential, cumulative, irreversible temporality. This compensating mechanism seeks to enforce a conception of history as something not made but commemorated, the present as reconcretization of the past; history as recollection or unfolding of genealogies, the past spreading like an echo into the present while it unceasingly foreshadows that future which will meet up with the beginning in an endless circulation. There is no history for Joaquin in the sense of progressive evolution, an inherently bourgeois perspective. Likewise, as Poulantzas states, “pre-capitalist territories have no historicity of their own, since political time is the time of the prince-body, who is capable of extension, contraction, and movement in a continuous and homogeneous space.” For the prince-body, substitute the Virgin Mother and the earth as fields of inscription, of textualization and hermeneutics for Joaquin.

It seems that to preserve and sustain the archaic and feudal matrices of time and space in a period, especially after the Second World War, when the classic function of the city as “the form and symbol of an integrated social relationship,” as the historian Lewis Mumford explains; where “the mind takes form” has become eroded, Joaquin in Cave and Shadows, felt the need to reconstruct the subject-positions for Filipinos that he had outlined in his previous writings and, in Jack Henson’s decentered or “castrated” position, broach the possibility of recovering a primordial but now lost symbolic site of community and authentic existence. I believe that Joaquin is in general conducting a futile salvaging operation, a rearguard battle against the powerful forces of the consumer capitalist market and its “specular” Faustian individualism that he sometimes extols. These forces, according to Mumford, effectively destroyed the time-space episteme or frame of reference incarnate in the medieval city: “The Protestant doctrine of justification by Faith and the doctrine of Divine Election came in with credit finance and the rise of the self-perpetuating urban patriciate: the visibly elect, the manipulators of intangible values…. The validity of the universal Church was denied; the reality of the group was denied; only the individual counted on earth as in heaven: nominalism or social atomism.

Assuming that historical mutation of urban function, the Manila of Cave and Shadows can be interpreted as the space where phallocentric will has driven the feminine underground, exiled the Virgin into myth or the archives, and now desperately tries to manipulate the tortuous course of events. But the narrative undermines that order, subverts the sequential, arrow-flight time of the plot and the ratiocinative detective-knower, and eventually opens the masculinist logic of the proairetic code to the pressure of feminine modalities: repetition, cyclic rhythms, recurrence, cosmic sense of unboundedness, the vertigo of hallucination, dreams, rage and the shock of terror unleashing jouissance. Think, for instance, of the disorienting textual “madness” and dislocating carnival excess found in the description of Connie Vidal’s car accident in chapter 4 of The Woman Who Had Two Navels (pp. 183-84), or the freakish weather and the fury of the elements in Cave and Shadows. The repressed returns avenging …

Caught in roughly the same inexorable antagonisms between the secularizing traffic of business and the archaic structures in our psyches, Charles Baudelaire, regarded by all as the greatest lyric poet of urban modernism, acutely grasped the desanctification process in the “moving chaos” of everyday life in the city. His response of cosmic irony (in Paris Spleen, for example), however, does not validate orthodox piety or a fashionable bohemian aestheticism. As Marshall Berman and others have demonstrated, Baudelaire perceived the possibility of heroism and discovery of pleasure in the modernization of public urban space, delineating primal scenes of poetic vision amid dangerous traffic whence works of art characterized by the modernist style of “undulations of reverie, the leaps and jolts of consciousness” are born.20 Baudelaire’s counterpastoral modernism, unlike Joaquin’s, embraces the city as a locus of contradictions bereft of myths, into which the poet hurls himself to be renewed by its anarchic energies, by the sudden leaps and swerves of life in its labyrinth of kaleidoscopic streets and boulevards.

This is not to deny that Joaquin also exhibits a profound Baudelairean fascination for the city, for its mixture of beauty and despair, terror and ecstasy; but his interest focuses not on its perpetual novelty-the endless metamorphosis of market values in a commodity economy but on what is repeated, reversible, continuous and symmetrical. The so-called baroque texture of Joaquin’s language results from the deep inner contradiction in his art between the ‘Faustian” (a term misapplied to acts of free will) hero and the Virgin, between archaic-medieval and bourgeois orientations. While the closures of the earlier texts show a bias for a traditional orientation (first announced in “La Naval,” “Popcorn and Gas Light” and reworked in recent anthropological excursions), I would stress that the resolutions in “The Order of Melkizedek” and Cave and Shadows betray an uneasy, troubled, bifurcated sensibility. Could it be that this mythopocic almanac-maker has been affected by that exuberant outburst of the Filipino people in 1970 reclaiming the streets of “the ever loyal and noble city,” an explosion that evokes scenes of the “festival” of the oppressed: the Paris Commune 1871, Petersburg 1917, Barcelona 1936, Paris 1968, and so on? This “festival” of the subalterns, the denizens on the edges and margins, the underclasses, erupted in Philippine history only once for joaquin: in the 1896 revolution and the subsequent war against U.S. imperialist aggression. But in Cave and Shadows, for the first time, the people-as-nation surfaces through the cracks and fissures of mythical and Establishment reality, a multitude of urban-rural solitudes that seem to presage a long-awaited regenerating apocalypse. In approximating Baudelaire’s allegorical vision of “the heroism of modern life” in his essays and fiction, Joaquin assumes at last a genuinely prophetic stance which can be and ought to be integrated into a libertarian, ecumenical cultural politics. On the other hand, I think it remains a debatable issue whether or not Joaquin’s exaltation of the Virgin’s aura (“aura” connoting utopian plenitude and wholeness) can justly be appreciated only as a form of commemoration which Walter Benjamin defines as “the secularized version of the adoration of holy relics…. In commemoration there finds expression the increasing alienation of human beings, who take inventories of their past as of lifeless merchandise …. Relics come from the corpse, commemoration from the dead occurrences of the past which are euphemistically known as experience.”21 The succeeding chapters hope to contribute to a more dialectical analysis and interpretation of Joaquin’s mimesis of that aura and commemoration in his short stories, poetry, plays and two novels.

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NOTES

1 The Education of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 383-89.
2 Religion in the Secular City (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 170. See also Cox’s earlier books, The Secular City (1966) and, for a revaluation of festivity and fantasy, The Feast of Fools (1969).
3 3 Alan Watts, Myth and Ritual in Christianity (Boston: Beacon, 1968), pp. 107-13. See also Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (New York: Harper, 1960), pp. 155-230. Joaquin evinces knowledge of “Mariolatry” in Almanac for Manilenos (Manila: Mr and Ms., 1979), pp. 118-20.
4 Watts, p. 108.
5 Ibid. On the notion of history and the sacred, see Michael Harrington, The Politics at God’s Funeral (New York: Harper, 1985), pp. 132-37.
6 The Second Sex (New York: Grove, 1952). De Beauvoir is seconded by Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father (Boston: Beacon, 1973), pp. 90-92.
7 La Naval de Manila and Other Essays (Manila: Alberto S. Florentino, 1964), p. 30.
8 Ibid., p. 28. Of relevance are these historical resumes: Carmen G. Nakpil, “A History of Maynila,” The Philippines Quarterly (March 1976), pp. 3-5; Teodoro Agoncillo, “The Last Years of Intramuros,” Archipelago (1975), pp. 15-22.
9 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon 1979). A critique of U.S. “Orientalist” discourse on the Philippines may be found in my Crisis in the Philippines: The Making of a Revolution (South Hadley, Mass: Bergin & Garvey, 1985).
10 Quoted in Edward Said, Beginning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 203.
11 Quoted in Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 111.
12 Nick Joaquin, “Culture as History,” The Manila Review 3 (1975), p. 13. Except for the elaborate enumeration of tools, etc., inspired by McLuhan’s reductive technologism, this long essay conflates the basic ideal of “La Naval de Manila” and other later pieces collected in Discourses on the Devil’s Advocate and Other Controversies (Manila: Cacho Hermanos, 1983).
13 Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” Feminist Theory, ed. Nannerl O Keohane, et al (Chicago, 1982), p. 35.
14 “The Art of Ancient Egypt,” The Philippines Quarterly (December 1960), p. 25.
15 Joaquin, “Culture as History,” p. 25.
16 Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power and Socialism (London: Verso, 1978), pp. 101-3. Cf. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Macmillan, 1973), pp. 1-12.
17 Poulantzas, p. 107. On spatial politics, see Michel Foucault, The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984), pp. 239-56.
18 Poulantzas, pp. 108-9.
19 Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt, 1970), pp. 71-72. See Gideon Sjoberg, The Pre-Industrial City (New York: The Free Press, 1960), pp. 327-28: “The periodic religious ceremonies, in which a large segment of the community may participate, are one of the few mechanisms the city possesses for integrating disparate groups in an otherwise segmented community.”
20 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), pp. 142-66. On the city as fesival, see Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World (New York: Harper, 1971), pp. 122-24, 20506.
21 Quoted in Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 73.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

E. SAN JUAN heads the Philippine Cultural Studies Center in Connecticut, USA He was recently visiting professor of literature and cultural studies at the National Tsing Hua University and Academia Sinica fellow in Taiwan. He was 2003 professor of American Studies at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. Among his recent books are RACISM AND CULTURAL STUDIES (Duke University Press); WORKING THROUGH THE CONTRADICTIONS (Bucknell University Press); US IMPERIALISM AND REVOLUTION IN THE PHILIPPINES (Palgrave); IN THE WAKE OF TERROR (Lexington); CRITIQUE AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION: LESSONS FROM ANTONIO GRAMSCI, MIKHAIL BAKHTIN AND RAYMOND WILLIAMS. A new book, TOWARD FILIPINO SELF-DETERMINATION, is due for release this August from State University of New York Press.

This essay is Chapter I of San Juan’s out-of-print book SUBVERSIONS OF DESIRE: PROLEGOMENA TO NICK JOAQUIN published in 1988 by the Ateneo de Manila University Press. It is still the only substantial materialist reading of Joaquin’s oeuvre up to now; its scope and depth remains unparalleled.

