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Paper Trails: Cultural Imperialism from the late 19th Century as seen through Documents, Literature and PhotographsMarc Jason Gilbert |
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In former times, it was commonplace to say that
"every school boys knows" the story of the great colonial empires of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, what they once knew was generally
confined to the color of their own colonial empire as painted on a map and
the names of its builders, from Paul Doumer to Cecil Rhodes.1
Today, at least according to a typical report on that subject prepared by
Aldridge High School students, they know much more:
. . . . the style of colonial rule and patterns of social
interaction between colonizer and colonized changed considerably in the
late 19th century. Racism and social snobbery became pervasive in contacts
between the colonizers and their African and Asian subordinates. The [colonizers]
consciously renounced the ways of dressing, eating habits, and pastimes
that had earlier been borrowed from or shared with the peoples of the
colonies . . . [and became obsessed with demonstrating] the superiority
of [their own] learning and of everything from political organization
to fashions in clothing.2 |
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| Students at Aldridge and elsewhere have now moved beyond the mere identification of the size and locale of colonial empires and the reputations of their founders to examining the nature of modern imperialism and how it changed over time. These students are able to do so largely because of the work of the past two generations of scholars who have made these subjects a focal point of world historical analysis. Initially, the work of these scholars concentrated on the role of psychology, racial attitudes and gender relations in the expression of imperial power.3 Students of world history have since examined the emergence of industrial exhibitions meant to tout imperial achievements,4 the development of architectural styles intended to exalt the power of British rule,5 the granting of honorary titles and imperial orders to bind the elite classes among their subject peoples to their colonial masters (a process called ornamentalism),6 the use of the cinema to promote colonial dominance,7 and even the changing view of the clothing deemed proper to be worn by populations charged with administering and defending empire.8 | 3 | |||||||||||
| Other foci of study have included the manner in which control over and extraction of the world's resources were represented as confirmation of the superiority of the colonizing nations: for example, how the devastation of the Amazon and Congo basins due to the heedless extraction of raw materials were framed as the triumphs of positivism9 and how even colonial famines were used to demonstrate the superiority of metropolitan ways of knowledge, despite the death tolls rung up in Ireland and India due to doctrinaire applications of laissez faire.10 Recently, attention has been directed towards the way in which the imperial idea was expressed through the colonizer's control over much of the world's natural environment11 and trade in commodities such as drugs,12 salt,13 sugar,14 spices,15 tea (the Black Gold of the Empire long before oil),16 bananas17 and the pineapple (which today remains the motif that defines what modern manufactures from Ethan Allen to Bed Bath and Beyond happily tout as British "colonial" furniture—a phrase trademarked by Lennox).18 | 4 | |||||||||||
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The following material identifies
sources for the exploration of colonial culture readily available on the
Web or from most college or public lending libraries. Samples of material
suitable for document based questions, lesson plans, suggested student exercises,
and a bibliography suitable for student research are also included. The
latter suggests introductions to the subject that may serve as a guide for
study. The selected documents are meant to be suggestive rather than comprehensive:
individual instructors may wish to examine subjects not stressed here, such
as migration and diaspora studies. It is hoped that these resources will
help illuminate how, for both the colonized as well as the colonizer, cultural
issues were as significant as (and often directly related to) economic,
political and military affairs in determining their identities and giving
shape to their societies.
This material is offered with two caveats. In the hands of critics of empire,
cultural studies are subject to "essentailization," or reductionism. In
the process of applying new critical approaches, some students of gender
in South Asia have labeled legislation passed in 1891 to discourage child
marriage in India as proof that domination over the sexual lives of Indians
was central to the establishment of British imperial hegemony on the subcontinent.
Yet, on this occasion, the British were responding to Indian demands for
reform, a step which the British government had previously refused to take
due to a reasonable fear of the consequences of interfering in the social
relations of Indians after the Great Rebellion of 1857. In fact, the British
government had earlier passed up many opportunities to effect such reforms
despite rather egregious examples of the destruction of young women's lives.
A reluctant colonial government that had passed up previous opportunities
to control the sexuality of its subjects is not necessarily innocent of
the charge of seeking sexual dominance, but its gives one pause to read
that its actions in this case demonstrated the centrality of sexual politics
to the colonial enterprise.19
A far more serious challenge to historical enquiry is the claim by a rising
crop of apologists for empire that the colonial enterprise was necessary
to spread the benefits of human rights, democracy and modern medicine around
the globe. Setting aside the issue to how these values can (or should) be
effectively imposed by admittedly self-serving, economically exploitative
racist colonial orders, these apologists, in order to tout the benefits
of imperialism, dismiss the parallel record of human and environmental exploitation
which are now universally regretted and acknowledged to be part-and-parcel
of all colonial systems. Recently, Paul Johnson has argued that the solution
to terrorism is colonialism,20 while William Kristol of the Weekly
Standard and the features editor of the Wall Street Journal,
Max Boot, suggest that while imperialism has a bad name, it is nevertheless
a good thing.21 These writers are fully aware of the Amritsar and Dinshwai
massacres, the massive death tolls in deliberately ill-regulated colonial
sweatshops, mines, and rubber plantations, and also of the corruption of
the colonizer's own culture that attended the carrying of the "White Man's
Burden," but there is little room for these events and processes in the
apologists' conveniently narrow and one-sided drawing of the imperial balance
sheet. Of course, these apologists do have a point, but their praise of
imperialism is offered without much historical reflection or caveat emptor--
an important issue for educators. These apologists can the talk the colonialist
talk, but if their voices are heard in the corridors of power, it is not
these talking heads, but the present and rising generation of students that
will have to walk that walk.
Whether or not these students are ultimately tasked with spreading the civilization
of their choice by imperial instruments or experiencing the trauma that
is so often part of the cultural collateral damage of imperial life, they
deserve the most intellectually honest discussion of the issue an instructor
can provide, even when the instructor has already made up her or his mind
on the question. If the following discussion of instructional materials
fails to promote that aim, instructors are welcome to employ them in any
manner they see as better suited to accomplish this task.
Selected Document Analyses
and Resources
While colonialism is a familiar subject, its study is often divided according
to regional or national-colonial systems (in Africa, in Asia, French, British,
Japanese imperialism etc.) or by discipline (economic imperialism, literature,
science, etc.). Of course, this creates very rich sources for comparative
history that are of great interest, and rightly so, to world historians.
However, world history is also an interdisciplinary field that is willing
to consider the broadest spectrum of analyses. Fortunately, modern imperial
history has embraced interdisciplinary approaches and is addressing the
challenge of post-colonial studies and critical theory. The following nine
document sets suggest the richness of the sources for the study of cultural
imperialism as an element of world history. They are produced here with
introductions and text in abbreviated form where the full text is available
on-line. Following each of the document sets are questions for discussion
and related lesson plans. This article concludes with a bibliography arranged
by topic and a list of web-based primary sources. |
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Document Exercise 1: Camp Life in India by Sir Monier Monier-Williams (1850) |
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The seductive power of culture in the imperial context
is clearest in a recollection offered by Monier-William's account of an
evening spent as a visitor for dinner with the Collector, the principle
local British administrator, in an Indian forest camp in 1850. Sir Monier
Monier-Williams (1819-1899) was Professor of Sanskrit at Haileybury, the
British East India Company's school for its administrators, from 1844-1858.
