Colonial Management, Collaborative Dissent: English Readers in the Philippines and Camilo Osias, 1905–1932

Primers and English readers in the colonial Philippines were not simply means of teaching English but were part of biopolitical management of Filipinos in which the creation of an Americanized tutelary subject was a major technology of U.S. colonial rule, a technology that continues in areas of occupation today. This essay examines the overlaps and differences between forms of nationalism articulated in readers for the Philippines, compiled by American teachers Mary Helen Fee, David Gibbs, and Orlando Scheirer Reimold before 1915, and the 1920s Philippine Readers series authored by Camilo Osias, Filipino nationalist and first Filipino superintendent of schools. It demonstrates how Osias, despite his position within the colonial hierarchy and the colonial apparatuses through which the genre functioned, was paradoxically able to use the genre to open up a space for an anti-imperial, independence-now Filipino nationalism. The article teases out the ways in which the early readers attempted to inculcate American political, social, and economic ideals in Filipino children and how Osia’s readers contest colonial hegemony by critiquing but also laying claim to aspects of the dominant ideology itself.