Posted in AESTHETICS, CRITICAL THEORY, DISCOURSES ON CONTRADICTIONS, EXTRAPOLATIONS, SOCIOCRITICISM, SPECULATIVE PROVOCATIONS Tagged: E. San Juan, English in the Philippines, Nick Joaquin, Philippine writing, Sonny San Juan, WOMAN WHO HAD TWO NAVELS

ASIAN AMERICAN DERELICTION, SELF-DECEPTION, SERVILITY

philcsc — Sun, 03 May 2009 14:22:32 +0000

ASIAN AMERICAN DERELICTION & SERVILITY:

With reflections on Jessica Hagedorn’s Dream Jungle and Bienvenido Santos’ What the hell for you left your heart in San Francisco

By E. SAN JUAN, Jr.
Fellow, W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University

The starting point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is “knowing thyself” as a poduct of the historical process to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory, therefore it is imperative at the outset to compile such an inventory.

—ANTONIO GRAMSCI, Prison Notebooks

After the precipitous collapse of financial giants like Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual, Merrill Lynch and other US banks and the October carnage in the global stock market, US finance-capitalism’s substance seems to dissolve rapidly into shadows. US finance capital, once unimpeachable, is suffering a rapid slippage not into Derrida’s vertiginous abyss of textual undecidability but into bankruptcy. How are the humanities and literary studies, specifically that “peculiar institution” called Asian American Studies, impacted by this epochal and now traumatic event? Before we can answer our individual progressive community’s challenge of how to “understand imperialism as a haunting presence,” post-9/11 and in the “age of Obama”– indeed, the “history of the present” shock-and-awe of an unprecedented crisis, we need to review why Asian American literature–to refer tentatively to a discursive fabrication–seems unable to transcend its paralyzing conceptualization as a plural unstable ethnic identity, despite its imagined or hypothetical foundation in centuries-old civilizations (China, Japan, Korea). This paper rehearses and evaluates the key theoretical schematics and initiates a pedagogical critique of two Filipino American novels as an example of an alternative to the status quo.
For this modest academic exercise, it is not necessary to invoke the legacy of the pre-Columbian past to revitalize “the exhausted tropes of solidarity and coalition” because such tropes–except for a brief period during the popular-democratic upheavals in the sixties–never appealed to the “political unconscious” of each specific “Asian” group undergoing the “labor of the negative,” by which I mean the ordeal of their normative and routinized exclusion, exploitation, inferiorization, stigmatization, and destruction by the white-supremacist polity and its hegemonic apparatuses in the domain of the State and civil society. The rubrics of transnationality, citizenship, immigration and globalization are the symptomatic indices of our contemporary predicament under the shadows of Empire.

Orientalizing the Buffer Race

As the Vietnam quagmire deepened in 1966, sociologist William Petersen declared the Japanese Americans “a model minority,” rescuing them from the trauma of the internment years. A decade after, Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior appeared in 1976, hailed as a breakthrough for Asians. After the US debacle in IndoChina and the eclipse of the Civil Rights struggles, Newsweek in 1982 headlined a leading story “Asian-Americans: A Model Minority” (Kitano and Daniels 1988, 51). This is the year when Vincent Chin, a Chinese American mistaken for a Japanese in Detroit, was killed by two white workers. The gospel of neoliberal globalization, also known as “the Washington Consensus,” took off with a retooling of methodological individualism in “rational choice theory” and officially sanctioned Establishment multiculturalism. To maintain the hegemonic common-sense of a racial hierarchy, the U.S. dominant bloc requires a “buffer race” to split the toiling majority, keep blacks visible but subordinate, and thus deflect class conflict by preserving the civil-society consensus of white color privilege (Gran 1999). To preserve the status quo, the identity of the white working class needs to be defined by race, not by class consciousness.
Before the ascendancy of the global village of multinational corporations and its administered pluralist ethos in the 1970s, the U.S. elite under Nixon reinforced the racial hierarchy by its attacks on radical trends among people of color; soon, covert and open repression encouraged religious separatism, national chauvinism, and the consolidation of the underclass(chiefly, African Americans). At this conjuncture, East Asians on the West Coast in particular were instrumentalized to breathe new life into the assimilationist syndrome. Later on, with the return of finance capitalism in the Reagan-Bush years and the influx of Irish and Mexican immigrants after 1965, modernism as an ideological disciplinary complex and structuring habitus (to use Pierre Bourdieu’s [1993] category) is displaced by postmodernist tendencies–subaltern studies, deconstruction, postcolonialism, Foucaultian modalities of suspicion, etc. Asian American cultural production, with its scholastic authorities and texts, finds its niche in this new tri-polar world (U.S., Europe, Japan as leaders in the G-7 bloc) characterized by the rise of Japan as a peer partner in global hegemony, with Asians as “no longer ’second class citizens’ ” (Gills 1993, 212).
With ethnicity today as the equalizing mechanism of conformity, we rarely hear special pleas for the plight of “the model minority.” In Taiwan-born Eric Liu’s provocative brief for “model minoritism,” The Accidental Asian, we find a rather nostalgic diagnosis of the madness labeled “ Mongolphobia, “an archaic but insidious” belief that Asians threaten the American Way of Life. Liu ascribes this primal terror, the “fear of a yellow planet,” to yellow journalism—The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, the Evil Genius—and to the annals of early psychoanalysis. A history of collective psychosis is recounted: the riots and lynch mobs against Chinese in the 1870s leading to the infamous 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act; the internment of Japanese Americans in the concentration camps of the 1940s; and, with the Wen Ho Lee scandal, the conspiracy theory of China as the new source of the “yellow peril.”
But Liu believes the “last judgment” is on the horizon. From “perfect Manichean scapegoats,” or subhuman creatures to superhuman monsters or machines, Asians have multiplied and “breached the mainstream,” with the “advance guard” reaching “the commanding heights of power,” while a resurgent Asia is profoundly altering American language, manners and dreams. Liu prophesizes the third possibility that reconciles extreme aversion and extreme idolization: “Asians are, in fact, human; that they have left our imagination and arrived in our lives. Soon we may have to admit: We have already met the East, and it is us” (1998, 135). Welcome to/from Disneyland, gated Asians! In this sleight-of-hand version of Hegelian dialectics (unwittingly parodying Francis Fukuyama), Liu has ironically collapsed the heterogeneous Other into the banal Same. This passage from the thesis of the wholly Other into the worshipped “model minority”–still being resurrected by Helen Zia and other tokenizing gatekeepers–may serve as an allegorical figure for the vicissitudes of the Asian presence in the landscape of the United States in the era of globalization and the post 9/11 war of terror and the crisis of a retrenchingneoliberal dispensation.

E Pluribus, Unum? / Out of Many, One?

The neoconservative triumphalism of “free market” Weltanschauung from the Reagan administration up to the collapse of Lehman Brothers marked a decisive
turn in the way white-supremacist hegemony operated. The Cold War required a pretense or premise of defending the “Free World” from the evils of Soviet and Chinese communism. While the 1965 Hart-Celler Immigration and Naturalization Act opened the floodgates to more immigration from Asia, abolishing the “national origins” quota, it was the Vietnam War and its aftermath that dissolved the Chinese/Japanese monopoly of the cultural field of Asian America. In 1975, over 130,000 refugees from Vietnam, Kampuchea and Laos were allowed into the U.S. It is at this point when formalist New Criticism in literary and humanistic studies, already battered by the Civil Rights demand for revising the Western canon, had to be overhauled in order to allow the implementation of a new mode of racial hierarchization. Since the old narrative of assimilationism and adaptation (retooled as the cyclic pattern of suspicion and adjustment) has lost purchase, in anticipation of finance-capital’s ascendancy over a de-industrialized America, a new paradigm had to be invented to preserve the myth of consensual democracy. This is summed up in Lisa Lowe’s (1991) triple shibboleths of “heterogeneity, hybridity, multiplicity.”
With the advent of the IndoChinese and the heightened influx of Filipinos, Asian America–by which I mean the Chinese/Japanese monolith–had to confront changing reality. This is not what Lowe had in mind despite her claim of recognizing the material contradictions among Asian communities in the US (see the synoptic analysis of those contradictions by Paul Ong, Edna Bonacich and Lucie Cheng [1994]). For her, asserting ethnic multiplicity was a means of disrupting Eurocentric hegemony, quite a novel revision of Gramsci’s original use of the concept as a political strategy of a proletarian-led historic bloc to overthrow capitalist power. But aside from intra-ethnic differential relationships and hybrid mixings, multiplicity serves as the theoretical wedge to displace the organizing category of class, founded on the unequal division of social labor and therefore unequal power, as the ordering principle of US capitalism. Asians are now contingently determined by “several different axes of power,…by the contradictions of capitalism, patriarchy and race relations” (2000, 429). This may be useful in explaining the cycle of acceptance and abuse that historian Iris Chang observes in the history of the Chinese in the U.S. (2003). But in effect it merely replicates the repressive teleology of mainstream functionalist empiricism and its coercive agencies.
We no longer dream of the pleasures of victimhood, to be sure, at this late date. In the age of cosmopolitan self-help and cyborgean bootstraps, we want agency. Deploying Spivak’s “strategic essentialism,” Lowe claims that privileging this socially constructed uneven cultural terrain will enable Asian subalterns to contest and disrupt the discourses, laws, norms, rules and practices of racial prejudice, exclusion, discrimination, scapegoating, oppression, etc. She also invokes Stuart Hall’s notion of cultural identity as a matter of “positioning.” Consequently, she rejects class solidarity because it erases ethnic particularity. This then becomes a theory of politics as social movements moving in parallel lines, diverse alliances and coalitions striving to transform hegemony–to be sure, not only capitalist but also scattered racist and sexist hegemonies.