He was named Boden professor of Sanskrit at Oxford in 1860. He was knighted
in 1886. The photograph of Monier-Williams (above, center) is by the British
writer Lewis Carroll (from http://international.loc.gov/intldl/carrollhtml/lcgallery.html).
He is surrounded here by photographs of typical British Indian family servants
in Darjeeling c. 1898-1902 (from http://www.geocities.com/photosofindia/peter.htm)
who represent the type of servants he encountered in India. The following
account is originally from Eva March Tappan, ed., The World's Story:
A History of the World in Story, Song and Art, Volume 2, India,
Persia, Mesopotamia, and Palestine (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914):
224-233. It was edited and posted on the World Wide Web as part of Paul
Halsall's valuable Indian History Internet Sourcebook at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/india/1850monier.html.
Also resident at that same website is an often-referenced account of Indian
society (the Parsis community) by Monier-Williams (http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/india/1870-monier-parsees.html).
However, Monier-Williams' reference to Aladdin in the close of this passage
is unique in that it offers something of a smoking gun regarding "Orientalism"
among Western writers and observers of the colonial world. |
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Camp Life in India |
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. . . if every collector is a small king, every Englishman in India is regarded
as a petty prince. Obsequious natives watch his movements, and hang upon
his words. I try to stroll about, but as I circle leisurely round the compound,
attendant satellites hover about my path. I am evidently expected to develop
wants of some kind or other in the course of my ramble . . . I hastily hide
my head within the walls of my tent. But my tenacious followers are not
to be shaken off so easily. I am conscious of being vigilantly watched through
my barrier of canvas. By way of experiment I utter the magical formula,
"Qui hai?" ["Khoi Hai?" Literally, "Who is there?" was the stock
phrase uttered by a European visitor in India upon arriving at a home not
his own in order to summon a servant; it became a descriptive term for the
British in India] and a dusky form seems to rise out of the ground as if
by magic. There he stands in an attitude of abject reverence and attention,
waiting for me to issue my commands. . . . Just at this juncture I hear
a commanding voice call out in the distance "Khana lao."["Bring
the food/meal!"] This is the collector's brief and business-like order for
dinner. I repair with relief to the drawing-room and dining-room. The collector
and his wife, beaming with hospitality, make me sit down at a well-appointed
dinner-table. I have a French menu placed before me. I eat a dinner cooked
with Parisian skill, I drink wine fit for an emperor, and am waited on by
a stately butler and half a dozen stately waiters in imposing costumes,
who move about with noiseless tread behind my chair, and anticipate every
eccentricity of my appetite. I am evidently on enchanted ground, and can
only think of Aladdin in the "Arabian Nights."22 |
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Study Questions: Why is "every Englishman"
entitled to high status? Does Sir Monier Monier-Williams question the human
environment in which he finds himself? Why or why not? How does he feel
about the service he is receiving? What would be the consequences for an
Indian servant who was not ubiquitous and ready to serve? Is such obsequiousness
unique to servants in the colonial setting, or, in other words, would a
servant of a traditional ruler have more of a buffer between those they
served or less? Why or why not? What does the use of Hindi-Urdu in the "familiar"
imperative form ("Bring food!") indicate about how language can be used
to express the dominance of the ruling elite? Monier-Williams, as a linguist,
knows of this usage and its meaning. How does he respond to it? Do you sense
any contrast between the collector's behavior towards Indians and his behavior
toward Monier-Williams, or Monier-Williams toward the collector and his
own attitude towards Indians? |
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Document Exercise 2: Living off the Country (1942) |
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Colonial settlers and officials
strove mightily to preserve their diet as a symbol of the social distance
from their subject-people. From Britain to Imperial Japan, cookbooks were
developed to assist them to replicate the cuisine of "home," as in the case
offered immediately below from a rare recipe book published in Nigeria in
1942, reprinted in Charles Allen, Plain Tales from the Dark Continent,23 of whose title only
a humorous pun was intended. The recipes offer the means for preparing 'Fish
and Chips' and other British culinary mainstays. Students might be asked
to explain the necessity for such recipes (see study questions below) or
extend the use of this resource to the examination of their socio-political
context, using as guides Mary A. Procida's "Feeding the Imperial Appetite:
Imperial Knowledge and Anglo-Indian Discourse" in the Journal of Women's
History, 15 no. 2 (Summer 2003): 123-149 and Anne L. Bower's "Romanced
by Cookbooks" Gastronomica 1 (Spring 2001): 76–79. Alternatively,
they could consult the website http: www.congocookbook.com
which has a section on historic books and recipes that offers excerpts from
the works of authors as varied as Sir Richard Burton and Chinua Achebe.
Students can be assigned to examine these or similar sources in the food
and diet section of the bibliography below for their content in identifying
the role of food in world history from colonialism to globalization. This
bibliography will also support examinations of the impact and long-term
results of colonialism on the eating habits and diets of the colonized from
Latin America to Japan.
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MISCELLANEOUS RECIPES AND HOUSE- HOLD HINTS Alkama Sponge Cake. 4 eggs, 3 ozs. Castor sugar, 4 ozs. Alkama, º teaspoon baking powder, ½ teaspoon boiling water. Beat the eggs and sugar together until very thick. Mix the baking powder with the alkama and fold lightly into the eggs and sugar. Add the boiling water slowly, turn into a tin 5 inches in diameter. Bake for about 25 minutes in a moderate oven. When the cake is cold ice it with Zaria sugar icing. Banana Chips. (A substitute for potato chips with fried fish) Peel green bananas and slice lengthways or crossways as desired. Sprinkle with pepper and salt and fry up quickly in fat or lard. Pile on a dish and serve immediately. Bean Croquettes (Kwasi). Soak native beans in cold water over night. In the morning remove from the water and grind finely in a food chopper or have a native woman grind them on her stone. Add enough water to make a stiff batter. Add finely chopped onion and salt to taste. Drop by small spoonfuls into a saucepan which is about half full of hot fat, preferably groundnut oil. Care should be taken that the oil is not too highly seasoned with pepper or the bean cakes will be too 'hot' to eat. Remove from fat when they are brown. Serve hot with some sort of tart sauce, such as "Kukuki" jam. 24 |
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Study Questions: Why would colonizing
peoples seek to replicate the recipes of "home?" What words or directions
in food preparation are stressed and why? Who would actually prepare these
meals? What would be their reaction to this effort? Yours? A "Google" standard
search of the terms "food imperialism lesson plans" identifies more than
ten pages of resources, as does a search for "food imperialism." The Food
Timeline and the Food Museum offers classrooms resources for students of
food history and heritage: http://www.foodtimeline.org/food2a.html and http://www.foodmuseum.com/.
