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2. On Filipinos, Filipino Americans, and U.S. Imperialism: Interview with Oscar V. Campomanes
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ANTONIO T. TIONGSON, JR. 2 On Filipinos, Filipino Americans, and U.S. Imperialism Interview with Oscar V . Campomanes TONY TIONGSON: How do you conceive of U.S. imperialism? As a tragic or “exceptional ” episode in U.S. history? As a matter of economics or diplomacy, or something much more? For example, do you think it has an embodied presence in the lives of individuals from colonized nations today? OSCAR CAMPOMANES: To frame U.S. imperialism in terms of William Appleman Williams’s controversial thesis on “the tragedy of American diplomacy” (actuallythetitleofhispathbreakingbookpublishedin1959 )orofthehegemonicand uncritical historiography on the U.S. Empire which draws from a protean and extended tradition of discoursing on “American exceptionalism” is, immediately , to capitulate to enduring but ultimately dissatisfying analytic conventions and debates on the topic. Indeed, to get caught between the “economistic” analysis of U.S. imperialism by Williams or his influential students (the “revisionists ” Walter LaFeber, Thomas McCormick, etc.) and the realist predilections of U.S. diplomatic historians/international relations scholars—the shadow cast by George Kennan, Williams’s vaunted antagoniste, is very long—is to fall into a trap within which one can only suffer from a self-reproducible kind of conceptual and critical asphyxia. This is not to say that I don’t admire—indeed, I thoroughly do—the conceptually idiosyncratic and solidly empirical work of Williams; I believe that apart from Tragedy, his Roots of the Modern American Empire (1969) and that fabulous set of essays, Empire as a Way of Life (1983), should be required reading for anybody interested in the problematic of U.S. imperialism. But as Amy Kaplan and a few astute others have pointed out, Williams’s work does not pay enough radicalizing attention to the cultures of U.S. imperialism and the terms by which this imperialism has been customarily framed by its observers, students, apologists, and, not least, by Williams himself in the kinds of critical research and commentary that he produced so prolifically on the subject for much of his career. The important thing to note about U.S. imperialism is that its economic motors—especially in the expansion, after 1898, into the Philippines and East Asia/Pacific, the Latino-Caribbean zone, and the Americas—remained unspeci fied, or continued to be discussed as if these were comprehensible only in INTERVIEW WITH OSCAR V. CAMPOMANES 27 terms of an “economistic” analysis such as that developed by Williams (which by itself did indeed offer much explanatory power). But the limitations of this approach became evident in the ease with which his detractors could dispute it or overemphasize its problems by mere recourse to the culturalist alibis of the empire or also to what historians would call “counterfactuals.” U.S. empire building in these regions, in the view of one counterfactual hypothesis, did not prove to be as profitable to the modern U.S. economy as early ideologues and advocates had fantasized. The power of these counterfactual arguments is evidenced in the bathetic career of “the China markets thesis” as an explanation for the rise of the U.S. Empire, and the stale or deadlocked debates to which it gave rise, after Marilyn Young’s and Thomas McCormick’s otherwise solid research and arguments for its truth claims! Also, the political forms that the U.S. Empire took—the sheer novelty and the improvisational or highly pragmatic expressions of both its constitution after 1898 and its Philippine colonial experiment, given the inexperience of the United States in extracontinental expansionism and the decline of formal colonialism in due course—made this imperialism easily assimilable into a “diplomatic ” or statist paradigm; the nature of this “New Empire” became easily reducible into what some of its more conservative students cleverly formulated, categorically, as “an imperialism of suasion.”1 That is to say that it could be claimed with a straight face by most as hardly an imperialism at all, simply the highly contingent maneuvers, the realpolitik, of pragmatic U.S. statesmen who were concerned not to build or sustain an empire, formal or informal, but to exercise and claim U.S. national power and secure U.S. national interests on a “global” scale. With the onset of U.S. cold-war politics and perspectives later, amidst the full-blown unfolding of post–World War II decolonization, U.S. imperialism could thus be neutrally nominated by its unimaginative and apologetic historians or scholars as “globalism” or “internationalism,” extremely meaningless euphemisms. Yet the work is already clearly done: diplomatic...