Essentialism of the Signifier

The eighties and nineties witnessed the propagation in the US academy of the ideas of Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, etc. following the decline of Althusserian Marxism. This was signaled by the revised Gramscianism of Stuart Hall, the founding father of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies. One offshoot is Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s 1985 book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, the scriptural testament for “new social movements,” whose anti-totalizing obsession resonates in the theory of “minority discourse” sponsored by David Lloyd and Abdul JanMohamed in Cultural Critique (Spring-Fall 1987). At the same time, the intervention of Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s (1986) “racial formations” approach reinforced the vogue of cultural relativism and voluntarist idealism that conceives of society as a random collection of social practices lacking any necessary integrating structure (Callinicos 1982; see San Juan 1992; 2002). Philosophical adventurism and Nietszchean metaphysics of “the will to power” began to prevail in Asian American literary studies. Recycling the Althusserian motif of “multiple articulations” to counter the ideology of pseudo-universal humanism, Lowe follows these revisionists in firming up the deconstructive-anarchist trend in Asian American criticism.
With this linguistic/culturalist turn, criticism becomes solipsistic and uncannily tendentious. Amy Tan’s sensational blockbuster, The Joy Luck Club (1989) and its movie version, may have sealed the fate of Asians as potentially subversive agents of social change. As soon as the Asian American canon began to be institutionalized in the eighties as part of the “cultural war” maneuvers, teachers/scholars in this peripheral region needed to justify their scholastic anti-legitimacy. By 1995, Lowe herself had to shift gears by instructing us that the Asian American canon (Bulosan, Okada, Kogawa, Cha) is really a defiance of the reigning Western canonical tradition since it upholds unevenness, indeterminacies, inassimilable alterity, nonequivalence, irresolution–all against unification, reconciliation, development, linear narrative, uniperspectivalism, ethical formation, etc. that constitutes American imperial nationalism. She concludes her thesis: “The teaching of racial, ethnic, and postcolonial texts decenters the autonomous notion of Western culture by recentering the complexities of racial, ethnic, and postcolonial collectivities, and unmasks the developmental narrative as a fiction designed to justify the histories of colonialism, neocolonialism, and forced labor and to erase the dislocations and hybridities that are the resulting conditions of those histories” (1995, 66).

Postmodernity’s Revenge

The exorbitant addiction to Derridean maxims and post-structuralist doxa has continued unabated. As one of the Establishment gatekeepers, Shirley Geok-lin Lim prefaces her widely used 1992 anthology Reading the Literatures of Asian America with an essay on the “ambivalent American,” meaning herself as a “new new American.” She resents the habitual tokenism inflicted on fellow poets like the Polish Czeslaw Milosz, rejects Lynn Cheney’s Eurocentric universalism, and invokes Werner Sollor’s notion of symbolic “multiple choice” ethnicity as the way out and into the majoritarian consensus. Unfortunately she succumbs to the lure of the immigrant paradigm and all its insidious implications (including the belief that American English is a life-line for the pariah’s salvation). Her idea of a dialogic identity, “identity on the cusp,” as it were, construed as a compromise between a Utopian American future and the ancestral golden past of the native folk (as in Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, and in other authors such as Kingston, Chin, etc.) exudes a pathos of wish-fulfillment that undermines the realism of her initial polemic.
Aestheticist individualism overrides the constraints of historical structure and other social determinants. With the shift from the white majority nation to a multiethnic nation of minorities, Lim hopes that the paradigm of conflict and ambivalence in Asian American texts “will be transformed into a productive multivalence: ” ‘Valences’ speak to the abilities to integrate, combine, fuse, and synthesize different elements. Conflict is almost always a product of dualities; perhaps synergisic commonalities will be the product of pluralities of ethnic figures, pluralism which we know is already on its way” (1992, 28-29). This may be an improvement over Elaine Kim’s (1982) inaugural configuration of Asian American literature as modeled on the ethnic immigrant success story; but, in actuality, it reinforces the pluralist/multiculturalist dogma of neoliberal globalized capitalism.
“Pluralism” may be an exhausted idea, but it can be refurbished disguised as “transnational” or “diasporic.” Arjun Appadurai and Theodor Adorno are called in by Susan Koshy to rescue entropic US hegemony. In an attempt to inflect Lowe’s standpoint into something contestatory, and “ambivalence” into something contingent or aporetic, Koshy posits the notion that the inferential value of “Asian America” resides in “the catachrestic status of the formation” (2000, 491). Agreed that there is no objectively verifiable referent to “Asian America,” Koshy’s agnostic and complaisant response is that we should resign ourselves to “the limits of its signifying power.” Do we need another exhibition of crippling Derridean discourse whose purpose is to shift our concern from the analysis of the political economy of production relations to the metaphysics of sliding and floating signifiers? Ludic semiotics, to be sure, does not threaten the profit-making machine of the “free market.” Nor does it question the ethics or morality of ruthlessly extracting surplus-value from the super-exploited peoples of the world. This cultural/linguistic turn can only hide, if not obfuscate, the material contradictions that our critics claim to confront; rather, as Teresa Ebert and Mas’ud Zavarzadeh points out, “it generates an imaginary re-patterning of the social by displacing class with ‘difference,’ ‘performativity,’ and ‘desire,’ thereby remaking the social: erasing it as an effect of labor and rewriting it as an effect of meanings, affects, hospitality, and the unrepresentable” (2008, 29).

Discombobulated and Compromised

This labor of decentering the Western bourgeois standards of truth, beauty and goodness was the primary task of Marxist ideology-critique before the Nietzschean/Heideggerian vogue. Despite the brief renaissance of Marxist thought in the 1968 May uprisings and the popularity of Marcuse and the Red Book, the heavy weight of Cold War repression aborted a full-blown mobilization of the working masses. Within the Asian communities in the United States, youth re-discovered their ethnic roots and impelled the composition of linear narratives now anathema to Lowe and postmodernist epigones.
The histories of the “tribe” by Sucheng Chan and Ronald Takaki, however, recontextualized the protracted agon of the Chinese, Japanese, Filipino and Korean workers, their suffering punctuated by collective insurrections and solidarity actions with other groups. This perception of a multilayered narrative seems to have registered the significant theoretical intervention made by Robert Blauner which, for me at least, exploded the myth that all Filipinos were immigrants and thus could not but follow the venerable itinerary of European immigrant success. Blauner distinguished colonized from immigrant minorities in the pluralist order; metropolitan nations incorporated “new territories or peoples through processes that are essentially involuntary, such as war, conquest, capture, and other forms of force or manipulation” (1972). The case of the Philippines and Puerto Rico are the obvious examples. Colonization–this time, the “internal colonialism” (Allen 2005) of racialized groups–and immigration of ethnic Europeans represented two ideal-types or polar ends of a continuum that explains the peopling of the US social formation. Takaki understood this, but he could not hold on to and elaborate this crucial distinction in his 1989 opus, Strangers from a Different Shore. His world-view was still imprisoned within the mystified ideal of American Exceptionalism, as attested to by his 1994 comment on the “culture wars” then raging at the end of the Reagan era.
Takaki locates the problem in the linkage of “democracy to national identity” (1994, 299), not to capitalism. Consequently, his solution to economic and racial inequality, including the intensifying exploitation of ethnicized or racialized workers, is the extension of rights and citizenship to everyone. There is a rich, flourishing archive of scholarly texts and discourses by Asian American lawyers (especially those engaged in “critical race theory”) and activists devoted to this reform-minded approach, none of which has prevented the worsening inequality and anomic decay among Chinese, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Laotians, Kampucheans and Hmongs, since the liberalization of entry in 1965 (Hing 1998). The prophylaxis of citizenship rights offered by Lowe, Takaki, Okihiro and others should be laid to rest by Natsu Taylor Saito’s (2002; 2003) cogent argument that such belief in citizenship as the cure can only reinforce the state’s systematic “plenary power” over the others, especially in cases of immigrant persecution, dating back to the 1882 Exclusion Law. So we are back to the analysis of the capitalist mode of production and reproduction as the enabling principle and legitimizing guarantee of the racial polity (Meyerson 2001).
An affliction of similar proportion may be discerned in Gary Okihiro’s apologetic, if not opportunistic, mode of historicizing the vicissitudes of Asian American existence in late-capitalist United States. Okihiro intends to denounce the crimes of white-supremacist America on Asians, but at the same time he doesn’t want to be seen as an angry ideologue, an uncouth left-wing doctrinaire scholar; his tone varies, at once serious but complacently ironic; he strives to distance himself from the anecdotal Takaki and the more schematic style of Sucheng Chan by gestures at once hedging and temporizing, almost verging on a defense of McKinley’s “Benevolent Assimilation” policy eventually administered with Theodore Roosevelt’s big stick. Okihiro may be the authentic by-product of Lowe’s hybridized discourse-deconstructing machine.
At the end of the Cold War, the bombing of Yugoslavia, and the inauguration of a more fiercely predatory pax Americana with the impending US invasion of Iraq, Okihiro’s confession of partisanship for the mystique of “multicultural America” speaks volumes, rivalling Eric Liu, and provides the key to the current stagnation and malaise in the discipline: “But class has never, I believe, been central to our analysis. We persist in our belief in the push-pull (or some variant thereof) hypothesis of Asian migration, we see articulation as a racial encounter, and we present our work and subject matter as yet another aspect of multicultural America” (1998, 32). Okihiro and other functionaries in the academy cannot resolve the impasse of duplicity, not ambiguity, while negotiating between the old panethnicity model based on racial formations (see Espiritu 1992; San Juan 2002) and the siren song of incommensurable discrepancies and undecidabilities. This may be due to an Orientalized “cunning of history” missed by Edward Said.

Therapy or Exorcism?