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Document 3: Science, Medicine, Music, and the Colonizer's Fear of the Sun |
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Colonial insecurities extended well beyond dietary
concerns. Dane Kennedy of George Washington University has examined the
clothing worn by late nineteenth and early twentieth century colonial settlers
and officials. He found that British and American colonizers were obsessed
by the fear that without special clothing they would be subject to the penetrating
the rays of the tropical sun; the rays were thought to account, at least
in part, for the laziness and other bad habits of the colonized. They even
purchased "spine pads" to shield their nervous systems from these invisible
enervating forces. We are fortunate that there is an audio file available
of Noel Coward singing his own rendition of the first verse of his famous
song, "Mad Dogs and Englishmen" (1932), in which he illuminates the determination
of British rulers in Asia to get about in the tropic heat in the face of
these invisible dangers in a manner that they believed served to single
themselves out favorably from those they ruled. The audio file and the text
produced here may be found at http://www.sabrizain.demon.co.uk/malaya/coward.htm.
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Mad Dogs and Englishmen by Noel Coward
In tropical climes there are certain times of day When all the citizens retire to tear their clothes off and perspire. It's one of the rules that the greatest fools obey, Because the sun is much too sultry And one must avoid its ultry-violet ray. The natives grieve when the white men leave their huts, Because they're obviously, definitely nuts! Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun, It's such a surprise for the Eastern eyes to see, Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun. |
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Of course, it was not true
that the "natives" feared the noonday sun: neither the Guptan nor Mughal
Empires would have lasted very long, nor would the Indian peasantry have
been productive for thousands of years, if they kept to the shade at noon.
However, but they did manage their relations with their climate (farmers
took a long lunch in the fields at midday). The claim made in the song's
last line is thus an imperialist conceit with significant portent. Coward's
tongue-in-cheek lyrics draw attention to the quite serious distinctions
made by the British. They energetically refused to surrender to their environment:
it was the weak South Asian subject peoples who succumbed to it. Who then,
are the rightful masters of that world, if not the European colonizers?
Note that Coward indicates that indigenous empire builders, the Chinese
and the Japanese, share the Asian characteristic of avoiding the midday
sun, raising the question as to whether the British are the rightful masters
of all Asian empires as well. This may sound like over-stretching the point,
but Dane Kennedy is merely exposing the tip of the iceberg of the cultural
costs of the effort to sustain Western dominance paid by making no concessions
to indigenous conditions. He notes that, "In the early years of the twentieth
century, a strange new illness appeared in the colonial tropics. It
was called tropical neurasthenia." His analysis of this illness is essential
reading for anyone who wishes to understand the complexity of the burdens
borne by colonizers. For the full text of an essay based on Kennedy's research,
Google "Dane Kennedy, Diagnosing the Colonial Dilemma." What follows is
Kennedy's introduction to that essay. He argues that tropical neurasthenia
preyed: |
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Study Questions: After reading all of this paper, students may address
why Kennedy argues that one of the elements/sources of tropical neurasthenia
may have been social. They can also assess whether tropical neurasthenia
was unique to British colonials (American examples are cited) and ascertain
why Kennedy suggests such symptoms changed with the approaching end of formal
empire. Students in science as well as humanities courses will profit by
writing an essay synthesizing the findings of several recent works on imperial
exhibitions and science museums offered below, such as Peter Hoffenberg's
An Empire on Display. These studies, like Kennedy's essay, explore
the means by which the colonizers, when describing their world, often distorted
its nature and content, and science itself, to justify the continuation
of imperial rule. |
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Document Exercise 4: Picturing Empire: Photography, Painting, Gender and Race |
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| The website for the NEH-The website for the NEH-supported Women and World History project located at http://chnm.gmu.edu/wwh/wwhprimary.php features a section devoted to primary sources in world history which emphasizes the cultural content of colonial encounters. These range from Africa to Southeast Asia and from Western views of foot-binding in China to women's education in Indonesia. However, the examples range far beyond gender issues. Each source featured at this site is preceded by a short descriptive essay. | 17 | |||||||||||
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The image on the left, below, is a rendition of
a painting by T. J. Barker, "The Secret of England's Success" (1863). In
this famous painting, Queen Victoria is portrayed handing a Bible to a kneeling
African prince. The line drawing provided is offered out of respect for
copyright, but a beautiful full-color image can be obtained at http://www.humanities.uci.edu/users/vfolkenflik/VRF%20Sources/Victoria.jpg.
If for any reason this image is unavailable at that site, merely go to the
web portal of the National Portrait Gallery, London at http://www.npg.org.uk/live/index.asp.
Click on Search Collection, fill the "Sitter" search option by entering
"Queen Victoria," then hit Search. The digital image of the painting is
on the top of the second page of the search. For analysis of the image,
see http://chnm.gmu.edu/wwh/p/176.html.
The two costumed figures below on the right are from a series of paintings
by Claude Antoine Rozet, which according to the analysis offered at their
source (http://chnm.gmu.edu/wwh/p/179.html)
marks the beginning of racial taxonomy in France's newly conquered territory
in Algeria. |
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Study Questions: The Women in World History site directs students
to the Barker painting above left and asks them to imagine what it might
suggest to someone living in Victorian Britain about the British Empire
and discuss whether it was possible for a Victorian to imagine switching
the position of the two central figures, in other words, Queen Victoria
kneeling to an African chief? The site informs students that, despite the
British association of empire with masculinity, the Queen was a familiar
source of imperial symbolism. Why would this be so? How, in this picture,
is British masculinity inserted (her husband looks on, other male advisers
are present and she is shown possessor of holder of the Crown, etc). How
is the inferiority of the African visually produced in posture and costume?
