The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines, and: Caliban and the Yankees: Trinidad and the United States Occupation (review)

Following the innovations of postcolonial criticism, field-altering collections like Cultures of United States Imperialism have insisted that empire was not something that occurred elsewhere, but was instead a constitutive element of U.S. culture.¹ While such work has importantly brought imperialism to an uncanny home within American Studies, it has also placed this home securely on U.S. soil by figuring empire as a particularly American product, one that can be endlessly discovered in the writings of American novelists and politicians. In contrast to this account of homespun imperial ideologies, both Paul A. Kramer's The Blood of Government and Harvey R. Neptune's Caliban and the Yankees shift the analysis of American imperialism to sites of imperial contact where such ideologies are often negotiated and produced.

Meticulously researched, The Blood of Government details how struggles for recognition (both the recognition of U.S. imperial authority and the recognition of Filipino nationality) materialized around ever changing racial paradigms. Tracing the history of Philippine-American contact from the 1890's through the 1930's, Kramer explicitly challenges the idea that race in the Philippines was an export of American racial idioms. Kramer thus focuses on a complex history of interaction between Filipino elites and colonial administrators and demonstrates how this interaction affected racial imaginaries in both the Philippines and the U.S.

The Blood of Government follows a number of racial formations as they emerged from shifting relations between Filipino elites and colonial administrators. After a preliminary chapter on Spanish colonialism, Kramer examines the Philippine-American War and details how the U.S. Military represented the Filipino population as a collection of savage tribes. The Philippine-American war was thus represented as an exterminist race war rather than as a war between imperial and nationalist interests. Kramer then examines the development of a colonial civil government and how U.S. administrators enlisted the collaborative participation of Filipino elites. He outlines a shift to what he calls a "calibrated colonialism" that measured the Filipino capacity for self-government. Kramer argues that this shift was largely facilitated through the collaboration of Filipino elites and through a change from the racial paradigm of savage tribes to one that distinguished between civilized Christians and savage non Christians. This racial paradigm changes again after 1904 with the re-emergence of nationalism within a new cadre of Filipino elites, and Kramer traces how colonial administrators adjusted their "calibrated colonialism" to accommodate a racial formation as a single people.

The Blood of Government produces a convincing narrative of how racial categories changed in relation to the contingencies of colonial contact, and one of the book's strengths is the way that it demonstrates how representations of race are never fully under the control of those putting them forth. Although the protean character of race has become a familiar note in re-readings of imperial history, what makes this book well worth the reading is the exquisite detail through which Kramer renders this narrative of exchange and refashioning. A truly substantial piece of historical scholarship, The Blood of Government is one of the most richly textured histories written about the American occupation of the Philippines. Not only does Kramer flesh out the social conventions of colonial contact, but he also deftly manages to integrate social and administrative history by moving through a wide range of sources that include novels, letters, published books, speeches and government reports.

In spite of all his attention to the complexity of racial formations, Kramer still frames colonial contradictions in terms of conflicts between distinct and well-defined interest groups. In Caliban and the Yankees, Harvey R. Neptune is similarly interested in capturing the "uncertainty and complexity" (7) of colonial encounter, but in addition to exploring the conflicts between colonial...