Imperial Archipelago: Representation and Rule in the Insular Territories under U.S. Dominion after 1898 (review)

Imperial Archipelago studies what Thompson denominates as the “U.S. Imperial archipelago” or “the island territories under U.S. military and political dominion after 1898, namely Cuba, Guam, Hawai’i, the Philippines and Puerto Rico” (p. 1). Thompson takes a deceivingly simple question as the point of departure of his study: why were some territories annexed (Hawai’i) while others became independent (Cuba and the Philippines) or territories of the U.S. (Puerto Rico, Guam)? How can we explain the different political status obtained by each one of these islands in the context of the U.S. imperial archipelago? The main contention of this book is that through discourse and visual analysis of the available documentation it is possible to discern the particular political strategy followed by the United States to conceive their relationship with these countries.

This book continues Thompson’s interest in visual studies in the context of colonial historical studies that is illustrated so well in his previous book Nuestra Isla y su gente: La construcción del “otro” puertorriqueño en Our Islands and Their People (1995). Imperial Archipelago is a more developed project that is composed of one introduction, six chapters, a conclusion and a bibliography. The Introduction locates the project of the book in the context of the historical development of nations in Caribbean, Atlantic, South Asian, American and Latin American frameworks, as well as in historical and postcolonial studies. Thompson’s work converses with postcolonial studies, particularly with Edward Said’s foundational definition of “colonial discourse” as “those representations, comprised of symbols, meanings and propositions, that create subject peoples and justify imperial rule over them” (p. 3). Yet in this book the author proposes a necessary contextualization and historical grounding for colonial discourse analysis, as well as studies of the representation of imperial domination.

The first chapter argues that the different historical contexts, political debates, cultures and inhabitants found in each one of these dependencies elicited a different response from the U.S. Thompson then proposes two modalities of rule used by the U.S. to confront the situation of each one of these countries: “dichotomous representation of difference” vs. “hierarchical differentiation.” The first one constructed the natives of these islands as alien people, generally inferior to the imperial rulers, and thus appropriate for imperial domination. The second strategy elaborates distinctions among subject peoples, establishing which countries were superior to others and in terms of what. This chapter ends by identifying the corpus used to conduct the comparative study of the different archipelagic overseas possessions, which includes photographs from travelogue books, graphic and verbal representations of the peoples and landscapes found in the U.S. imperial archipelago, and finally legal debates about the political future of these islands in the context of the U.S. imperial expansion. Most of the primary materials consulted in this study were produced between 1899 and 1906, and the book ends with an excellent bibliography of primary and secondary materials.

Chapter 2 analyzes the representation of women from Puerto Rico, Cuba, Hawai’i and the Philippines, using photographs as the main source of analysis. Thompson uses the masculinization of the U.S. and the feminization of the insular colonies as a point of departure for the visual analysis proposed in the rest of the chapter. He then compares the representation of Puerto Rican, Cuban, Hawaiian and Philippine women and men and links it to the political outcome of each one of these countries in their relationship with the U.S. For example, Puerto Rican women are depicted as mostly of mixed race and attractive, and willing to work, while Cuban women are represented as virtuous, beautiful and heroic. The Hawaiian women are depicted as “beautiful, passionate, uninhibited, happy, hospitable and kind” (p. 66) yet they often can have defiant poses and attitudes. Finally, Philippine women are represented differently...