The host site for the illustrations of Claude Antoine Rozet directs students
to the images of racial taxonomy (as above right) and asks them to trace
how differences in appearances were interpreted by the French as reflecting
class and/or racial difference and above all rendering them inferior for
their collective "exotic" non-European characteristics. Students of patterns
of authority, from gender to race, can access the works at this site and
in the bibliography that follows as support for projects focusing on perceptions
of women's roles and the cult of colonial masculinity. They can also examine
the differences in class, education and experience of those women who opposed
or participated in traditional gender roles in the colonial setting and/or
their relations with the women among the colonial population. |
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Document Exercise 5: Responding to "Uncivilized" Behavior: Kaiser Wilhelm II and Boxer Rebellion |
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| American, European and Japanese imperialists often used any barbarity that accompanied indigenous resistance to colonialism as proof of the "uncivilized" nature of the colonized. In this document, Kaiser Wilhelm II employs the most "lurid terms" in justifying a military response to the barbarities of the Boxer rebellion, during which the German envoy to China was killed, when giving a speech to the men of a departing German punitive expedition at the seaport at Bremerhaven on July 2, 1900. It was such speech that the Indian nationalist and poet Rabindranath Tagore described when he wrote, "To justify their own spilling of ink, they spell the day as night."25 The texts below are edited and made available at http://www2.h-et.msu.edu/~gtext/kaiserreich/china.html. It introduces three related texts, the second in two versions. This selection is from the second verbatim account of the Kaiser's speech; the site also offers the sanitized official account that offers its own glimpse into the colonial mindset. The accompanying supporting photographs are available along with many others for this application at http://www.deutsche-schutzgebiete.de/boxeraufstand_zusammenfassung.htm. They are, clockwise from left: a poster of "The War in China;" an image of the Kaiser receiving the submission of a Chinese envoy, Prince Chun; and German and Japanese imperial troops displaying Boxer heads as war trophies: note that this photograph links Japanese with German imperial forces. | 20 | |||||||||||
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| Kaiser Wilhelm's Speech, July 2, 1900 |
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| The task which I am sending you out to do is a great one. You must see that a serious injustice is expiated. In this case the Chinese have dared to overturn a thousand year old international law and to make a mockery of the sanctity of the diplomat and the right of hospitality. The case is unprecedented in world history--and this from a people proud of its ancient culture! | 23 | |||||||||||
| But you can see from this what a culture not based on Christianity comes to. Every heathen culture, no matter how beautiful or august, will come to nought at the first catastrophe! | 24 | |||||||||||
| ...When you come upon the enemy, smite him. Pardon will not be given. Prisoners will not be taken. Whoever falls into your hands is forfeit. Once, a thousand years ago, the Huns under their King Attila made a name for themselves, one still potent in legend and tradition [The Kaiser's allusion to Attila was seized upon by enemy propagandists during World War I. In popular consciousness the Germans and the barbaric "Huns" became one]. May you in this way make the name German remembered in China for a thousand years so that no Chinaman will ever again dare to even squint at a German! | ||||||||||||
| You will have to fight a force superior in numbers. But, as our military history demonstrates, we are accustomed to this . . . . Gather new laurels for your [regimental] flags. The blessings of the Lord go with you and your prayers. An entire nation accompanies you on all your paths. My best wishes to you for the fortune of your arms....And may God's blessing attach itself to your banner and bring a blessing upon this war so that Christianity may survive in that land and such sad events never reoccur. To this end stand by your oath. And now, a prosperous voyage! Adieu, comrades! | ||||||||||||
Study Questions: How are the Chinese portrayed in these speeches? Is the reason for their actions discussed? What alone matters? What nationalistic images are raised to inspire the troops? How is Christianity employed? How are these related, i.e. how Christian is Germany's "place in the sun?" In the accompanying photographs, how are European and Chinese military technologies represented? How do these photographs conjoin German and Japanese imperialism? Students as well as teachers may benefit from examining the lesson plan directing students to compare Japanese and European colonialism on the web at www.outreachworld.org/Files/asia/swangerK-jpn.pdf. |
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Document Exercise 6: Tying Burmese Days to Heart of Darkness |
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| George Orwell's novel Burmese Days (1936) drawn from his service as a minor police official in Burma, and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, a fictionalized meditation on Conrad's experiences in Africa, are familiar to most students of colonialism. However, since world historians seek to explore historical processes across regions, readings that tie these works together are more valuable than a reading drawn from one or the other. Students can be directed first to focus on an essay written in 1934 entitled "Shooting an Elephant," offered at http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/887/ and also at the George Orwell homepage at http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/index.cgi/work/essays/elephant.html, from which the above journalist's I.D. picture is also drawn: | ||||||||||||
George
Orwell: Shooting A Elephant
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Study Questions: Orwell realized this story gave him "a glimpse of the real nature of imperialism." What was it that Orwell found and revealed in his account? British Indian officials were warned "never to show the feather," or indecision, in front of the "natives." What is the cost of this psychological element of colonial administration? Orwell refers to the 'White Man" in the East. What undercurrent of gender is revealed by this story? Do these themes appear in Heart of Darkness? |
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Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness |
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| Orwell's "man on the spot" view of colonialism can be usefully paired with the opening pages of Joseph Conrad's most famous work, which are offered at http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/world_civ_reader_2/Conrad.html (the picture of Conrad, above left, is drawn from another site useful for its lesson plan: http://school.discovery.com/lessonplans/programs/heartofdarkness/): | ||||||||||||
| I left in a French steamer, and she called in every blamed port they have out there, for, as far as I could see, the sole purpose of landing soldiers and custom-house officers. I watched the coast. Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you-- smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, Come and find out. This one was almost featureless, as if still in the making, with an aspect of monotonous grimness. The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be almost black, fringed with white surf, ran straight, like a ruled line, far, far away along a blue sea whose glitter was blurred by a creeping mist. The sun was fierce, the land seemed to glisten and drip with steam. Here and there grayish-whitish specks showed up clustered inside the white surf, with a flag flying above them perhaps. Settlements some centuries old, and still no bigger than pinheads on the untouched expanse of their background. We pounded along, stopped, landed soldiers; went on, landed custom-house clerks to levy toll in what looked like a God-forsaken wilderness, with a tin shed and a flagpole lost in it; landed more soldiers--to take care of the custom-house clerks, presumably. Some, I heard, got drowned in the surf; but whether they did or not, nobody seemed particularly to care. They were just flung out there, and on we went. Every day the coast looked the same, as though we had not moved; but we passed various places--trading places--with names like Gran' Bassam, Little Popo; names that seemed to belong to some sordid farce acted in front of a sinister back-cloth. The idleness of a passenger, my isolation amongst all these men with whom I had no point of contact, the oily and languid sea, the uniform somberness of the coast, seemed to keep me away from the truth of things, within the toil of a mournful and senseless delusion. The voice of the surf heard now and then was a positive pleasure, like the speech of a brother. It was something natural, that had its reason, that had a meaning. Now and then a boat from the shore gave one a momentary contact with reality. It was paddled by black fellows. You could see from afar the white of their eyeballs glistening. They shouted, sang; their bodies streamed with perspiration; they had faces like grotesque masks--these chaps; but they had bone, muscle, a wild vitality, an intense energy of movement, that was as natural and true as the surf along their coast. They wanted no excuse for being there. They were a great comfort to look at. For a time I would feel I belonged still to a world of straightforward facts; but the feeling would not last long. Something would turn up to scare it away. Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn't even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign dropped limp like a rag; the muzzles of the long six-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull; the greasy, slimy swell swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying her thin masts. In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech--and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives--he called them enemies!--hidden out of sight somewhere. | ||||||||||||
