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  • Legitimizing Empire: Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican Cultural Critique by Faye Caronan
  • Daniel Immerwahr
Legitimizing Empire: Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican Cultural Critique, by Faye Caronan. Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2015. xiv, 189 pp. $30.00 US (paper).

Legitimizing Empire is not, as one might expect, about justifying colonialism. Its author, Faye Caronan, uses “legitimizing” in another sense — that of claiming responsibility for one’s illegitimate children. Pointing to travel guides as evidence, she argues that the United States has not done this: “The hegemonic narrative of U.S. exceptionalism either touts the benefits of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines or Puerto Rico or neglects this history altogether” (23). And so Caronan introduces texts by Filipino Americans and Puerto Ricans that pierce through that fog.

Somewhat audaciously, she does this without using or citing a single document in Spanish, a language traditionally thought to be relevant to the study of Puerto Rican literature. Nevertheless, her collection of texts is varied and useful: Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters (New York, 1990), Esmeralda Santiago’s América’s Dream (New York, 1996), the documentary films Memories of a Forgotten War (2001) and !Yo soy Boricua, pa’ que tu los sepas! (2006) (in English, despite its title), and Nuyorican and Los Angeles–Filipino performance poetry.

The point about such texts is that, with the partial exception of Yo soy Boricua, they render empire visible. They knock on the door, illegitimate child in hand, and demand an admission of paternity. Though it is tempting to understand such writings through the framework of multiculturalism, Caronan has little patience for this. The texts are not offerings from foreign lands. They are, as they themselves insist, the offspring of US colonial history.

The stories that these “bastards of U.S. imperialism” tell are not pretty (73). They testify to racist violence, the humiliations of servicing tourists, sexual subjugation, and economic disruption. Moreover, writes Caronan, “Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican culture contend that empire has not ended” (149). They — the entire cultures, she appears to be arguing, [End Page 694] not just the texts at hand — understand the present condition as a form of neocolonialism.

Readers may wonder whether cultures can be distilled into political messages. I wondered about her claim — crucial to the argument — that the United States vigorously denies or whitewashes empire. To support this premise, Caronan turns to the Lonely Planet guides to the Philippines and Puerto Rico. But there are three problems here. First, when those guides were written, Lonely Planet was an Australian company. Second, travel guides are inevitably peppy and thus hardly the places to search for the scars of empire. Third, even so, the 2006 edition of Lonely Planet: Philippines (the edition Caronan uses) includes a section on US colonialism that is by no means flattering. “The main intention of the Americans, like the Spanish, was to serve their own economic needs,” it explains (27). The guide tells how the United States launched the prostitution market, killed countless Filipinos during World War II, charged high interest on aid loans, supported the Marcoses, drained the country of its much-needed nurses, and operated unpopular military bases (27–31). It even offers suggestions — good ones — for further reading. And Caronan does not mention any of that.

Does her omission matter? I think it is telling. Legitimizing Empire turns on a central opposition. In one corner there is the “U.S. nation-state” that “has at its disposal” the resources to disseminate “institutionalized narratives” that deny empire (10). In the other, mainland Puerto Ricans and Filipino Americans who “are not accorded the same level of legitimacy” and must find places of refuge (poetry clubs, schools with nonstandard curricula, experimental documentary films) from which to construct their “subaltern history” (10, 83). The successful silencing of colonized voices, Caronan continues, then enables the United States to engage in imperialism in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

But that is a sociologically flat analysis. Is the “U.S. nation-state” really so invested in denying its imperial past? That would be news to public-school students who, despite what Caronan implies, are routinely taught and tested on the war...

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