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Journal of Asian American Studies 4.2 (2001) 123-145



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Building Empire:
Architecture and American Imperialism in the Philippines

David Brody *

[Figures]

The dive into the Orient has been like a dream. The lands, the people, and their customs are all very strange and of absorbing interest. It surprises me to find how much this trip has modified my views, not only regarding the extreme East, but regarding ourselves and all our European precedents. It will take time to get a true perspective of it all in my mind.

--Daniel Burnham to Charles Moore, March 13, 1905 1

Over the course of the late nineteenth century, American representations of the "Orient" exploded into a tangled knot of discursive possibilities. One of the more overt examples of American Orientalism from this period was the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition held in Chicago. The entire fair was, as architectural historian Zeynip Çelik relates, organized as an exercise in racial typology. Exhibited as homogeneous and placed at the center of the fairgrounds, Western culture was in an area referred to as White City, while other cultures were popular side-show attractions found on the periphery of White City. 2 A brochure titled Street in Cairo World's Columbian Exposition, found in the souvenir collection of Daniel Burnham (the architect who was director of works at the fair), provides a glimpse into the Orientalist fantasies that attended this event. The pamphlet describes an initial encounter with a section of the Exposition known as Cairo Street:

Your first glance may be a disappointment. Like all Mohammedan towns, its exterior is most uninviting. Plastered walls, irregular buildings, here [End Page 123] and there pierced with grated openings, present a forbidding aspect, which is only relieved by the stately minaret, which rises from the center of this mass. Enter the eastern portal, which is low and broad, and you realize your dream of the Orient. You forget the magnitude of the buildings in Jackson Park and the "sky scrappers" of Chicago, and enter into the strange life which is before you. 3

The writing in this Orientalist souvenir recapitulates the turn-of-the-century fixation with signifying the Orient as a space of fantasy--in this instance, an architectural fantasy that invents a narrative of "irregularity," "forbiddeness," and otherness that comes to life in the form of a Western reproduction. In nineteenth-century America, northern Africa, Asia, and other geographies that fell into the realm of the unknown were often described as part of the Orient, an ill-defined location that Western culture(s) deployed to justify racially stereotyped notions of difference. 4

After the turn of the century, Americans continued to disseminate Orientalist fantasies. As a result of the Spanish-American War of 1898, the U.S. took possession of islands previously controlled by Spain, including Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. The American presence in the Philippines incited new stereotypes about the "Orient." While Americans were producing an Orientalist discourse predicated on their investment in colonialism, many Filipinos decided not to surrender to American control. Thus, a three-year war (the Philippine-American War) followed the Spanish-American conflict. This was a military struggle that produced both bloodshed and an American cultural commitment to describing the Philippines as an "Oriental" place that should be feared and not trusted. The battle for control of the Philippines ended in the defeat of what Americans described as Filipino "insurgents" and the archipelago became an official U.S. colony in 1902. 5

IMAGE LINK= IMAGE LINK= Throughout the Spanish-American and Philippine-American wars, the U.S. used architecture to discursively inscribe the Philippines as a geographic locale where the primitive Oriental population could not be trusted. For example, an article from the January 22, 1899 edition of Joseph Pulitzer's New York newspaper The World illustrates "The Revenge of the Filipino." The image and writing in this article report on the unfortunate narrative of an American soldier injected with leprosy by a group of Filipino insurgents (see figure 1). The illustrated site where the American [End Page 124] soldier, Private...

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