| We gave her her letters (I heard the men in that lonely ship were dying of fever at the rate of three a day) and went on. We called at some more places with farcical names, where the merry dance of death and trade goes on in a still and earthy atmosphere as of an overheated catacomb; all along the formless coast bordered by dangerous surf, as if Nature herself had tried to ward off intruders; in and out of rivers, streams of death in life, whose banks were rotting into mud, whose waters, thickened into slime, invaded the contorted mangroves that seemed to writhe at us in the extremity of an impotent despair. Nowhere did we stop long enough to get a particularized impression, but the general sense of vague and oppressive wonder grew upon me. It was like a weary pilgrimage amongst hints for nightmares. "It was upward of thirty days before I saw the mouth of the big river. We anchored off the seat of the government. But my work would not begin till some two hundred miles farther on. So as soon as I could I made a start for a place thirty miles higher up. | ||||||||||||
| I had my passage on a little sea-going steamer. Her captain was a Swede, and knowing me for a seaman, invited me on the bridge. He was a young man, lean, fair, and morose, with lanky hair and a shuffling gait. As we left the miserable little wharf, he tossed his head contemptuously at the shore. 'Been living there?' he asked. I said, 'Yes.' 'Fine lot these government chaps--are they not?' he went on, speaking English with great precision and considerable bitterness. 'It is funny what some people will do for a few francs a month. I wonder what becomes of that kind when it goes up country?' I said to him I expected to see that soon. 'So-o-o!' he exclaimed. He shuffled athwart, keeping one eye ahead vigilantly. 'Don't be too sure,' he continued. 'The other day I took up a man who hanged himself on the road. He was a Swede, too.' 'Hanged himself! Why, in God's name?' I cried. He kept on looking out watchfully. 'Who knows? The sun too much for him, or the country perhaps.' | ||||||||||||
| At last we opened a reach. A rocky cliff appeared, mounds of turned-up earth by the shore, houses on a hill, others with iron roofs, amongst a waste of excavations, or hanging to the declivity. A continuous noise of the rapids above hovered over this scene of inhabited devastation. A lot of people, mostly black and naked, moved about like ants. A jetty projected into the river. A blinding sunlight drowned all this at times in a sudden recrudescence of glare. 'There's your Company's station,' said the Swede, pointing to three wooden barrack-like structures on the rocky slope. 'I will send your things up. Four boxes did you say? So. Farewell.' "I came upon a boiler wallowing in the grass, then found a path leading up the hill. It turned aside for the boulders, and also for an undersized railway-truck lying there on its back with its wheels in the air. One was off. The thing looked as dead as the carcass of some animal. I came upon more pieces of decaying machinery, a stack of rusty rails. To the left a clump of trees made a shady spot, where dark things seemed to stir feebly. I blinked, the path was steep. A horn tooted to the right, and I saw the black people run. A heavy and dull detonation shook the ground, a puff of smoke came out of the cliff, and that was all. No change appeared on the face of the rock. They were building a railway. The cliff was not in the way or anything; but this objectless blasting was all the work going on. | ||||||||||||
| A slight clinking behind me made me turn my head. Six black men advanced in a file, toiling up the path. They walked erect and slow, balancing small baskets full of earth on their heads, and the clink kept time with their footsteps. Black rags were wound round their loins, and the short ends behind waggled to and fro like tails. I could see every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope; each had an iron collar on his neck, and all were connected together with a chain whose bights swung between them, rhythmically clinking. Another report from the cliff made me think suddenly of that ship of war I had seen firing into a continent. It was the same kind of ominous voice; but these men could by no stretch of imagination be called enemies. They were called criminals, and the outraged law, like the bursting shells had come to them, an insoluble mystery from the sea. All their meager breasts panted together, the violently dilated nostrils quivered, the eyes stared stonily up-hill. They passed me within six inches, without a glance, with that complete, deathlike indifference of unhappy savages. Behind this raw matter one of the reclaimed, the product of the new forces at work, strolled despondently, carrying a rifle by its middle. He had a uniform jacket with one button off, and seeing a white man on the path, hoisted his weapon to his shoulder with alacrity. This was simple prudence, white men being so much alike at a distance that he could not tell who I might be. He was speedily reassured, and with a large, white, rascally grin, and a glance at his charge, seemed to take me into partnership in his exalted trust. After all, I was also a part of the great cause of these high and just proceedings. | ||||||||||||
| Instead of going up, I turned and descended to the left. My idea was to let that chain-gang get out of sight before I climbed the hill. You know I am not particularly tender; I've had to strike and to fend off. I've had to resist and to attack sometimes--that's the only way of resisting--without counting the exact cost, according to the demands of such sort of life as I had blundered into. I've seen the devil of violence, and the devil of greed, and the devil of hot desire; but, by all the stars! these were strong, lusty, red-eyed devils, that swayed and drove men--men, I tell you. But as I stood on this hillside, I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly. How insidious he could be, too, I was only to find out several months later and a thousand miles farther. For a moment I stood appalled, as though by a warning. Finally I descended the hill, obliquely, towards the trees I had seen. | ||||||||||||
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Study Questions: Conrad and Orwell The introduction to this reading suggests that the novel conceals levels of meaning that place Africans in a poor light as a people. Others suggest the opposite, that what Conrad is exploring is the horror inherent in the domination of men by any other men, and how that horror was made known to him "on the ground" in Africa, not as a matter of fiction, but as a matter of his own encounter with the evil itself while he himself was in Africa. How does he regard the African seamen he sees (he is himself a seaman)? How does he regard the French naval bombardment he witnesses and what does he deduce from the "criminals" he sees escorted by an African in a uniform? Do these incidents suggest Conrad has any sympathy with Africans? After witnessing these sights (and on hearing about the Swede who committed suicide), he feels forewarned about what is to come, but he goes on. Why? How would Orwell, in the reading above, provide something like an answer? Bonus question: What in Orwell and Conrad is illuminated in two scenes from Francis Ford Coppola's film, Apocalypse Now (1979), inspired by Conrad's work, where the American operative, Captain Willard (played by Martin Sheen), both arrives and, later, as he leaves the Cham temple complex having killed Colonel Kurzt (for another analysis of the connection, see the essay by James Rennie at http://www.film.queensu.ca/Critical/Rennie.html, from which the photograph of Willard's boat is derived). Students in courses in history and literature can explore the analyses/case studies of travel writing, as well as general literature, provided in this essay's bibliography (see below) by searching for content relating to how cultural perceptions and habits affect perceptions of difference between the ruler and the ruled in colonial societies. Local library holdings of colonial diaries, travelogues and texts can be the venue for a scavenger hunt for colonial literary images similar to those found above and analyzed in course papers or class presentations using the bibliography provided below. |
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| Students can relate Conrad to Rudyard Kipling through John A. McClure's Kipling and Conrad: the Colonial Fiction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981) and Orwell to Kipling (see E. Baneth-Nouailhetas, "George Orwell and the 'White Man's Burden'', Commonwealth, 17-1 (1994), 32-390. Rudyard Kipling's poetry and his novel Kim (1901) and E. M. Forster's A Passage to India (1924) have been thoroughly deconstructed (again, see the bibliography below). These examinations may be used as models for student analysis of these works. | ||||||||||||
| The National Endowment for the Humanities Edsitement webpages permit comparative study of Conrad, Orwell and Kipling alongside Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka at http://edsitement.neh.gov/view_lesson_plan.asp?id=382. | ||||||||||||