On this emergence in the nineties of the Asian American penchant for schizophrenic inquiry, the best diagnosis is, to my mind, the insightful and wide-ranging treatise of David Palumbo-Liu, Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier. Palumbo-Liu comments on the schizophrenic symptoms found in three texts, among others: Daniel Okimoto’s American in Disguise, Yoshimi Ishikawa’s Strawberry Road, and Chang Rae Lee’s Native Speaker. Just as Lowe manifests symptoms of the process of transnationalism and transmigrancy that forces into crisis the once sacrosanct notions of citizenship and nationhood, the protagonists of those texts, in particular that of Lee’s novel, testify to the splitting and disintegration of social and political subjectivity in the age of globalized finance-capitalism. Palumbo-Liu notes: “If the 1970s named Asian Americans as dual personalities, the 1980s and 1990s have produced a particular vision of the schizophrenic, one intimately linked to transnationalism” (1999, 320), who may no longer be amenable to the programmatic techniques of healing, reconciliation, and adaptation beloved by pragmatic social scientists and technocrats of the Cold War era.
Faced with the civilizationalist racism of post-9/11 Homeland Security State, Vijay Prashad for his part attempts to revive a moribund Ethnic-Studies institution by replacing the epistemology of identity with that of polyculturalism. Comparative ethnic studies, for him, is the way out of the deterministic, vulgar optic of class exploitation. One would think that this hegemonic apparatus of mis-representation has already been rendered inutile long before the actual bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and so on. But not for Prashad. This refurbished version of the old cultural pluralism may be discerned also in current historiography where, for example, the United State’s “calibrated colonialism” (Kramer 2006) becomes a dynamic interactive field where the colonizer and colonized transact the business of politics as equal partners. The fallacy of equating exploiter and exploited in order to ascribe agency/humanity to the subjugated but emotionally appealing victim vitiates many empirical studies of Filipino overseas migrant workers (e.g. Tung 2004). Supposedly novel in inventing agency for the colonized, this new epistemology in the disciplines of history and sociology interprets colonial domination as consensual negotiation between rulers and ruled, reducing hegemony into an exercise in Habermasianesque rational communication. Polyculturalism thus becomes the alibi of imperialism suddenly capable of “bad faith.”
It is thus not surprising to find Prashad nostalgically enthused with the obsolete panethnicity nostrum and the anti-totalism of Lowe’s Immigrant Acts, unwittingly generating an aporia that is both paradoxical and unintelligible: for him, “ontological incompleteness” fetishized by Lowe, Koshy and others “need not obscure for us the social completeness of identity and identification” (2006, 169). This rhetorical contortion may be an instance of what Fredric Jameson (1991) calls “schizophrenic nominalism,” a postmodern malady in which the traditional markers of identity and historical progression, coherence and continuity have disappeared so that everything now is characterized by fluidity, disjunctures, aleatory slippages, nomadic drifts, and other symptoms that defy thought and logocentric reason. We enter a realm of ludic terra incognita about which we cannot speak, much less intuit and reflect.

Malays Running Amok?

At this juncture, it would be useful to explore how Filipino writers in the United States responded to the shift from racialized pluralism to globalized differentiation. As everyone knows, Carlos Bulosan’s problematic exemplum, America Is in the Heart, has become an ever contentious object-lesson. The reason lies in the fact that practically all readers ignore or choose to elide the historical singularity absent from textbooks and mass media: the Philippines was violently subjugated by US imperialism in the Filipino-American War (1899-1902) at the cost of 1.4 million Filipino lives (San Juan 2000; 2008). This is the submerged text of the first part of America, whose revolutionary impulse surfaces intermittently in the stories and essays, but more fully in the novel of the McCarthy/Cold War period, The Cry and the Dedication. Because of the persisting amnesia about this ugly truth in monumental US history, only dredged up recently when apologists of the Iraq War invoked the “humanitarian” occupation of the Philippines by the US military at the beginning of the twentieth century; or when the recently reported practice of “waterboarding” on Iraqi and Afghani prisoners was discovered to be a common form of torture against captured Filipino insurgents, Bulosan remains unread, or inadequately appreciated, up to now.
Almost equal if not surpassing the total population of Chinese Americans, the Filipino community (more than three million of 12 million Asians) in the US exists due to the political instability and economic underdevelopment of the Philippines (Hing 1998). Perhaps one should really define the Philippines from 1898 to 1946 (when the US granted formal independence, with many strings attached) not as a classic colony but as a dependency, thus an internal colony like the Native American territories. Virtually a neocolony today, the Philippine social formation cannot be understood by means of postcolonial concepts of hybridity, in-betweeness, interstitiality, and so on. Nor can decolonization of Asian American Studies’ paradigms of cultural nationalism, identity politics or national assimilation be carried out by using the phenomenon of the global diaspora to expunge anti-imperialist liberation struggles that mobilize the sedimented nationalist traditions of peasants and workers in the neocolonies. The durable recalcitrance of Filipino subjectivity saturated with nationalist memory-traces explains why, unlike the relatively assimilated Japanese, Korean and Chinese middlemen strata, Filipinos who have been disenfranchised and demonized for a long time cannot function as the “buffer race” between the white majority and the castelike black underclass. This remains the case until today, even though these colonized “nationals” were not locked out in 1882, nor banned by the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907-08, nor by the 1924 Immigration Act which favored “desirable” Europeans and denied citizenship to Asian “aliens.” Nonetheless, all Filipinos are Americanized to one degree or another, in more ways than one; and if what Arif Dirlik says is correct, that Americanization is synonymous with racialization, then all Filipinos have been thoroughly racialized, “not just fitting into a racially organized society but also thinking racially” (2008, 1367).
A few years ago I pointed out how the postcolonial notion of transnational citizenship, fluid and flexible, originated from the dynamics of circulating use-value whereby all goods and services (as health care given by Filipino domestics) are commodified and made equivalent , translated or quantified into exchange value via the cash-nexus (San Juan 2005). The Philippines to this day remains a neocolony, formally independent but politically a client-state of Washington and the Pentagon. It functions as a strategic testing laboratory for US Special Forces fighting the proxies of Al Qaeda (shadowy Abu Sayyaf bandits some of whom work for local politicians and the government military) was long prepared by more than a hundred years of trying to preserve the oligarchic rule of a corrupt and murderous elite whose subservience to the “Washington Consensus” guarantees the accelerating Filipino “warm body export” part of which services the US military bases in Iraq, Europe, Guantanamo, Hawaii, Guam, and elsewhere, including the secret “launching pads” of CIA clandestine operations in the Philippines itself (Mahajan 2002).
During the thirties and forties of the last century, Filipino workers exposed to the insurrectionary and seditious milieu of the islands were considered nasty trouble-makers, aside from being perceived as a threat to the purity of Caucasian women. They collaborated in strikes with Japanese, Mexicans, and other ethnics in the Hawaii plantations and West Coast farms. From the outset up to 1946, Filipinos were legally considered “nationals” without any rights but only the “duty of permanent allegiance” to the U.S. nation-state (Hall 2002, 101). They were not allowed to vote, own property, start any business or marry Caucasian women. However, Filipino surplus labor as a rule were Americanized enough to warrant their candidacy for model-minority status; migration is thus valued as “an opportunity and mechanism for upward social mobility,” according to functionalist sociologists (e.g., Carino 1996).
With the post-9/11 racial profiling, the Filipino re-entered the target-vision of the alarmed racial polity, i.e. “white supremacy… as a political system in itself” (Mills 1999, 25). In August 2002, for example, 63 Filipinos were herded into an airplane for a direct flight to the Philippines, all the deportees manacled during the flight. In December, a second batch of 84 Filipinos were deported under the same humiliating condition, legitimized by the Absconder Apprehension Initiative Program of the US Dept of Justice (effective since Jan. 13, 2001) and other laws which criminalized the Filipino for being undocumented workers (Mendoza 2003). From October 2001 to April 2002, 334 Filipinos were deported through authoritarian executive orders, justified by legislative actions (including the USA Patriot Act) under the Bush administration. This is quite unprecedented: Filipinos have never been deported in this brutal way in such large numbers. With the discovery of terrorists in their country of origin, Filipinos are now doubly marked as a “brown peril” of sorts, with affinities to Muslim Pakistanis, Indians, Bangladeshis, Indonesians, Afghanis, and so on. The old somatic/physical markers of race as well as the ethnic/cultural signifiers have now become either amalgamated or sublimated into the prevailing computerized “terrorist” profile.
How does a novelist like Jessica Hagedorn, for instance, respond to this new regime of “civic nationalism” engaged in a “just war” to defend “civic order and democratic liberties”? How does this post-Cold War “insecuritization” (Thornton 2002) under the aegis of the “global war on terror” provide an opening for Hagedorn’s volatilization of the old formal properties of mimetic art which foreground versimilitude of character and plot?

Hagedorn’s Untamed Flicks

As though afflicted with a severe attack of “repetition compulsion,” Hagedorn does a reprise of her 1988 Dogeaters in her new production, Dream Jungle. We encounter here a postmodern repertory of combining parts and suturing disparate fragments. This technique of collage/pastiche may be viewed as imitation or copying without laughter. And since there is no original common language of bourgeois individualism and its attendant metanarrative, parody is ruled out. If the real, assuming there is some agreement that reality is out there, can no longer be captured or expressed by language and its resources, what is there to write about? What is striking in this setup, despite the postmodernist obsession with the materiality of the sign as image, not a vehicle of meaning, is that readers and reviewers refuse to give up summarizing, decoding, and making sense of bits and pieces somehow stitched together in Hagedorn’s artifice.
Hagedorn’s Dream Jungle weaves two constellations of events. The first centers on the wealthy playboy Zamora Lopez de Legaspi who discovers a tribe of Stone-Age cave dwellers (alluding to the Tasaday tribe found in 1971 before Marcos’ declaration of martial law). The second gravitates around a servant girl, Rizalina Cayabyab, daughter of Zamora’s cook, who flees to Manila, becomes a go-go dancer, and meets an American actor, Vincent Moody. Moody happens to be working on the crew of Napalm Sunset (alluding to Apocalypse Now), a Vietnam-war movie being filmed in Mindanao, Philipines, where the indigenous Tasadays were discovered. These two event-networks, for one reviewer, function as semantic indices to convey what Hagedorn feels are the effects of Spanish and American colonialism. They are decipherable signifiers that convey the novel’s major themes, making this bricolage intelligible: “explorers [Magellan; Coppola; other foreigners] turn out to be conquerors, Westerners are still bending Philippine destinies and lechery continues to bind colonizer and native” (Ramzy 2003). If so, then Hagedorn has wasted time and energy on banalities. At best, she has distracted our mind from the toxic and barbaric disasters inflicted by US power on the peoples of Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines, and elsewhere.
What strikes our critical intelligence is the standard by which Hagedorn can be said to represent a Filipino response to the historical conjuncture I have addressed here. Tentatively we can say that this schizophrenic mode of fabulation is actually both the form and substance of Hagedorn’s attempt to make sense of the historical period from the end of the Vietnam War to the 9/11 terror attack. Pastiche, variegated points of view, alternation of episodes, may indeed achieve what The New York Times reviewer suspects is Hagedorn’s singular intent: to engage with the “unreliability of the realities it depicts” (Upchurch 2003). But then we have to ascertain if the realities–among others, for example, Secretary Manda Elizalde/Marcos’ abuse of power on all levels, and the corruption of Filipinos by Coppola’s filming of Apocalypse Now in the Philippines–have been convincingly presented, and scrupulously documented, as claimed by clever reviewers.
Metropolitan taste demands more than humdrum anecdotes. It turns out that Hagedorn’s real concern–to zero in on “the societal repercussions of heavily staged-managed creations,” such as the alleged anthropological findings, or the publicity surrounding that and Coppola’s representation of the Vietnam War experience–was achieved by simply intuiting or insinuating “her way around a dozen memorable characters and milieus, letting her concerns swarm beneath the busy surface of her narrative” (Upchurch 2003). Granted; but this technical experimentalism itself relies on a dense texture of surface details, an incoherent assemblage that reproduces the illusion of an interminable present without depth or resonance.
As Shelley Jackson acutely puts it, Hagedorn’s is “a scavenger aesthetic, choosy but eclectic” (2003). It chooses, yes, but in a rather brusque, self-conscious, astutely exhibitionistic fashion. Given the fact that Hagedorn (since Dogeaters) has rejected the typifying realism of the bourgeois narrative for the abstract, psychologizing mannerism of high modernist art (Lukacs 1995), which is the ideological aura of finance capital in the age of globalization, we can conclude that Dream Jungle serves precisely the agenda of the racial polity caught in an emergency : namely, human existence is a matter of individuals with arbitrary experiences, society an accidental collocation of idiosyncratic characters, and history a wild, arbitrary and ultimately chaotic iteration of scenes for which there is no overarching vision or framework that can make sense of the whole. Isn’t this a version of the fluid, heterogenous, border-leaping Asian American creature fashioned by Liu, Lowe, Lim and their disciples?

