American Imperial Pastoral

The fantasy of American imperialism took pastoral form in Baguio, the “summer capital” of the Philippines, at the turn of the twentieth century. Manifested through the desires of the ruling elite of the American occupation, the expanding role of the market in the governance of the islands, and the labor and dispossession of Filipinos, the building of the mountain city was meant to symbolize and consolidate American colonial power. Taking readers through the first two decades of Baguio's inception, Rebecca Tinio McKenna tracks how the colonial government “enlist[ed] nature to obscure exercises of power,” skillfully connecting the legal maneuvers and financial interests that dispossessed Ibaloi people to the ideological values that underpinned the urban design and architecture of the American hill station (p. 14). Framing her study through a decidedly American studies lens and refining Leo Marx's Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964), a seminal literary study of nature amid social and political change, McKenna pushes readers to think about the kind of cultural labor done by the pastoral as part of the American imperial endeavor

Archaeology · Colonialism · Economic history · Elite · Framing (construction · Ideology · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Sociology · Architecture · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Gender Studies · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Philippine History and Culture

• Sonic Histories of Occupation

  Open Access•Tan Sooi, I Geroge Blake et al.•Sonic Histories of Occupation•2022

  Add to list