Document Exercise 7: Reversing the Imperial Gaze—Connecting Orwell and Conrad with Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman (1975) |
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| Instructors have long used the seminal works of Conrad and Orwell as well as Rudyard Kipling (see bibliography below) to illuminate imperial values. Excerpts and lesson plans for these works abound (see also below). However, these works were authored by Europeans. Several works by the colonized people permit the reversing of the imperial gaze and are equally well-supported by instructional aids. These works include Frederick Oyono's The Old Man and the Medal (1970) in which an African is given a decoration and then abandoned by colonial society, and Chinua Achebe's better- known Things Fall Apart (1958), the story of the coming of colonialism to a West African community (for teaching guides see http://worldhistoryconnected.press.uiuc.edu/2.1/mgilbert.html). However, Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman (1975) is a worthy addition to the cannon. This Noble Prize-winning author offers a much more intimate portrait of colonial subjection in a play in which Yoruban magical realism blends with traditional European-style narrative. It is also well-supported by teacher and student study guides,26 one of which offers a comparative approach. It is possible to examine cultural colonialism in both Conrad and Soyinka via Rachel Teisch's on-line article "Colonialism in Soyinka and Conrad" on-line at http://www.scholars.nus.edu.sg/landow/ostost/soyinka/soyinka2.html. | ||||||||||||
| There are many editions of Death and the King's Horseman in print, including one with both text and textual criticism published by W. W. Norton (New York), edited by Simon Gikandi (2002). A short, personal reaction to the play by Ayanna Gillian, which explores what she sees as the play's capacity for psychological decolonization and the reshaping of her ancestors as "initiators" of history, not merely as "victims," is offered at http://www.africaspeaks.com/articles/2004/2305.html. It includes this excerpt from the play, wherein the King's Horseman lives his last hours on earth: | ||||||||||||
| "PRAISE SINGER: "In their time the great wars came and went, the little wars came and went; the white slavers came and went, they took away the heart of our race; they bore away the mind and muscle of our race. The city fell and was rebuilt, the city fell and our people trudged through mountain and forest to found a new home but- Elesin Oba do you hear me? | ||||||||||||
| ELESIN: I hear your voice Olohun-iyo | ||||||||||||
| PRAISE SINGER: Our world was never wrenched from its true course. There is only one home to the life of a river mussel; there is only one home to the life of a tortoise; there is only one shell to the soul of a man; there is only one world to the spirit of our race. If that world leaves its course and smashes on boulders of the great void, whose world will give us shelter?" | ||||||||||||
| Questions for Study: How has the King's Horseman's soul been harmed by his association with the colonial power? What led to his conflict with them? Why did the colonizers act in manner which promoted conflict? How are those motivations connected to those described in Orwell and Conrad? Has the Yoruban world been destroyed? As mentioned above, the National Endowment for the Humanities Edsitement webpages encourage comparative study of Conrad, Orwell and Kipling alongside Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. See http://edsitement.neh.gov/view_lesson_plan.asp?id=382 (scroll to bottom of the page). | ||||||||||||
Document Exercise 8: American Anti-Imperialism: The White Man's Burden Rejected |
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| Jim Zwick's "Anti-Imperialism in the United States, 1898-1935" is an invaluable website (http://www.boondocksnet.com/ai/index.html) that offers historical background as well as selections from literature, cartoons, essays, political platforms and biographies related to the subject. These include a copy of, and examinations of, the anti-imperialist attack on Kipling's famous poem on race and empire by a large number of contemporary American men and women who were angered at the imperialist content of the poem (see http://www.boondocksnet.com/kipling/. One example is William Jennings Bryan's "The White Man's Burden," an address at the Independence Day Banquet of the American Society of London, July 4, 1906, in The Public vol. 9 (July 14, 1906): | ||||||||||||
| If it is legitimate to "seek another's profit" and "to work another's gain," how can this service best be rendered? This has been the disputed point. Individuals and nations have differed less about the purpose to be accomplished than about the methods to be employed. Persecutions have been carried on avowedly for the benefit of the persecuted, wars been waged for the alleged improvement of those attacked, and still more frequently philanthropy has been adulterated with selfish interest. If the superior nations have a mission, it is not to wound but to heal -- not to cast down but to lift up; and the means must be an example -- a far more powerful and enduring means than violence. Example may be likened to the sun whose genial rays constantly coax the buried seed into life and clothe the earth, first with verdure and afterward with ripened grain, while violence is the occasional tempest which can ruin but cannot give life. | ||||||||||||
| Can we doubt the efficacy of example, in the light of history? There has been great increase in education during the last century and the school houses have not been opened by the bayonet. They owe their existence largely to the moral influence which neighboring nations exert upon each other. And the spread of popular government during the same period, how rapid! Constitution after constitution has been adopted and limitation after limitation has been placed upon arbitrary power until Russia, yielding to public opinion, establishes a legislative body and China sends commissioners abroad with a view to inviting the people to share the responsibilities of government. | ||||||||||||
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Questions for Further Study: Choose five of the many American anti-imperialist responses such as that provided above at the Boondocks site and compose an essay identifying the reasons they choose to resist Kipling's call for America to take up the burdens of imperial leadership. For example, why does William Jennings Brian believe that the colonial enterprise is unnecessary to achieve the spread of democracy and constitutional government? American history classes might employ the bibliography that follows to compare the cultures of imperialism in the U. S. and another imperial nation (or nations), focusing on the sources of the colonizers cultural outlook on race, class, gender etc. and how it accords or is oppose by the culture of the colonized. The attitudes of both towards women or the natural environment, for example, can be explored. The lesson plan on American imperialism in the Philippines includes links to anti-imperialist speeches. See http://www.glencoe.com/sec/socialstudies/ushistory/tav2003/content.php4/381/5. |
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Document Exercise 9: Daily Life on Colonial Plantations |
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| Three works are often employed to lend insight into the conditions on colonial plantations: three by Europeans and one by a Vietnamese: Multatuli (the pen name of Eduard Douwes Dekker), author of Max Havelaar or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company (a free e-book at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/11024); Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), Edward Morel, a British journalist who wrote Red Rubber: The Story of the Rubber Trade Flourishing on the Congo in the Year of Grace 1906 (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1906), his earlier (1903) The Black Man's Burden (excerpted at http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1903blackburden.html), and Tran Tu Binh's The Red Earth: A Vietnamese Memoir of Life on a Colonial Rubber Plantation (Athens. OH: Ohio University Center for International Studies Center, 1985). While valuable and accessible and visceral, instructors might wish to consider a source which is more suitable to younger students: Helen R. Nagtalon-Miller's three-page essay, "The Filipino Plantation Community in Hawaii: Experience of a Second Generation Filipina," featured in The Age of Discovery_ Impact on Philippine Culture and Society edited by Belinda A. Aquino and Dean T. Alegado, (Honolulu: The Center for Philippine Studies, University of Hawaii, Manoa, 2nd ed.,1992): 30-33. The essay takes the reader inside the Filipino plantation community in Hawaii and is especially valuable as it illuminates the parallel experiences of colonial Filipino and migrant Japanese workers as well as the impact of plantation life on Filipino diet and language. It also extends the Filipino plantation-worker experience in post-colonial American society. | ||||||||||||
| This work is no longer obtainable from its publisher, the Center for Philippine Studies, School of Asian, Hawaiian and Pacific Studies, University of Hawaii, Manoa, though copies exist at the Center and were distributed to libraries and may be obtainable through interlibrary loan. In view of this limited availability, the Center for Philippine Center in a gracious act of bayanihan ('Helping each other") has granted permission for the article to be reprinted here, to be used for educational purposes only. It has been changed only minutely to suit the present format. | ||||||||||||
