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Postcolonial disorientations

Colonial ethnography and the vectors of the Philippine nation in the imperial frontier

Bibliographic Data

ID4465393
AuthorsD P S Goh (0000-0001-7298-4182, corresponding author)
Year2008
Volume11
Issue3
Pages259-276
Publication date2008-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePostcolonial Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1368-8790 • E-ISSN: 1466-1888
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13688790802226652
OpenAlexW2043941017
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited4

This essay argues that American colonial governmentality in the early twentieth century was constituted by an ethnographic discourse that was inflected by an imperial frontier orientation. The frontier governmentality interdicts and disciplines Filipino society and culture for colonial formation, thus planting American frontier dreams in the state's education and land policies. But it was driven by the contradictions between two types of interdiction I call the “home” and “base” vectors, which have directed the disorientation of Philippine postcoloniality, trapping it between American dreams Filipinized to the hegemony of elite nationalism. As the mestizo elites came to embody Philippine nationalism in the later years of colonialism under the framework of imperial democracy, the Filipinization of the frontier ethnographic discourse entailed an elite autoethnography of racial blending, which produced a nation with an orientation seeping into the American Southeast Asian frontier. The Philippines is thus not simply an American client state, a cacique democracy or a deferred postcolony, but the vehicle of American imperial frontierism in Southeast Asia during the Cold War. The implication is that we are seeing the accentuation of the home/base contradictions in the frontier discourse in the fragmentation of the Philippine nation today, with Filipinos running through the enlarged frontiers of America's neoliberal empire as itinerant laborers

Colonialism · Democracy · Elite · Empire · Ethnography · Frontier · Governmentality · Hegemony · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science · Anthropology · Gender Studies · History · Law · Philippine History and Culture · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies

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Unique citing works1
Citations per year0,14
Citation span2019 - 2019 (1)
Citation velocityhistorical
Highly citedNo
Citation typesNeutral: 1

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