Body Parts of Empire: Visual Abjection, Filipino Images, and the American Archive by Nerissa S. Balce (review)

Nerissa S. Balce's Body Parts of Empire: Visual Abjection, Filipino Images, and the American Archive stands astride the two shores of the Pacific: it reconstructs the critical connections—between the subaltern condition of the Philippines and the imperialist expansion of the United States—that were forged in the largely forgotten Philippine-American War of 1899-1902. In exposing those connections, Balce highlights the way that media representations were virtually weaponized in the American government's propaganda war of counterinsurgency and imperial self-justification. She examines how all manner of literature, cartoons, posters, and even vaudeville songs joined in the intent to represent the Filipino population as infantile, savage, ignorant, unassimilable—as, in a word, abject. Cognizant of postcolonial and decolonial theory, Balce takes an "archive-centered approach" that Javier Morillo-Alicea modeled in globally oriented studies of imperial power in both the Caribbean and the Philippine archipelagos (10). She traces this "production of abjection" in a "genealogy of the Filipino native as an idea," for which the "tropes of Filipino savagery and docility" functioned not only in affirming legitimacy for the only official US colony at the beginning of the twentieth century but also, and at a deeper level, to form what Balce calls the "American imperial identity" (9).

The Filipinos as herein depicted—in photography principally, but also in caricatures and literary descriptions—are framed and posed as "abject bodies," and by "abject" Balce means that they are in this way dehumanized as something to be cast aside, degraded and contemptible. At the same time, the project of visually imaging particular abject bodies amounts to a "necropolitics" of photography that forms a part of the archive and reliquary constructed in service to the ends of constructing the new American empire of the 1890s (9). One passage in particular exemplifies the emblematic function of American publications on the war in referring to the photographic depiction of row on row of dead Filipinos laid out in long trenches. "If abjection is the symptom (the monstrous) and the sublime (the magnificence) of empire," writes Balce, "images of the slain Filipino 'enemy' are both the symptom and the sublime of empire in photographs that are both violent and celebratory. The Filipino cadaver, rebel or civilian, becomes a sign of American nationhood and victory, and emblem of the American imperial sublime" (65).

The book's four expository chapters are preceded by an introduction, subtitled "America's Shadow Archive," referring to the site in which such representations are preserved and curated. The book's conclusion, subtitled "The Romance of Counterinsurgency," reviews the manner in which the nationalist project of war actually reworked definitions of gender, sexuality, masculinity, and honor in American culture. In reconstructing this romance, Balce makes the case for viewing artifacts of the war, inclusive of photographs, cartoons, narratives, letters and other documents, as instruments that served to justify and normalize a violent foreign intervention into the Philippine nation's struggle for independence and sovereignty.

Critics of these racist representations pointed out their contradiction with regard to American values. Balce recovers the denunciation by the "Negro press" of the hypocrisy of a wartime situation in which American soldiers referred to Filipinos as "niggers" (133-34) as those same white Americans fought alongside African American comrades in arms and defended a country whose ideals, in principle at least, prohibited such acts of violent racial hierarchization. Not only was the common Filipino depicted in cartoons as resembling the stereotype of the African American, but the first President of the Republic, Emilio Aguinaldo, was imaged as a "pickaninny" in need of chastisement and discipline (11). Such disparagements make credible the connection Balce draws between the anti-Filipino racism normalized by war and the frequency of black lynchings (110-22). Germane to this discussion is Balce's account of the case of the African American soldier David Fagen, who defected from the...