The Filipino Plantation Community in Hawaii: Experiences of a Second-Generation Filipina Helen R. Nagtalon-Miller
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| The age of discovery had an especially devastating effect on the people of the Philippines. From the Western point of view the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century began a process of leading the Philippines into the path of Western culture. From the point of view of the Filipino people, in retrospect, the Spanish arrival marked the beginning of the mixture of indigenous cultures that had existed for several centuries with that of European culture. | ||||||||||||
| Filipino culture was a blend of what had existed in 1521 overlaid with the impact of more than three centuries of Spanish intrusion and later of several decades of American occupation. The earliest Filipino immigrants to Hawaii in 1906 had only a few years of the American experience, but by the time the largest numbers began to arrive after World War I, a generation of Filipinos had been influenced by the "Little Brown Brother" colonial philosophy of the American expansionists. | ||||||||||||
| The Filipinos who came to work on the sugar plantation of Hawaii were thus the product of this fusing of Malay, Spanish and American cultures. In reality, however, Filipinos (like most colonized or multicultural people) are not always aware of their culture, or conscious about which culture is which. | ||||||||||||
| The Hawaii sugar planters attempted to ensure that those they recruited were agricultural laborers who would be satisfied to remain on the plantations to fulfill their contracts. The planters were usually successful in recruiting laborers, although many accounts are told of better educated recruits successfully passing themselves off as farm laborers. | ||||||||||||
| One such person was my father. He was a graduate of Ilocos Norte High School and the Provincial Normal School, and was more interested in pursuits of the mind than in the farming and managing of his family's land. Determined to leave the Philippines without telling his family (he knew that his family would not give him their blessing if he told them of his intentions), he spent several weeks before arriving at the recruiting agent's office roughing up his palms with rocks in order to be able to show calloused hands and succeed in being recruited. This may not have happen too often, and most of those education and fewer employment possibilities in their homeland. | ||||||||||||
| When my father was recruited he left the Philippines alone and went to a plantation on Kauai where he had been assigned as a laborer. After a year, he asked to be transferred to Oahu Sugar Company in Waipahu on the island of Oahu, where he was to be employed as the company's office assistant payroll and sugar cane weight clerk. He married my mother, whose high education in the Philippines was interrupted when she left for Hawaii with her father, mother, and two younger brothers. Her father had been recruited to be the chief cook and manager of the company's boarding house where my father was employed shortly after being transferred from his laborer's job on Kauai to Oahu. | ||||||||||||
| In Hawaii there was a noteworthy difference between the Filipino immigrant workers and the Japanese who arrived earlier. The Filipinos came from a land that had been colonized by the Americans after more that three centuries of Spanish rule. The Japanese, on the other hand, came from a country which was already a world power and a relatively homogenous society. Because of Japan's position among world powers it could try to bring pressure on the United States, and often did, when there were complaints of worker mistreatment. (This did not mean that the intervention of the Japanese government on behalf of its citizens in Hawaii were always successful.) The Filipinos had no such recourse because the Philippines before independence in 1946 was a colony of the United States. | ||||||||||||
| Considering the much larger number of males compared with the females, it is not surprising that Filipinos in Hawaii lived two quite different lifestyles. The largest group consisted of single men who lived in dormitory-style housing. In the early days the plantations provided boarding facilities for single Filipino laborers in structures called "clubhouses." They often were comprised of a kitchen, a large dinning room, a social hall, and a recreation hall. | ||||||||||||
| Only a small minority of Filipinos lived in single family units. However, these units did not exist in isolation of nuclear and extended families, and frequently of fictive families (families whose members are not related by blood). | ||||||||||||
| Often single males who were related to one or another of family members, or were just friends, would share living quarters, expenses and household chores. Many single males would be asked to become godfathers to the family's children, thus becoming honorary fathers to those children. There were at least two relatives living with our family. They tended the vegetable garden, help with the cooking and housework, and were treated and respected as members of the family. | ||||||||||||
| In older plantation homes, where the plantation did not object to the tenants adding or changing the design of the house, whenever a relative arrived, new rooms were added. | ||||||||||||
| After 1965, when a new wave of Filipino immigrants came and plantation families were buying their own lots and homes (fee simple), families began rebuilding their homes to resemble the two-story Spanish-type architecture of the Philippines. | ||||||||||||
| The low wages paid sugar workers, lower for Filipinos than for other groups in the early years, required ingenuity in order to survive. It was common for workers to grow vegetables in their gardens and to share their harvest with neighbors and friends. Where land was not available near their living quarters, they would cultivate their vegetables in unused plots of land near the sugar cane fields. | ||||||||||||
| A group of neighbors and relatives shared large quantities of food: for example, a large can of bagoong (Filipino fish sauce) would be brought cooperatively and shared by members of the group. | ||||||||||||
| A pig would be slaughtered and butchered in someone's backyard and the meat cuts divided among five to ten families, depending on the size of the pig. The organizing family would get such delicacies as the head, tail, and the innards. | ||||||||||||
| Some bachelors (2 to 4 individuals) would buy a automobile together and share its use. The workers helped each other to buy household appliances, equipment, tools, or large purchases requiring loans. Lending money to each other without written contracts was common. | ||||||||||||
| Since a high percentage of laborers were Ilokano, their foods were vegetables cooked with dried shrimp or fish and slices of pork or chicken. In contrast, our Tagalog friends and neighbors used more tomato sauces, potatoes, peas and garbanzos in their cooking. Gradually, each group began cooking each other's dishes. | ||||||||||||
| The favorite foods were pinakbet (the Ilokano vegetable stew resembling the French ratatouille but with bagoong and fish, shrimp, pork, or pork rinds, and with very little broth), and dinengdeng (sliced eggplant, long green beans, bitter melon, okra, and lima beans cooked in broth consisting of bagoong, fresh tomatoes and dried shrimp). | ||||||||||||
| Conditions peculiar to Hawaii meant that these dishes underwent changes. Less bagoong was used while more pork and tomatoes were included in the recipes. In the U.S. mainland even greater changes were necessary. The pinakbet cooked by the Mexican wife of my father's cousin did not look at all like pinakbet to me because of the changes she had made to make since basic ingredients were not available, or she felt that bagoong had too strong a flavor. | ||||||||||||
| The Filipino tradition of bayanihan (helping each other) was a common practice among all groups on the plantation. The laborers helped each other build chicken houses garages, play-rooms or screened work rooms. For weddings and baptismal parties the relatives, neighbors and friends helped with the preparations of the lunch or dinner, which included kankanen (sweets made of sticky rice, sugar, and coconut milk). On the plantations, probably due to the scarcity of women, the men did the large-scale cooking; the women made the rice cakes. Families often took care of the orphaned children of their friends with little or no monetary help, with just the satisfaction of a mutual debt of gratitude in mind. | ||||||||||||
| A majority of the Filipino immigrants were Catholic. A much smaller number were Methodists and Congregationalists who had become Protestants through the work of the Boards of Mission of those denominations in the Philippines and Hawaii. Those denominations established churches on the plantations where services were held in the language of the members. The sugar planters supported the work of those churches by constructing buildings for the Protestant Churches on almost every plantation. | ||||||||||||
| Both Catholics and Protestants practiced rituals that were not entirely Catholic or Protestant, but contained elements of animism. The atang (offering), food for deceased relatives, was common on household shrines; it was a common practice to go to the beach after a funeral service to immerse oneself. My mother, despite being dyed-in-the-wool Congregational Protestant, would always say upon returning home from any outing "Adda kamin," ("We are back"), just to inform the house spirits that the family members have returned home. | ||||||||||||
