Truth and Lies about the Philippine-American Century
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9450445 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Kimberly Alidio (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2006 |
| Volume | 58 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 205-211 |
| Publication date | 2006-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0003-0678 • E-ISSN: 1080-6490 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/aq.2006.0019 |
| OpenAlex | W2052174572 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 7 |
The Star-Entangled Banner: One Hundred Years of America in the Philippines. By Sharon Delmendo. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004. 229 pages. $23.95 (paper). This book takes its title from a catch phrase that appeared in several Manila newspaper articles of July 1996 covering the semicentennial commemoration of formal independence and Philippine-American Friendship Day. On July 4, 1946, officials representing the governments of President Manuel Roxas of the Philippines and President Harry Truman of the United States convened in the city's Luneta Park to end forty-eight years of American colonial rule, inaugurate the Philippine Republic, and pledge future cooperation between the two nations. Fifty years later, American and Filipino officials gathered in the same spot to reenact the historical proceedings. During one part of the ceremony, as the Philippine flag was raised and the American one lowered, the two banners intertwined for several moments. As reported in the Filipino media, many audience members took the entangled flags to indicate an alternative, messier version of the past. Newspapers reported the ceremonial glitch with comments on Filipinos' "love-hate" relationship with America, and America's neocolonial hold on Philippine sovereignty. The anecdote illustrates Sharon Delmendo's objective to understand the complex connections between the Philippines and the United States. She tells a story of two nations drawn into conquest, invasion, insurgency, military alliance, and economic dependency from the late nineteenth century to the present. The author argues that, over the last century, the Philippines and the United States forged a "mutually constitutive" relationship in which they asserted their national integrity through and against one another. Notwithstanding the oft-celebrated Philippine-American alliance, Filipino and American nationalists alike have taken pains to deny altogether the historical entanglements between the two countries. The book is valuable for articulating one of the central guiding questions of Filipino studies, a field that has expanded in [End Page 205] conjunction with rising scholarly interests in diasporic and transnational cultures. As an attempt to unravel the complex tensions between nations sharing an imperial past, Delmendo asks whether American empire has a useable past for Filipino national and diasporic communities. The Star-Entangled Banner is a commendable, if ultimately unsatisfying, study that calls for a history of American empire beyond nationalist frameworks. Delmendo demonstrates nationalism's heavy hand in forging colonial and neocolonial ties, spurring virulent disputes, and, above all, distorting the historical record of Philippine-American relations. Throughout the book, we see nationalist ideology at work in children's literature, public veneration of national founders, wartime film, Filipino literature, and war memorials. These cultural texts are contested terrain for interlocutors from both countries, or, in a few cases, from within one country, over two broad controversies: first, the significance of Philippine-American relations to national integrity on the world stage, and second, the holidays, heroes, and wars that mark the Filipino nation's existence. Delmendo's methodology includes a "tripartite axes model" in which nationalist ideologies manipulate psychological identity, social values, and state power (14). Despite its ahistorical rigidity, the model allows for a critique of both Filipinos and Americans who seek to recast "history in the interests of developing or defending particular visions of the nation" (16). In both countries, nationalism has greatly diminished what is known about the history of Philippine-American relations. Delmendo finds that American "imperial nationalism" constructed historical narratives about Filipino anticolonial resistance, artfully blending fact and fiction (4). Building upon existing studies of colonial photography and imperial commodity culture, Delmendo argues that cultural texts deployed new technologies of representation to create "quasi-official" images of Filipinos for American popular consumption (48).1 The chapter "Marketing Colonialism" presents a close reading of a children's book published in 1904 at the tail end of the Philippine-American War. This book depicted Filipino insurgents as armies of monkeys and red ants. In addition to supplying a juvenile narrative of colonial conquest, Brownies in the Philippines capitalized on photography's popularization by marketing
Banner · Ceremony · Colonialism · Independence (probability theory · Media studies · Newspaper · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Sovereignty · History · Law · Philippine History and Culture
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |