Legitimizing Empire: Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican Cultural Critique by Faye Caronan (review)

Faye Caronan’s Legitimizing Empire: Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican Cultural Critique is a thought-provoking analysis that illuminates the ways in which the power of U.S. hegemonic culture has been used to delegitimize Filipino American and Puerto Rican cultural critiques of U.S. empire, while at the same time promote U.S. exceptionalism at home and abroad. Using a comparative analysis, Caronan examines ethnic novels, documentaries, and performance poetry to demonstrate how authors, filmmakers, and poet activists utilize these mediums to challenge the tropes of U.S. exceptionalism and multiculturalism in ways that expose the negative effects of empire in the Philippines and Puerto Rico.

There are two competing perspectives in a war of representation and narrative building that Caronan eloquently explores in her book. One is U.S. exceptionalism and multiculturalism, while the other involves a critique by Filipino Americans and U.S. Puerto Ricans, which seeks to expose what Caronan calls the “blind spots” in U.S. history such as the Philippine-American War and its effects on the Philippines, as well as Puerto Rico and the limits of citizenship as a commonwealth. These blind spots, as Caronan notes, have been both institutionalized and sanitized from American public education, both in the United States and abroad in its neo-colonies. The erasure of Filipino and Puerto Rican resistance against their oppression as colonial subjects and their experiences with U.S. violence become buried under the weight of U.S. exceptionalism that suggests the United States reluctantly took possession of these territories because both groups were unfit and ill equipped for self-rule. Using the shield of benevolent assimilation and the “white man’s burden,” the U.S. narrative of benevolence was meant to bring democracy to both nations and help them to govern themselves (with strings attached). Caronan successfully exposes both the absurdity of these notions due to U.S. ambitions as an imperial power and the reality that U.S. political and economic policies continue to make both the Philippines and Puerto Rico dependent on the United States.

Caronan also reminds us that U.S. exceptionalism is very present in culture and cultural production despite this being the realm of Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican critiques of U.S. empire. For example, in her first two chapters, Caronan describes how Filipino American Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters and U.S. Puerto Rican Esmeralda Santiago’s América’s Dream get co-opted and categorized under the realm of ethnic literature. As Caronan contends, although their novels attempt to provide a critical counternarrative to U.S. exceptionalism by exposing the negative impact of empire in the Philippines and Puerto Rico through violence, corruption, inequality, and dependency, their novels are marketed as fiction, thus delegitimizing their critiques as unreliable sources of information. They become commodified as minority literature for consumption by mainstream audiences so that, similar to travel guides, these novels become cultural products that enable consumers to “experience the ‘authentic’ postcolonial other” (22) through the tourist industry that is known to replicate racial stereotypes about the island colonies and its people.

Chapters 2 and 3 taken together interrogate and revise the metaphor of colonialism as heterosexual romance through both Dogeaters and América’s Dream. Caronan shows that rather than colonialism being a consensual romantic relationship, it was not consensual at all. Rather, colonial conquest is depicted as rape, since colonialism involved “both the physical destruction that occurs during conquest and the long-term psychic destruction brought on by conquest” (48). As such, Caronan takes this logical step further by contesting that given the complex colonial past and neocolonial present, both countries represent the bastards of U.S. imperialism, “the illegitimate children of colonial relationships that have been willfully forgotten” (73). She does this by examining Camilla Benilao Griggers’s Memories of a Forgotten War and Rosie...