• Imaging American Empire in the Philippines: Political Cartoons of the Philippines and America during the American Period

Carlo Tuason, University of Southern California

 

 

• Description: Historically and socially, political cartoons have functioned as means of political ideological dissemination and political signaling.  This is certainly the case for those produced by both America and the Philippines, respectively, throughout the American Period (1898-1946) of the Philippines. Centering primarily around key events such as the Philippine-American War, the subsequent annexation of the Philippines by the United States, involvement in World Wars, and the possibility of Philippine independence, the political cartoons produced in this period highlight the ever-changing and tenuous relationship between the island archipelago and the imperialist power. As the relationship between the two states evolved, so did the respective understandings and depictions of the power dynamics of said relation, as typified in the political cartoons. This paper analyzes how the visual language and tropes utilized in the cartoons functioned as political tools and how those very same visual elements worked to articulate the complexities and nuance between the Philippines and the United States during the American Period.

 

 

 

Transliterated Medievalisms: Understanding the Postcolonial Philippine 'Middle Ages' 

• Stefanie Matabugo, University of California, Los Angeles
   

  • Description: The colonization of the Philippines by Spain (1565-1898) and later, by the United States (1898-1946), are both marked by the instrumentalization of European medievalisms and the medieval period as part of their colonial projects. In addition to Catholicism, the ideas of chivalry and courtly love were introduced to the Philippines via the proliferation of medieval metrical romances that were adapted into the major Philippine languages. Significantly, one of the most renown works of Filipinx literature (hailed by some as the national epic of the Philippines), the metrical romance Florante at Laura, by Francisco Balagtas, makes ample use of European medieval and classical motifs. This paper will reflect upon the Philippines as a society of medievalisms and the problematics related to such western influence, especially with regard to nationalism and Filipinx identity. I will further argue that the permeation of medievalisms and the European medieval period in Philippine society was reinforced during the American colonial era. American values and English superiority were purposefully instilled through education and the English literary canon, which included a number of medieval works (e.g. Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Howard Pyle’s Robin Hood). How did the differing Spanish and American medievalisms impact the colonial experience? Importantly, how do these threads of medievalism inflect a modern national Filipinx identity and how does this appropriation situate the Philippines within the global heritage of the European Middle Ages and the legacy of postcolonial Southeast Asia?

 

• Manilamen in Louisiana: Migration and Unfreedom at Bayou St. Maló, Michael Salgarolo, New York University

  • Description: At some point in the mid-nineteenth century, sailors from the Spanish Philippines began to desert merchant ships docked in the Port of New Orleans and made their way into the marshlands south of the city. Settling on a remote bayou island known as St. Maló, these “Manilamen” became efficient fishermen, shrimpers, and trappers. They created a semi-autonomous society based on collectivity and profit-sharing, a far cry from the forms of coercive labor that would have been imposed upon them on a merchant shipping vessel, a sugar plantation, or a Southern penal institution. In a world increasingly dominated by forms of unfree labor, the Manilamen of St. Maló found refuge in the unforgiving depths of the Louisiana bayou. They were not the first people to transform that very land into a space of resistance. The small island on the southern edge of Lake Borgne known as “St. Maló” was named for Jean San Maló, a runaway slave who led a band of followers into the marshes of St. Bernard Parish in the 1780s. In the outermost reaches of a scarcely populated section of southeastern Louisiana, the formerly enslaved men and women of the “San Maló Band”  sought refuge from Spanish Louisiana’s cruel regime of chattel slavery. My paper imagines the journeys taken by the fishermen of St. Maló from the Spanish port of Manila to the American port of New Orleans, outlining a nineteenth-century commercial world defined by an expansion of both free trade and unfree labor across the Atlantic and Pacific Worlds. I read St. Maló as a subversive space of refuge from state-sanctioned violence and coercive labor regimes. I argue that situating St. Malo at the intersection of the Pacific and Atlantic Worlds can not only disrupt Atlantic-based narratives of a transition from “slavery to freedom,” but can also reveal common strategies of resistance to capitalist accumulation across oceans and centuries.