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Reviewed by:
  • Visualizing the American Empire: Orientalism & Imperialism in the Philippines
  • Susan K. Harris
Visualizing the American Empire: Orientalism & Imperialism in the Philippines. By David Brody. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 2010.

David Brody is a specialist in visual studies. He also is active in American and Cultural Studies circles. Both interests are evident in Visualizing American Empire: Orientalism & Imperialism in the Philippines. On the one hand, there is much here to please a traditional visual historian: detailed descriptions, photographs, notes about sizes and materials. On the other hand, he also asks what the objects he describes mean: socially, culturally, and politically.

Visualizing Empire asks what sense Americans made of the visual materials furnished them by the acquisition of the Philippine archipelago in 1899. This moment marked the beginning of American overseas empire, and in addition to swallowing the fact that the U.S., a former colony, had become a colonizing power, Americans had to familiarize themselves with a territory 7,000 miles from California. Most Americans were clueless—the newspaper social critic "Mr. Dooley" quipped that Americans didn't know if the Philippines were islands or canned fruit—but, Brody suggests, the way had been prepared by earlier travelers such as Charles Longfellow (son of the poet), and Edward Morse, both of whom spent considerable time in Japan and helped to familiarize their countrymen with Asian arts and traditions. Longfellow also visited the Philippines, sending back carefully staged photographs of Filipinos. Both men promoted the fascination with the East known as "Orientalism," and both were avid collectors. Longfellow even had tattoos of Japanese figures engraved on his body.

Visualizing Empire begins with two chapters detailing these men, their collections, and their influence, as well as an analysis of the periodical Art Amateur in the domestication of Orientalism in the U.S. These chapters set the stage for the meat of the book, which is a study of the ways in which the Philippines—its peoples, landscapes, and architectures—were represented by and for Americans. Focusing on the visual, Brody devotes individual chapters to media images, maps, the victory celebration given Admiral Dewey on his return from the Philippines, and to architecture. The epilogue meditates on the Filipino domestic objects with which President Taft (who had served as civil governor of the islands shortly after annexation) furnished the White House. All of these chapters offer opportunity to think about how Americans commodified the Philippines for their own consumption and to rationalize their imperialist acts. One fascinating example occurs in the chapter on media coverage. In 1901 the New York Evening Journal ran an article comparing Emilio Aguinaldo, President of the short-lived Philippine Republic and (after he refused to recognize U.S. sovereignty) a fugitive from the U.S. military, to Frederick Funston, the U.S. general who captured him through duplicitous means. [End Page 176] The article includes drawings of elements (eyes, lips, chins) of both men's faces. The verbal descriptions accompanying the visual evidence—that Aguinaldo's eyes could be "savage" for instance, whereas Funston's showed that "he is a man absolutely without fear" (63)—are based on perceived racial characteristics rather than on the evidence itself. At a time when many Americans were protesting the fact that the U.S. went into the archipelago claiming to help the Filipinos free themselves from Spain only to end up making it a colony of their own, such descriptions helped convince consumers that the Americans might actually be benefiting the islanders by, in President McKinley's words, "civilizing and Christianizing" them. In the same vein, the chapter on architecture shows how images of new buildings resulting from the American passion to create modern infrastructures implied that the new colonial power was bringing order, cleanliness, and modernity to a culture that Americans perceived as chaotic. Maps, too, created order, imposing grids on wilderness terrain, identifying geographic features, and measuring distances between points.

Of course the flip side of the civilizing mission was the perception that Filipinos needed civilizing; Brody rightly points out that the reports sent back from the Philippines could be used to serve anti- as well as pro-imperialist ends. Many of the Americans who protested...

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