Homecoming Trajectory

Let us now turn to Bienvenido Santos, a Filipino writer whose career spans two generations: the Manongs of the forties and the immediate postwar period, and the post-1965 immigrant community of professionals and exiles from the Marcos dictatorship. Now, the vintage Santos beloved by anthologists, the author of You Lovely People (1955) and Villa Magdalena (1965), can certainly be aligned with the “model minority” scheme that could not resist the inroads of alienating bureaucracy, consumerism, utilitarian standardization, and the predatory Social Darwinism of the seventies and eighties. Santos’ novel What the Hell For You Left Your Heart in San Francisco (1987) may be regarded as the melodramatic and at times self-ingratiating response of the petit-bourgeois stratum of the Filipino community to the shock of its continued marginalization, subordination, and exclusion.
One peculiar feature of Santos’ life may be contradistinguished from Hagedorn’s. While Hagedorn’s sensibility was shaped by the “Beat”generation of the sixties and the trendy cosmopolitanism of New York, Santos’ world-view emerged from his forced stay in the US when World War II broke out in 1942, and from his voluntary exile from the Philippines when his novel The Praying Man was banned by the Marcos authoritarian regime in 1972. By circumstance and choice, Santos aligned himself with the fate of the Filipino community in a period when the pressures of fascist power and reactionary ideology impacted heavily on the daily lives of his compatriots, pressures registered in the episodic but chronological unfolding of his 1987 narrative. It serves as the inchoate national allegory of Filipinos in the interregnum between World War II and the Iraq War.
Santos’ attempt at a totalizing narrative may be conceived as an emergent national allegory, or if you like, a national allegory-in-the-making. I believe Fredric Jameson’s theory of “national allegory” is more useful in describing the situation of Asian American writers trying to represent their group for the racial polity. The reason is that the personal and political for the Asian writer is always intertwined, given their reification and subjection to the dominant norms; hence the logical distinction between the spheres in Asian experience is not as rigid or fixed as European aesthetic doctrine since Kant and Coleridge would have prescribed. Jameson defines his concept of national allegory: “Third-world texts, even those which are seemingly private and invested with a properly libidinal dynamic–necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society” (2000, 320). In the perspective of “internal colonialism,” the Asian communites resemble the underdeveloped “third world” of the sixties and seventies. What a world of difference it would have made if the canonical texts by Kingston, Bulosan, Okada, Villa, Theresa Cha, Frank Chin and others were read as allegories of their specific nationality formations and not one-sidedly as emanations of individual psyches reacting to hostile environments. Parenthetically, I urge that Kingston’s three major works, The Woman Warrior, China Men, and Tripmaster Monkey, be read as national allegories of a kind, critical articulations of Asian American feminism wrestling with racialized patriarchy and class exploitation. I nominate two powerful examples of a “national allegory” that elaborates a metanarrative of multiethnic solidarity: first, Yuri Kochiyama’s autobiographical assemblage, Passing It On, which resists Derridean or Foucaultian subsumption; and second, Marilyn Chin’s shrewd recasting of the dramatic monologue genre in “A Portrait of the Self as Nation, 1990-1991″ (1997, 159-163).
Realism and the Cartesian ego have been jettisoned together with all kinds of nationalism–except the unmarked one of U.S. Herrenvolk patriotism, and the equation of its national interest with democracy and liberty (of the “free market”) everywhere. And so the hegemonic ideology continues to prove tenacious and instrumental for careerist ends. Otherwise, we could have easily liberated ourselves a long time ago from the corrupting spell of the “model minority” myth inflected in postmodern ambivalence, multiculturalism, and compensatory postcolonial mimicries. National allegory requires a dialectical method that would mediate historically specific experiences and establish their coherence in a meaningful totality, a unifying meta-narrative of historical development anathema to our current orthodoxy. With finance-capital dictating the parameters of globalization, Asian America remains locked up in a world of virtualization where an emergent configuration of wholeness, autonomy, and unity dissolves in simulacra, spectacles, and illusions of alterity regurgigated from the mechanical reproduction of the commodified Same, and finally assimilated in the absolutist Leviathan corpus.

Adumbrations of Pinoy Existentialism

Conventional wisdom has recycled platitudes about the Filipino community in the US: family- and clan-centered, regionalistic, with unique resources drawn from the cultural heritage (barangay, plaza complex) such as the “bayanihan” (cooperation) spirit and “balikbayan” (returning to the homeland) practice, which allegedly harmonize the native-born Pinoys/Pinays from the interfacing Philippine-born immigrants (Guyotte 1997). Santos’ novel dramatizes those stereotypes and cliches only to satirize them tactfully, as shown by the choreographed behavior of the circle around Dr. Vicente Sotto, the employees and bureaucrats of the Philippine Consulate, the Filipino-American organizations at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, and Dante’s students and colleagues at City College.
David Dante Tolosa’s journey, ostensibly a hunt for his lost fugitive father, turns out to be an education/initiation plot, a learning process. Although filled with a menagerie of character types, whose relatives inhabit Hagedorn’s Dream Jungle, Santos’ narrative revolves around the writer Dante’s search for a viable community. He pursues solidarity linkages with American lost souls (Judy), enigmatic survivors (Cesar Pilapil), and anti-”model minority” derelicts like Professor Arturo Jaime’s family. Right from the start, Dante moves to settle the issue of ambiguity by identifying himself as typical Americanized colonial subject: born in 1938 “on the outskirts of the American naval base near Subic Bay in the Philippines. An oriental with broad hints of Malay-Indonesian, perhaps Chinese, strain, a kind of racial chopsuey, that’s me. Better yet, for historical and ethnic accuracy, an oriental omelette flavored with Spanish wine” (1987,1). Well-meaning pastiche breaks down here into culinary grotesques.
In Dante’s search for support for his project and his vocation, Santos allegorizes a whole nation’s struggle for genuine sovereignty, for recognition as a singular nation. Not so much the character of Dante as the itinerary of the quest for solidarity, the deracinated individual’s need to communicate and connect with others (the priority of audience and context for the Filipino artist) and thus unify the fragmented collective psyche–that is ultimately Dante’s over-riding motivation. It is none other than to articulate the dream of nationhood, to imagine the birth of national self-determination. It is not so much the solitary artist’s agon for self-fulfillment that we see in Dante’s comic if pathetic maneuvers for self-recognition, but the Filipino organic intellectual’s dilemma of deciding whether to succumb to self-indulgent anarchist gestures–the fate of Jose Garcia Villa, a contemporary exiled artist, and kindred compatriots–or to mediate the shipwrecked psyche’s anguish and craft with the suffering and oppression of the larger community to which, by descent or consent, he belongs. Dante confronts this ethical imperative during his sojourn in America.
Hegemony in politics and art is a matter of calibrating the ratio of force and consent. Dante was driven into exile by geopolitical forces beyond his control. His reservoir of “consent,” fueled by conscience or naivete, is what explains Dante’s sympathy for Estela, the invalid in a wheelchair in a mansion on Diamond Heights–the child whose inability to control the psychosomatic symptoms of her life symbolizes the existential plight of the Filipino community. Estela’s fascination with the blazing lights of San Francisco from the Heights is the general Filipino enchantment with the surface glitter of industrialized America as the incarnation of the mythic “City on the Hill,” the promised land of freedom and equality and redemption. The scene epitomizes Bulosan’s enduring fantasy of a fabled America, innocent and virginal before the Puritans’ bloody errand in the wilderness.
This theme of fantasy and disillusionment is recapitulated by Santos for this period of “colorblind” racism and brutal fascist violence in the Philippines and other U.S. imperial outposts before the advent of a “global apartheid” (Marable 2006). Unfortunately, this doctrine of American Exceptionalism–a Messianic ideology embodied in the policy of “Manifest Destiny” and affiliated slogans of the Cold War and Bush’s “war on terrorism” (Pease 2000)–appears as a healing trope, even though ironically fused with a horribly diseased, helpless Filipina child. Ultimately, the “American Dream” evaporates in the flood of sordid disenchantments that hound Bulosan’s characters, a lesson not lost to Santos’ protagonist. Dante survives owing to a peculiar mixture of native resources: susceptibility to seduction, intellectual naivete, convivial will-power, sensuality, and strong animal instincts. At times, he manifests the DuBoisian virtue of double-consciousness. For the mass audience of the global North, however, Dante serves to personify the model citizen of impoverished, underdeveloped “third world” countries vulnerable to the temptations offered by the World Bank/International Monetary Fund, US Agency for International Development, and transnational corporate investors hungry for super-profits.

