American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures in the Philippines and Puerto Rico during U.S. Colonialism (review)

As we approach the end of the long American century, there is a renewed scholarly interest in its origins, the informal empire of islands acquired as a result of that "splendid little war," the Spanish-American War of 1898. In fact, there has long been a need for studies that break from period accounts and their progeny that view this imperial expansion in terms of the fulfillment of Manifest Destiny or as an extension of Turner's frontier, and look instead at these events comparatively across territories and from the point of view of the newly (re-)colonized. American Empire and the Politics of Meaning does all these things and much more. Not only does Julian Go reveal how elites in both the Caribbean and the Pacific sought to "domesticate" the novel forms and language of the occupying power so different from its Spanish predecessor, the book also spans the disciplinary boundaries between cultural sociology and comparative history by paying close attention to meaning-making. Go is concerned with understanding colonial rule "as a semiotic system-in-practice" and the different ways people read its signals and negotiated its imposition. On both these accounts, this book merits serious attention.

The study focuses on the first decade of what Go calls the "American tutelary project" in Puerto Rico and the Philippines, examining the theory and practice of its operation. He argues that the United States particularly targeted the wealthy, educated political elites in both colonies and recruited them as its "primary students and collaborators" (3). After introductory chapters explaining the importance of cultural theory and how culture was used as "a tool for rule" (6), the book is effectively divided into two sections, though it is not formally defined as such. The first section of three chapters (chapters 2-4) explains the way elites up to 1903 accepted Americanization and everything that it imposed but did so in terms of preexisting meanings, looking respectively at Puerto Rico, the Philippines and then comparatively at cultural transformation between the two. The second section also of three chapters (chapters 5-7) charts the elites' divergent trajectories after 1903 as those in Puerto Rico learnt to use the cultural meanings imposed by American tutelage to carry out a structural transformation of the island's political life, while their counterparts in the Philippines continued to reject its meanings, re-evaluating and "complexifying" their preexisting political culture. The larger lesson that Go sets out to demonstrate is that cultural change cannot be explained by any universalizing theory but that each situation must be judged according to local events.

It is the focus on comparison that constitutes one of the great strengths of this volume: The history of American colonialism has been too often torn asunder by regional divisions, with the Caribbean claimed by Latin Americanists and the Pacific allocated to Southeast Asia. Not since the days of the empire itself have studies attempted to look at its constituent parts as a whole. While more recent scholarship has shown something of a renewed interest in this theme, it has been mainly preoccupied by America's role as imperial successor to the British Empire.¹ A full-length comparative study of the two most important American colonial territories is therefore most welcome. In his other work, Go even extends his arguments further to encompass within his gaze the other smaller imperial outposts of Guam and American Samoa.² The other significant contribution of this book is the way it calls attention to the various registers at which American colonialism operated, that the legitimacy of the occupying power was not achieved by merely raising the flag but was also sought through manipulating signs and symbols. The success of the American empire depended on how successfully its agents were at colonizing local culture and inducing cultural change. Go reveals the limits to...