"zigging and zagging across temporal and textual realms": On Writing Histories about the Philippines in American Studies

"zigging and zagging across temporal and textual realms":

On Writing Histories of the Philippines in American Studies

"[Z]igging and zagging across temporal and textual realms": that is how Vicente L. Rafael describes "the somewhat idiosyncratic architecture" of his recent book, The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines. With his reference to idiosyncrasy, one might detect a glimmer of apology. After all, idiosyncrasy is conventionally a sin in scholarship as it represents a particular rather than universal perspective. No apology should be necessary. Indeed, idiosyncrasy and the acknowledgment of it may be considered virtues when writing histories that disrupt and destabilize not only what we know but also, simultaneously, how we came to know it.

Rafael's explanation of his book's "architecture" is helpful for appreciating the challenges faced when writing about a subject that has been exceptionally difficult for U.S. readers to apprehend: the complex history of the Philippines, from the late nineteenth century to the present, that is, into and out of the period of formal U.S. colonization. Two other recent histories about the Philippines also engage these challenges: Paul A. Kramer's The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines and Augusto Fauni Espiritu's Five Faces of Exile: The Nation and Filipino American Intellectuals. Each of these histories, in different ways, skillfully demonstrates how neither temporality nor textuality is a stable realm; these are histories that demand readers to think more critically about both the conventional flow of linear historical time and the presumed transparency of archival resources. Lost knowledge must be recovered and empirical objects we thought we knew need to be rethought. This strategic instability can provide the conditions for drawing new histories into visibility. Consequently, histories—of persons, of institutions, of practices, of concepts, of the Philippines and the United States—appear to zig and zag. Such innovatively framed histories do not merely provide new information; they generate new knowledge. That new knowledge scrupulously reveals how an investment in the progressive linearity of time and the transparency of representation makes the nationalisms served by conventional histories both satisfying and flawed.

While Rafael's book alerts readers to its necessary zigzag structure, Kramer's work perceptively critiques the notion that the national histories of the Philippines and the United States can be insulated from each other. He emphasizes how a "politics of recognition" has set the conditions for what can be known and made intelligible about either the Philippines or the United States, but not, as Kramer provocatively asserts, both simultaneously. Kramer describes how the appreciation of intertwined histories has been hobbled by disconnections between the historiographies that must resolve imperial, national, and/or anticolonial narratives: "In the Philippine case, the American colonial period has frustrated the traditional narrative of rising Filipino nationalism that provides much of the structure for nineteenth-century Philippine historiography. . . . Thus, the period is represented as one in which 'true' nationalism was 'suppressed'—hence the failure to secure the independent state that must be the outer form of nationalism—and false, 'official' forms brought forward to displace authentic ones" (13–14). The dictates of nationalism require narratives that seek to reconcile the colonized past with the interest of the present, as, say, a prenational prelude to an ascendant national present for a postcolonial Republic...