Asian America: A Utopian Project?

What I find somewhat disconcerting, though in hindsight perfectly understandable, is Santos’ resort to a tired humanistic formula to resolve his protagonist’s problems. Having gone through the grotesque and painful ordeals in his search for some mooring (emblematized by the lost father) in a chaotic consumerist milieu, Dante settles for an ending to his existential search. The novel’s closing scene with his final goodbye to Estela may be read as an attempt to transpose to this vacant placeholder the old Jamesian “central intelligence,” a scene that emits somehing like the “Great Gatsby” intuition that would reconcile all contraries and pacify everyone. Dante imagines Estela watching the landscape before her as her limbs twist, eerily crying and frothing, the convulsions of “wounded beast” that operates as Santos’ “objective correlative” for the diseased body politic and the metropolitan wasteland at the end of the Vietnam War and the onset of deadly Reaganite repression and missile warfare against the unruly “third world” subalterns in Libya, Nicaragua, Grenada, Philippines, etc. (Blum 2005):
There are no stars blinking at our feet, no encrusted jewels, such as you might imagine, winking over our heads. We are flesh and blood, tired before the day is over, seeking to find after the rains, a welcome door, a smiling face, both the familiar and the strange. Surrounded by strangers, we look for friends in a continuing search against despair.
We have left native land but our hearts are still there, not here, Estela, not in this golden city by the bay. We like to think we gain a lot from day to day in hope, that we are not as we often suspect we are, sentimental fools. But we believe in love, that’s all we live for, love. But what the hell is that? And like you, Estela, we carry our own deformities as nobly as we can, but unlike you, we hide them well. (1987, 191).

Unlike Hagedorn’s slyly cynical if proprietary distance from her creations, Santos’ empathy is, to my mind, somewhat patronizing and even excessive for the real worth of the problems his characters are grappling with. Perhaps Santos senses this danger of pathos-becoming-bathos so that he catches himself and asks rhetorically: “What the hell for you left your heart in San Francisco”? The colloquial register seems to offer a fitting denouement to a memorable verbal performance, analogous to how the Chinese artist Zhang Huan incarnates genealogy in his theatrical art. In enacting “Family Tree,” Zhang asked three Chinese calligraphers to write directly on his face and shaved head until all his skin was covered. Not the substance (Chinese folktales, poems, names) but the form soon becomes legible: the ink-brushed characters gradually darkened his entire head. In the last of a sequence of nine photographs of this unrepeatable happening, Zhang’s face is completely black “as if erased by, or completely absorbed into, language” (Cotter 2007). This may apply to Hagedorn’s art, but not to Santos’ stylized realism and his stubborn drive to articulate the tale of the “tribe.”
In any event, Santos’ performance values signifiers but not at the expense of the signifieds and their sociohistorical grounding. References to public conduct and speech-acts are not manipulated simply for a psychological reality-effect; they index the kaleidoscope of scenes and characters to specific embodiments, to concrete historical contexts: Marcos’ authoritarian rule and the suspended state of animation of the Filipino pettybourgeoisie in California. In a time when “Only English” became the latest outburst of the racial polity(San Juan 2005b), with de-industrialisation, outsourcing, and cutbacks wrecking middle-class lives; with the abject failure of Brown vs Board of Education to remedy de facto discrimination; and when the gains of the Civil Rights struggles have been coopted or eviscerated by right-wing assaults on social services and public programs–long before the Katrina disaster will demonstrate that equality and freedom for people of color remains a hope or dream–Santos dares to write in Tagalog and other vernaculars with English words. Maxine Hong Kingston praised Santos for this miraculous feat, for his being “a master at giving the reader a sense of people speaking in many languages and dialects” (Cruz 2005, 36). This dialogic, more exactly polyphonic or heteroglossic (after Bakhtin), method of constructing the scaffolding of a particularized “national allegory” is, I contend, a much more subversive and radically transformative strategy for thwarting finance-capital’s attacks on immigrants, ethnic minorities, and internally colonized peoples than the calculated ruses and panaceas of multiplicity, leveraged ambivalence, transnational cosmopolitanism, and other new-fangled nostrums sold in the now bloody, turbulent marketplace.

On the Eve of the Collapse

Meanwhile, history unfolds as we engage in our Wittgensteinian language-games. We are informed by a New York Times op-ed piece (March 31, before the present crisis) that the era of the white man and woman has ended, with the “baton” passing to Asia: soaring growth rates in China, India and Vietnam; 450 million cell phones in China; with Hong Kong’s “efficiency and high-speed airport” making “New York seem third-world.” Postmodernist motifs overflow in this passage: “These alternate faces of globalization–fluidity and tribalism–define our frontier-dissoling world….Everything passes. In the 17th century, China and India accounted for more than half the world’s economic output. After a modest interlude, the pendulum is swinging back to them at a speed the West has not grasped” (Cohen 2008). And so, inscribed in this cosmic panorama, the unfortunate episode involving CalTech aerodynamics professor Dr. Tsien Hsue-Shen who was deported at the start of the Cold War, or the somewhat comic refusal to allow Congressman David Woo to enter the Dept of Energy hall in Washington DC to deliver an invited speech celebrating Asian History Month, need not deter us. Nietszche’s Eternal Recurrence or some updated version of Kierkegaard’s “Repetition” may appear more “sexy” than this challenging project of national allegory. We beg to dissent.
This is a modest proposal. What I am proposing here in this brief survey of critical theories is the need to shift our attention away from the current nihilistic and cynical impasse. Instead of privileging the “free play” of discourse released from any contextual anchoring, we need to focus on the whole intellectual formation of Asian organic intellectuals (instanced in Peter McLaren’s interview of Lisa Chin [1994]). We need to examine the structure and dynamics of specific cultural modes of production in each Asian collectivity within the systemic constraints of late capitalism. In the process, we move beyond the now routinized genealogy of power/knowledge to the inventory of concrete historical limits and possibilities for radical transformative praxis.
For an effective counterhegemony against the disingenuous and ingenious weapons of the racial polity sustained by a protofascist State–the Homeland Security State of Bush and the neoconservatives–which has gutted Constitutional rights and international law (practising torture, “renditions,” preemptive bombings, unwarranted surveillance, and other abuses of power), it is obligatory for progressive scholars to draw up an inventory of our resources derived from both the native cultural legacy and the Western Enlightenment, however ridden with “orientalizing” traits, in order to forge a synthesizing plot of collective emancipation of working peoples across color-lines and ethnic boundaries, as well as across class, gender, and religious barriers. We need to collaborate together in a struggle that will destroy the basis of the racial polity in the unjust division of social labor and the unequal power stemming from that exploitation, which is the overarching narrative of all communities fragmented and divided among themselves, under the shadow of a dying Empire.

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BERTOLT BRECHT, THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR, AND THE PHILIPPINE REVOLUTION

philcsc — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 02:01:23 +0000

BERTOLT BRECHT, THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR, and REVOLUTION IN THE PHILIPPINES: Reflections on “Senora Carrara’s Rifles”

by E. SAN JUAN, Jr.

The changeability of the world insists on its contradictoriness. There is something in things, people, events, which makes them what they are, and at the same time something which makes them different…. The demolition, explosion, atomization of the individual psyche is a fact,…the strange centerlessness of individuals. But absence of center does not mean absence of substance. One simply faces new entities which must be newly defined.

–BERTOLT BRECHT, Arbeitsjournal

A recent sojourn in the Philippines for a year (circa 1990) has confirmed for me Brecht’s usefulness (his favorite epithet) in revitalizing the moribund naturalistic-cum-Broadway theater in metropolitan Manila, particularly in the productions of PETA, The Philippine Educational Theater Association, based in Manila. Progressive colleagues in theater, after local adaptations of Galileo and The Caucasian Chalk Circle, are rehearsing the only play Brecht classified as one of “empathy,” that is, one which seizes the spectator’s predisposition for identification with illusionary events and characters in an “opportunistic” way. We know of course that Brecht’s intention is not to delude the audience but to educate or enlighten it by cultivating and legitimizing a participatory mode of aesthetic involvement. When he completed the first version of Galileo, he noted in his journal on February 25, 1939 that it was “technically a step backward just like Senora Carrar’s Rifles. Too opportunistic… Aristotelian (empathy-) drama” (1964, 115). Given the dreaded stigma attached to the term “Aristotelian,” what can Third World revolutionary artists find in the play that would not simply exacerbate the ever-present temptation to indulge in ultra-leftism–the simple negation of art for immediate political action? Would exploiting the didactic potential of Brecht’s play be opportunist, or simply an attempt to use one tool for the same ends Brecht privileged in the Organum: to historicize life, “to treat social situations as processes” (1964, 193) so as to alter them? Since I have not seen any discussion of this play from a Third World radical perspective, I venture to submit the following speculative reflections to explore possibilities in the terrain of Brecht’s “fall,” perhaps a felix culpa, into empathy drama.1

Essentially, Senora Carrar’s Rifles intends to exhibit a specifically contextualized dialectics of choice: how a traditional mother in a semifeudal Spanish village during the Civil War, while opposed to violence, performs her task of maternal care and civic responsibility. Opposites eventually coincide, resolving tensions on a higher plane. Her basic conflict is not one between opposing violence and preferring peace, but one between the desire to maintain the status quo of precarious abstention to preserve the life of her two sons, and the temptation to fight the inhuman (Franco’s fascist military) forces threatening her still tolerable condition. Her apparent neutrality in a time of civil war is one replicated in Third World peoples (peasants, workers, petty bourgeoisie, indigenous minorities) long inured to having no control over their destiny, obsessed with guarding or defending what little they have, bargaining with the powers-that-be. This claim to neutrality is precisely what the play questions. (Of course, Brecht was really addressing the “neutral” allied powers at the time even as he critiqued pacifist liberals.) In a conjuncture where the contradictions are sharply defined, where friends and enemies can be neatly demarcated (loyalist Republican forces versus Franco’s religious “nationalism” supported by Hitler and Mussolini), Senora Carrar’s dilemma and its resolution provides an exemplum for those hoping to mobilize those morally paralyzed by setbacks–Brecht anticipated this when the democratic allies failed to rally to the beleaguered Republicans–or those who find an attitude of temporizing or compromise as a shrewder policy, a tactic of cutting one’s losses. The lesson is that the mother loses what she has been desperately trying to keep. What she should have learned is the reverse, the precept from the Gospel: Only if the seed dies will it bear fruit.