| At all parties, large of small, participants who could play a musical instrument, dance or sing, were asked to perform. It was considered ungracious not to perform when asked to do so. Children who could perform or those who were taking music and/or dance lessons were expected to perform for their elders and for guests. At out family parties, my parents were always asked to sing duets. Usually they sang Ilokano songs that were popular in their youth. Even our family parties were formally organized with a designated master of ceremonies and a formalized program featuring speeches and testimonies. | ||||||||||||
| Filipinos of the plantations would use the language of their native regions when among speakers of the same language. It was common for parents to use their native language with their children even the children responded in English. My parents spoke English fluently, but they spoke Ilokano to each other and to me and my sister. Even though we answered in English, they continued to speak to use in Ilokano. | ||||||||||||
A special vocabulary developed from the Filipino experience on the plantation and spread to other groups. It included expressions such as: 1. Bulakbol (lazy, probably from "blackballed," that is, someone blackballed by the plantation and who, therefore, could not work, even if through no fault of his own, was regarded as a ne'er-do'well). 2. Salamabit (son-of-a-bitch) and Salamagan (son-of-a-gun), expressions used in place of Filipino swear words when resorting to Hawaiian English Creole (pidgin). 3. Sabidong (poison) Gang, a term used on the plantation to refer to a work group assigned to spray chemicals to eradicate weeds in the cane fields. 4. Manong, Manang (Ilokano terms of respect for older brother/sister, but also used for other older people usually of the same generation of one's older siblings); Tata, Nana, (terms for father/mother, but also used for older people of one's parents generation). They were often used derogatorily or incorrectly by members of other groups. 5. Booli-booli (the way many Filipino laborers in the early plantation era pronounced "benevolent" when referring to benevolent societies which provided their members with financial help). Booli-booli often had a bad connotation because some of these aid societies did not fulfill their obligations to the laborers who had invested most of their savings. 6. In speaking English the traditional Ilokano honorifics of Manong and Manang, Tata and Nana were not usually used. They were replaced by Mr. And Mrs. My mother-in-law, who was of Anglo-Saxon background, could not understand why my mother insisted on calling her "Mrs. Miller" even after they had known each other for a number of years. |
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| Unlike many American children, Filipino children were not paid to do chores around the house. Money which they earned was given to their mothers. The mothers in turn gave the children what was needed for daily school or other expenses. Children were taught to help educate their younger siblings and were not expected to say to their parents, "You owe me $5 for yesterday's grocery shopping," or "for my having cleaned the house." | ||||||||||||
| Filipino parents commonly told their children they were not only American but also Filipino. However, since the children attended American schools and moreover the radio and newspapers were in English, they often had difficulty knowing to which group they belonged. Many second-generation Filipinos born and raised on the plantations found protection from ethnic slurs by identifying themselves as Spanish or Chinese. Children often were required by their parents to wear Filipino costumes during community celebrations, but as they approached their teens, refused to do so for far of being teased manong, buk-buk, or bayaw, all terms of derision. | ||||||||||||
| Important events in Philippine history were marked by major community celebrations, the most important of which were the observations of the birth and death of the Filipino patriot, Dr. Jose Rizal, and the Philippine Commonwealth Day. On such occasions members of the Filipino community wore Filipino dresses and Barong Tagalog (men's embroidered native shirt). These events were marked with the recitation of poems and speeches in Ilokano, Tagalog, or Visayan, folk dancing and singing. | ||||||||||||
| The Filipinos who came to Hawaii to work on the sugar plantations survived because, like other groups that came before them, they drew from those aspects of their culture that enabled them to continue to adapt. This, in turn, helped them to emerge gradually as a distinct and important group whose languages, history, religion, food, customs, and music have made an impact on the social, economic, and political institutions of American society. | ||||||||||||
Study Questions: What type of Filipinos did plantations wish to recruit? Why did they seek these types of workers? What problems do Filipino plantation workers face in adjusting to plantation life in Hawaii in terms of housing and other cultural issues, such as the prevalence of single men? How did housing styles change over time? Demonstrate how plantation life lead to a mixing of cultures not found to such a degree in the Philippines? What benefits could the Japanese plantation workers enjoy that Filipino workers might not? Why the disparity? How does plantation life affect the language of the plantation workers and their diet? What Filipino family traditions were different from that of American society? What impact did plantation life have on the indigenous beliefs of the workers? What kind of traditions survived? Provide an example of cultural survival i. e, in religious belief and social-political celebrations. What kind of traditions suffered as the younger generation matured? Why would they wish not to seem so Filipino? Students can compare everyday life of multicultural plantation communities in Hawaii and elsewhere at sites such as: |
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Students can compare everyday life of multicultural plantation communities in Hawaii and elsewhere at sites such as: http://library.thinkquest.org/J003466/index.html; http://opmanong.ssc.hawaii.edu/filipino/plantation.html http://www.hawaiimuseums.org/mc/isoahu_hplantation.htm http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/54/132.html |
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Bibliography: Imperialism and Culture, 1860-1960. |
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| The following titles, arranged topically, have largely been chosen for their accessibility and utility for student analysis. Though sufficient sources are grouped to support student research on a variety of topics, the list is not comprehensive. An asterisk denotes works that are both widely used in courses and accessible to younger students; academic journal articles have been included that focus on case studies or encapsulate or illustrate the findings of much larger and more demanding works less suitable for that audience. | ||||||||||||
Exemplary works: For a general introduction to colonialism and culture, see J. Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism: a Critical Introduction (London: Pinter, 1991) and Nicholas B. Dirks, ed. Colonialism and Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992.). Dirk's 25-page introduction to the subject work is a useful place to begin. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston, Grove Press, 1967) is the most accessible of any work on the subject. Other means of getting started are: Mark Bradley, Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Post-Colonial Vietnam, 1919-1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2000. Cooper, Frederick & Ann L. Stoler, eds. Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1997. Curtin, Philip D. The Image of Africa Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975. Hoffenberg, Peter. An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Inden, Ronald. Imagining India. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. Nandi, Ashis. The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism. Delhi: Oxford University Press. 1983. Strobel, Margaret. European Women and the Second British Empire. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991. |
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Art, Architecture and Visuality
Robert, Andrew ed. Photographs as Sources for African History: Papers Presented at a Workshop Held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, May 12-13, 1988. London: SOAS, 1988. _____."Review Article: Photographs and African History," Journal of African History 29 (1988): 301-11. Chowdhry, Prem. Colonial India and the Making of Empire Cinema: Image, Ideology and Identity. New Delhi: Vistaar Publications, 2001.Guha-Thakurta, Tapati. The Making of a New `Indian' Art. Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, c. 1850-1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Hanson, Allan and Louise, eds. Art and Identity in Oceania. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990.Irbouh, Hamid. Art in the Service of Colonialism: French Art Education in Morocco. 1912-1956. New York: Palgrave, 2005. Landau, Paul S. and Deborah D. Kaspin eds. Images and Empires: Visuality in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. _____."With Camera and Gun in South Africa: Constructing the Image of Bushmen, ca. 1880-1940," in Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of Bushmen. Pippa Skotnes ed. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 1996: 129-41. | ||||||||||||
