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Book Reviews
The United States and the Philippines: Scaling the Boondocks
| KRAMER, PAUL A. The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. 552 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $69.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8078-2985-4; $26.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8078-5653-3.
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In 1898, at the outbreak of the Spanish-American war, the United States sent its armed forces to the Philippine islands to neutralize the Spanish forces stationed there. In a matter of months, Spain had ceded to the U.S. the colony it had occupied for 333 years. American forces engaged in a brutal war of suppression of an "insurrection" by Filipino forces under General Emilio Aguinaldo, who had led the revolution against Spain in 1896 and formed an emerging republic with its base in the town of Malolos, Bulacan, on the island of Luzon. It was in the course of that war, which officially ended in 1902, that American soldiers returning from the guerilla campaign brought to their fellow citizens' consciousness the term "boondocks," which is derived from the Tagalog word bundok, referring to a mountain or remote area. |
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Paul Kramer notes that historians "are now only beginning to trace the myriad complex transits that surround this small linguistic crossing" by extending the scope of their works beyond the conventional conceptual borders that have insulated the study of the United States and the Philippines for over a century and have not captured their "connected histories." His work will have succeeded if it "points the way to an elusive goal: a history without boondocks" (33–34). |
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It is in this context that a Filipino audience will best appreciate The Blood of Government, a phrase derived from an 1898 speech by Albert Beveridge. The Republican senator from Indiana argued passionately that America must live up to its duties of spreading its civilization and tutoring its newly conquered peoples in the intricacies of government, all in the course of building an empire, so that Americans, like other "English-speaking and Teutonic peoples" could respond to God's calling for them to be "master organizers of the world" (2). By attempting to write a history of the racial politics of empire and the imperial politics of race as inseparable, Kramer highlights race as "a dynamic, contextual, contested, and contingent field of power," and argues for the "necessity of examining metropole and colony in a single, densely interactive field in which colonial dynamics are not strictly derivative of, dependent upon, or respondent to metropolitan forces" (2–3). By doing so, he enjoins both Americans and Filipinos to scale each other's boondocks, so that these remote areas of ignorance and misunderstanding may finally disappear. |
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In articulating race and empire in the making of Philippine-American colonial history, Kramer begins with the last years of the nineteenth century, when "Filipino" nationalists like Jose Rizal challenged Spanish racial exclusions of native-born indios through their writings, thus laying the foundations for the early structures of Filipino nationalism. Kramer discusses extensively the Philippine-American War and how it developed into a "race war" and "left a deep imprint on subsequent colonial state-building, which would proceed through a dialectic of violence and attraction...[and] continued to shape future racial formations, establishing the versatile and persistent problem of 'savagery' in Philippine-American relations" (29). In the early postwar period, Kramer explores Filipino-American collaboration in the making of the new colonial state and discusses how Americans practiced "inclusionary racism," producing a "bifurcated racial state in which distinct modes of colonial administration accompanied narratives of parallel colonial progress" (30). In this state the majority of Catholic Filipinos, having been characterized as "Christian" and "civilized," were making strides to evolutionary tutelage under American colonial control, whereas the "non-Christians," represented as "savage," had to be administered separately, with the formation of such entities as the "Moro province" in the areas occupied by the Muslims in Mindanao and Sulu, and the "Mountain province," occupied by tribal groups in the Cordillera ranges. |
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