Senora Carrar learns the fatal mistake of delaying or wanting to compromise, and therefore reaps the opposite of her intention. Through a non-commital agnosticism, one sacrifices what one holds dear; thus, armed intervention is necessary in self-defense, self-interest thereby fusing with the survival and freedom of the community in which one’s private worth finds ultimate validation. This urgent message–if one may put it too programmatically–is what, I think, appeals to our anti-imperialist compatriots faced with a population (as in the Philippines) where the religious ethos of the institution of the family resists involvement in projects of radical social transformation because of a conservative dogmatism and rigid particularistic ethos derived from a residual tributary formation.

One should note that this thematic mapping of the play stresses the polemical and pragmatic thrust since it focuses on the strategy of exposing the folly of anyone assuming a position of neutrality while everyone in the community suffers. In a context of total war, neutrality becomes acquiescence to the dominant force or a submission to the ascendant trend. All engagements are complicitous with one side or the other; partisanship is all. Seen from this perspective, the mother’s plight and her conversion evoke the need for the spectator to participate in the ongoing collective project of resisting what is experienced as evil, destructive forces, provided the knowledge and recognition of such forces have become identical with a consensus of the popular alliance–that is, that such knowledge has become a transformative material force when translated into praxis.

But what this interpretation leaves out is not, as I’ll argue in a moment, the historicizing or alienating element–note how Senora Carrar intermittently stands back to demonstrate/narrate herself with highly nuanced defamiliarizing effects–but the problematic of ressentiment in which the revenge motif and the more fundamental question of the gender division of labor find themselves eclipsed. Unless the son killed by the military is construed as symbolic of the socialist project, the mother’s decision to fight may be taken simply as a reassertion of the subaltern will, the maternal urge to project the offspring (the usual essentializing stereotype), in this instance, against the patriarchal mandate of generals and priests. In other words, the mother is not motivated by any radical principle except that of affirming the dignity of the poor and their right to strike back. We conflate here a humanist and an aristocratic motivation to elucidate the general direction of a whole pattern of behavior.

In his essay “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting” (circa 1935), Brecht first enunciated the function of Verfremdungseffekt or alienation-effect as a historicizing of incidents portrayed on the stage. This mode of representation is geared to exposing the temporality of any social situation and the unfolding of what is natural or normal as artificial and constructed, the product of a process of contrivance. Experience conceived as process implies mutability, a continuum of mutation. It signifies contradiction, heterogeneity, and sedimentation: “…the image that gives historical definition will retain something of the rough sketching which indicates traces of other movements and features all around the fully-worked-out figure” (1964, 191). Consider in this passage how Senora Carrar’s position alternates between dependency and mastery:

DIE MUTTER: Du bleibst!
DER JUNGE: Nein, ich gehe! Du kannst sagen, du brauchst Juan, aber mich brauchst du dann nicht auch noch.
DIE MUTTER: Ich halte Juan nicht, weil er fur mich fischen gehen soll. Und ich lasse dich nicht weg! (Sie lauft auf ihn zu und umarmt ihn.) Du kannst rauchen, wenn du willst, und wenn du allein fischen gehen willst, ich werde nichts sagen, und auch einmal in Vaters Boot!
DER JUNGE: Lass mich los!
DIE MUTTER: Nein, du bleibst hier!
DER JUNGE (sich losringend): Nein, ich gehe!–Rasch, nimm die Gewehre, Onkel!
DIE MUTTER: Oh! (Sie lasst den Jungen los und hinkt weg, mit dem Fuss vorsichtig auftretend.) (1967, 1224)

[Wallis translation]
THERESA: You’re staying here!
JOSE: No. I’m going. You can say you need Juan, but then you don’t need me too.
THERESA: I’m not keeping Juan here just so he can go fishing for me. And I will not let you go. (She runs to him and throws her arms around him). You can smoke if you want to, and if you want to go fishing alone I won’t say anything, and you can even go in father’s boat.
JOSE: Let go of me!
THERESA: No, you are staying here!
JOSE (Struggling to free himself): No, I am going! Quick, get the guns, Uncle Pedro!
THERESA (With a cry of pain): Oh! (She lets go of JOSE and limps away, stepping very carefully as if one foot hurt her badly.)

Senora Carrar then acts out the role of the hurt and resentful mother who, in a fit of casting out Jose as a disobedient child who refuses to acknowledge her “patriarchal” assumption, invokes the brother to chastise him. The dynamics of ressentiment thwarts any impulse of sympathy from the spectator even as we discover the deception or imposture this seemingly helpless woman has been foisting on us. Pity and terror, and their catharsis, are neglected here, thus making the drama’s putative original, John Synge’s Riders to the Sea, its parodic and sentimentalized version.

While it is generally conceded that the instructive crux of this play coincides with the turn of Senora Carrar’s judgement when she condemns the murderers of her son as “not human beings” but small-pox that “must be stamped out,” such a sudden reversal of thought may strike those already identifying with the unfortunate mother as a “tour de force.” This in itself generates a discordance in the audience’s effort to establish consistencies and probabilities. At first, Senora Carrar could not believe that her son would be killed by “just fishing.” That defied logic, but then immediately she falls sick as she kneels beside her son’s body. While the women mourners pray aloud (an incongruous importation of Irish piety into the milieu of Andalusian anti-clericalism), Senora Carrar arrives at her “moment of truth” –she holds out the “ragged, worn-out” cap of her son as proof that he was identified as “a gentleman” and therefore executed. (This allusion to the positional effect of apparel has been foreshadowed by Jose’s earlier donning of a militia cap.) Such a peripeteia may seem forced if we don’t observe that the long speech she delivers before the son’s body is brought in demonstrates the necessary distancing from this empathy-inducing funeral rite.

Ostensibly a harangue against Pedro and the partisans for scheming to lure Juan to the frontline, the mother’s reflections enact the loss she would soon confront. Applying post-structuralist terms, the impact of this utterance hollows the plenitude of her subsequent pathos. In this way, character or ethos (in the sense meant in Aristotle’s Poetics) is fissured into a play of rhetorical Gestus:

Wenn er mir das angetan hat und zur Miliz gegangen ist, dann soll er verflucht sein! Mit ihren Fliegerbomben sollen sie ihn treffen! Mit ihren Tanks sollen sie ihn niederfahren! Dass er merkt, dass Gott sich nicht spotten lasst. Und dass ein Armer nicht gegen die Generale aufkommen kann. Ich habe ihn nicht dazu geboren, dass er hinter einem Maschinengewehr auf seine Mitmenschen lauert. Wenn da Unrecht ist in der Welt, habe ich ihn nicht gelehrt, daran teilzunehmen. Ich werde ihm meine Tur nicht mehr offnen, wenn er zuruck-kommt, nur weil er sagt, er hat die Generale besiegt! Ich werde ihm sagen, und zwar durch die Tur, dass ich niemand in meinem Haus haben will, der sich mit Blut befleckt hat. Ich werde ihn mir abhauen wie einen kranken Fuss. Das werde ich. Sie haben mir schon einen gebracht. Der meinte auch, er werde schon Gluck haben. Aber wir haben kein Gluck. Das werdet ihr vielleicht noch begreifen, bevor die Generale mit uns fertig sind. Wer zum Schwert greift, wird durch das Schwert umkommen (1967, 1226).

[Wallis translation]:
If he has done that to me, and gone to the militia, I curse him. The air bombs can hit him. The tanks can run him down. He’ll see that there is no joking with God, that a poor man can’t beat the generals. I didn’t bring him up to shoot his fellow men. I never taught him to take a part in the injustice of this world. I will not open my door to him when he comes back, not if he says he has whipped the generals! I will tell him, through the keyhole, that I won’t have anybody in my house who is covered with blood. I pluck him out like an eye that offends. My husband was carried in and laid down right over there. He thought he could win us happiness by fighting. Where’s our happiness? Where’s it going to be when the generals get through with us? You’ll see. They that take the sword shall perish with the sword.

The cathexis of the mother’s attachment dissolves when she curses her son even as she embodies the opposite of what the truth of her son’s sacrifice implies. The son returns indeed “covered with blood”–his own and not those he was meant to destroy. This ironic fulfillment of the mother’s prophecy–a Brechtian director can anticipate this through slides or announcements to undercut suspense–can be made to function on stage as the answer to the mother’s question: “Where’s it going to be when the generals get through with us?” The speech thus performs the Gestus of affirming what it ostensibly denies.

Class allegiance and maternal instinct intersect in the mother’s exteriorizing of her positions, an act generating a contradiction which is resolved at the end when the mother’s role of provider (bread baker/domestic caretaker) is sublimated and fused with her urge to avenge her son. Earlier she demonstrates her partisanship and sense of civic duty when she nurses the wounded militia soldier Pablo, a scene where the boundary of the family coincides with the solidarity of the village. Though she is in a sense responsible for positioning her son as innocent sacrifice, she suppresses any feeling of guilt; her psyche channels the aggressive impulse toward the users of violence against her son. It is only with the son’s loss, and the ressentiment of conceiving the Other (fascist soldiers) as polluted, that the mother recovers her class identity and reaffirms the community of producers. The sacrifice of the son gives birth to subaltern solidarity.

While the dead son awakens Senora Carrar to what Pedro has been insisting, namely, the impossibility of being neutral in a world where violence and injustice implicates everyone, it may be experimentally heuristic to examine how the dead or absent father (whose metonymic extension, now the Senora’s rifles, signify the locus of libidinal investment as well as collective utopian desire) looms insistently in the background. The father’s return is narrated by Jose to his uncle Pedro in the beginning and functions in retrospect as a rehearsal for the son’s funeral: “Died at the station here. All of a sudden, in the evening, door flies open, and here come the neighbor women, the way they do when a drowned fisherman is brought home; file in without a word, take their places around the room up against the wall and pray all together as the body is carried in.” In this context, can we really consider Senora Carrar aloof, unconcerned, non-violent in principle? When she hears General Queipo de Llano’s voice on the radio condemning the “misguided rabble,” she reacts as follows:

Wir sind keine Aufruhrer, und wir bieten niemandem die Stirn. Wenn es nach euch ginge, tatet ihr vielleicht so etwas. Du und dein Bruder, ihr seid leichtsinnig von Natur. Ihr habt es von eurem Vater, und ich wurde es vielleicht nicht mogen, wenn ihr anders wart. Aber das hier ist kein Spass: horst du nicht ihre Kanonen? Wir sind arme Leute, und arme Leute konnen nicht Krieg fuhren (1967, 1199).

[Wallis translation]:
We’re not rabble. We’re not rioters. We haven’t had anything to do with agitators. You and Juan probably would if I didn’t look after you. You’re just like your father–and maybe I’d despise you if you weren’t. But this is a terrible business. Hear those cannons? We are poor people. Poor people can’t run a war.

Senora Carrar sees the father’s impulsiveness (ultimately, her own willfullness) in the sons and strives to control that; her pacifism results from the discipline of her feelings and her belief that “nobody knows what’s going to happen these days,” a mark of canny marginality. Such fatalism, however, masks a powerful will held temporarily in abeyance, biding the time for the felicitous opportunity.

We begin to sense at this point that the husband Carlo joined the fighting with the full complicity of his wife, in fact, at her instigation. In the middle of the play, when Manuela insinuates that “she helped her husband get to Oviedo” where he was fatally wounded, the widowed wife counters in a muffled tone: “Don’t say that. I did not help him. I wouldn’t have anything to do with it. I know they all try to put the blame on me, but it’s a lie, a dirty lie. I’d like to see anybody prove it.” Our suspicion is that the father’s figure here turns out to be a function of his wife’s calculation of the odds, her prudential cunning. In effect, the mother combines what Darko Suvin calls the plebeian (Schweyk) point of view and the rationalist (Diderot) outlook in Brecht’s sensibility (1972, 94-98).

The concepts of property and genealogy are interrogated in the exchange between brother and sister. Pedro insists that the guns “aren’t things that belong just to you,” and by extension the sons are not merely the mother’s possessions. Senora Carrar’s response to her brother’s desire to persuade Juan in releasing the father’s guns from the mother’s clutches affords us a poignant Geste of questioning reality and the dominant ideology. Her thinking aloud unfolds a psychic cleavage symptomatic of the stranglehold of religious belief manifest in suicidal guilt and self-pity:

Lass meine Kinder in Ruhe, Pedro! Ich habe ihnen gesagt, dass ich mich aufhangen werde, wenn sie gehen. Ich weiss, dass das vor Gott eine Sunde ist und die ewige Verdammnis nach sich zieht. Aber ich kann nicht anders handeln. Als Carlo starb, so starb, ging ich zum Padre, sonst hatte ich mich damals schon aufgehangt. Ich wusste ganz gut, dass ich mit schuld war, obgleich er selber der Schlimmste war mit seiner Heftigkeit und seinem Hang zur Gewalttatigkeit. Wir haben es nicht so gut, und es ist nicht so leicht, dieses Leben zu ertragen. Aber es geht nicht mit dem Gewehr. Das sah ich, als sie ihn hereinbrachten und ihn mir auf den Boden legten. Ich bin nicht fur die Generale, und es ist eine Schande, das von mir zu sagen. Aber wenn ich mich still verhalte und meine Heftigkeit bekampfe, dann lassen sie uns vielleicht verschont. Das ist eine einfache Rechnung. Es ist wenig genug, was ich verlange. Ich will diese Fahne nicht mehr sehen. Wir sind unglucklich genug (1967, 1219-1220).

[Wallis translation]:
Leave my boys alone, Pedro. I told them I would kill myself if they went. I know that that is mortal sin and I’ll go to hell if I do it. But that’s all I can do. When Carlo died–that way–I went right to the priest, or I’d have killed myself then. I knew very well that I was partly to blame, though he was worse, because he was so emotional, and struggle came natural to him. We haven’t such a good thing of it in this world, and this life isn’t so easy to bear. But violence won’t do. I learned that, when they brought him in and laid him on the floor in front of me. I am not for the generals, and it is a dirty lie to say I am. But if I keep quiet and conquer my own headstrong nature maybe they will leave us in peace. That’s a simple bargain. It’s mighty little I ask. I don’t want to see this flag again. We’re unhappy enough.

The rhetoric of this passage is a mutation from the immediate present, the hortatory mode, to a narrated past and an impersonal commentary on the unbearable nature of “this life.” It reveals the void on which her claim to pacifism and resignation rests. Senora Carrar also expresses a conditional wish based less on her experience as on a folk/peasant instinct toward the precarious nature of everyday life. Throughout, the detachment of the speaker is sustained by the simplicity and directness of her idiom (inspired by the Synge model), and also by the deliberate avoidance of any mawkish nostalgia for “the good old days.”

While the task of reversing the play’s “opportunist” use of the mother’s suffering largely depends, as I’ve suggested earlier, on the manner of staging and presentation–Brecht in fact hoped to cancel the empathy stimulus by projecting on the stage a documentary film on the historical causes of the Spanish Civil War–the alternating registers of the utterances I have quoted suffice to indicate the self-deconstructive possibilities of theatrical spacing demanded by epic/dialectical imperatives. Cues abound in the text for exteriorizing or distancing, the unmasking of representational illusion as conventional practices or socially authorized production. Brecht himself formulates the aesthetics of the reversals in the play through the Philosopher’s comments in the Messingkauf Dialogues: “Lamenting by means of sounds, or, better still, words, is a vast liberation, because it means that the sufferer is beginning to produce something. He’s already mixing his sorrow with an account of the blows he has received; he’s already making something out of the utterly devastating. Observation has set in” (quoted in Eagleton 1986, 172)

In the end, like Shen Te, Anna Fierling, and other fractured female protagonists, Senora Carrar ultimately shatters the spell of ressentiment, the vindictive personal impulse, and unsheathes the dialectical edge of that ambiguous Biblical injunction which justified her non-resistance–”They that take the sword shall perish with the sword”–as the collective judgement of the people against the militarist usurpers.

If the peoples of the Third World (a convenient generalization, not a homogenizing category) have suffered and continue to suffer the abuses of bourgeoise dictatorships and authoritarian regimes sustained by patriarchal/religious codes, then perhaps the “rifles” of the mothers whose sons and husbands have been tortured, killed or disappeared (as in Chile and elsewhere), can be mobilized to reveal the instability of imperialist hegemony vis-a-vis the psyches and praxis of the oppressed, especially women (to just barely touch on the feminist impulse). Brecht’s play can be profitably read, and performed, as an allegory of such possible transformations. It endows the old Horatian maxim of prodesse and delectare with exuberance and conviviality.

In June 1941, Brecht made a stop-over in Manila, Philippines, then a colony of the United States, on the way to exile in California. His return via Die Gewehre der Frau Carrar may herald a new way of utilizing the still popular empathy drama (on both the stage and screen) in a neocolonial formation for subversive pedagogical and pragmatic ends. In short, alienation-effect and epic distancing can only acquire their power because they are the diacritical reverse of empathy drama, just as the colonized and subjugated indigenous subjects exist because they are the necessary desiderata on which the power of imperialism is predicated.
So Brecht commemorated his passage (on July 21, 1941, from Vladivostok, USSR, with a short stopover in Manila, to Los Angeles, USA; see Volker 102) through this contested terrain in his poem “Landscape of Exile” whose second stanza I excerpt here:

The little horsecarts with gilt decorations
And the pink sleeves of the matrons
In the alleys of doomed Manila
The fugitive beheld with job.

REFERENCES

Brecht, Bertold. Brecht on Theater. Translated by John Willett. New York: Hill & Wang, 1964.
—–. Gessamelte Werke 3, Stucke 3. Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1967.
Eagleton, Terry. Against the Grain. London: Verso, 1986.
Suvin, Darko. “The Mirror and the Dynamo.” In Brecht. Edited by Erika Munk. New York: Bantam, 1972. 80-98.
Torres, Maria Luisa. “Anticipating Freedom in Theater.” In Brecht in Asia and Africa. Edited by John Fuegi et al. Hong Kong: The International Brecht Society, 1989. 134-54.
Volker, Klaus. Brecht Chronicle. New York: A Continuum Book, 1975.

NOTES
1. John Willet (1959, 45-46) gives the production history of this play which he thinks is a work that “seems truly to suit the Party line.”

2. I have also used the English version of the play by Keene Wallis published in Theatre Workshop, April-June 1938, pp 20-31.
For a more detailed elaboration of how Brecht has been appropriated locally, see Torres (1989).
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E. SAN JUAN is director of the Philippine Cultural Studies Center in Connecticut, USA He was recently visiting professor of literature and cultural studies at the National Tsing Hua University and Academia Sinica fellow in Taiwan. He was 2003 professor of American Studies at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. Among his recent books are RACISM AND CULTURAL STUDIES (Duke University Press) and WORKING THROUGH THE CONTRADICTIONS (Bucknell University Press). Recent works are IN THE WAKE OF TERROR: CLASS, RACE, NATION, ETHNICITY IN THE POSTMODERN WORLD (Lexington Books); US IMPERIALISM AND REVOLUTION IN THE PHILIPPINES (Palgrave Macmillan); TOWARD FILIPINO SELF-DETERMINATION SUNY), and CRITIQUE AND SOCIAL TRANSFORMATION: LESSONS FROM ANTONIO GRAMSCI, MIKHAIL BAKHTIN, AND RAYMOND WILLIAMS (The Edwin Mellen Press). An E. SAN JUAN READER entitled BALIKBAYANG SINTA was published last year by Ateneo University Press. He is currently a fellow of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University.

Posted in AESTHETICS, CRITICAL THEORY, DISCOURSES ON CONTRADICTIONS, POETICS, REVIEWS, SOCIOCRITICISM, WOMEN'S LIBERATION Tagged: Brecht, catharsis, Epic theater, Senora Carrara's Rifles, Spanish Civil War, Verfremdung-effekt