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Social Text 87, Vol. 24, No. 2, Summer 2006. © 2006 by Duke University Press

The Filipina’s Breast

S AVA G E R Y, D O C I L I T Y, A N D T H E E R OT I C S O F T H E A M E R I C A N E M P I R E

Nerissa S. BalceThe raiding of women has always been the dream and the obsession of the total victor. These raided bodies are the spoils of victory, the warrior’s reward. — Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem

In colonial documents, savage breasts were signs of conquest. From accounts of European explorers such as Columbus and Magellan, to nineteenth-century maps of the Pacific drawn by American cartogra- phers, to American postcards featuring Native American women, the bare brown bosoms of indigenous women were markers of savagery, colo- nial desire, and a justification for Western imperial rule. A foundational project of European and American imperialisms was the creation of an archive of images of the non-Western other whose inferiority was marked by female nakedness. Imperial cultures deployed barbarism and female nudity to justify imperial violence and articulate colonial phantasms about the savage land. Columbus, who fetishized the “colonial breasts” of native women, was convinced that the world was not round but “pear- shaped and topped by a protuberance much like a woman’s nipple.”1 In his account of the New World, his early encounters with natives empha- sized their nakedness and their physical beauty: “They all go naked, men and women, as the day they were born. . . . And the women have very pretty bodies.”2 The nakedness of the native, with special emphasis on the female native’s attractive body, recalls Adam and Eve’s exile from Paradise, which constructed a romantic image of the New World with “Indians” as creatures who were “spiritually naked,” gentle people with no weapons, laws, religion, or literature.3 The imperial impulse to convert these “exiles” of Christianity, coupled with travelers’ tales of wealth and gold in uncharted, exotic lands, would fuel Europe’s imperial fantasies for centuries.

European explorers of the New World in the first decades after Colum- bus believed in the superiority of their “writing, navigational instruments, ships, warhorses, attack dogs, effective armor,” and gunpowder, and of their Christian culture centered on “a tortured and murdered” male god, a deity born of a virgin and sacrificed by his heavenly father to atone for

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humanity’s sins.4 With the sword and the cross in hand, the conquistador viewed the naked savages as subjects of Empire, as “marvelous posses- sions” who were ordered to submit themselves to a Christian God and to a European sovereign;5 failure to do so provoked contempt and genocidal rage. The Cherokee scholar Andrea Smith reminds us that the Age of Exploration inaugurated “new” tools of genocide in the Americas: sexual violence, in particular the rape of native women and children, and military violence such as war, occupation, and forced removal from one’s native community through land laws and boarding schools.6 Thus violence and benevolence are discursive structures of imperial logic, in particular the project of disciplining the native.

After Columbus, cartography popularized the feminization of a sav- age land that had yet to be penetrated by Empire.7 Scholars in feminist, ethnic, and postcolonial studies have analyzed the imperialist logics of colonial texts. The Cherokee scholar Rayna Green, for example, writes that European artists depicted the New World through the icon of the Indian Queen, a dark-skinned naked woman crowned with tobacco leaves and surrounded by fruits native to the Americas.8 Her nakedness symbolized the New World as a rich, bountiful land that was both exotic and inno- cent. In European cartography, a colonial iconographic continuum exists between what Laura Donaldson describes as “the naked and the dressed.”9 A map by the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator published in 1636 shows Europe as an elaborately dressed woman with a crown and a book, suggesting civilization and literacy. Africa is a dramatic contrast, both dark skinned and unclothed.10 José Rabasa demystifies the European colonialist imaginary constructing “sartorial difference” by underscoring the racial script: “Dressed and learned in the sciences, Europe rules and supersedes Asia. . . . In contrast, Africa and America in their nudity testify to the dominance of the feminine and typify the barbarous states that are, nonetheless, full of treasures for Europe.”11

My essay charts the origin of an American idea — the Filipina savage. While the term may sound unfamiliar to contemporary Americans, “Fili- pino savage,” referring to the “Filipino race,” was common in American popular discourse after 1898, when the United States annexed the strug- gling Republic of the Philippines for 20 million dollars, paid to the belea- guered Spanish Empire. Figure 1 is an iconic representation of the savage Filipino race from the illustrated travel book United States Colonies and Dependencies by William Boyce (1914). The image shows an Ifugao man, woman, and child standing next to an American flag. The woman’s breasts are shown, as are the bare chests of the man and child. For this discussion on U.S. imperialism and photography, the Filipina breast will be read as a sign of conquest. Recalling the work of black feminist scholars on the

The Filipina’s Breast 91

“lubricious image of black women” and the historical context of rape and other forms of sexual violence under the institution of slavery and Euro- pean colonialism,12 I argue that the naked images of brown women — in this case Filipinas and Pacific Islander women — are representations of American imperial power and visual icons of “sexualized savages.”13

Here, I wish to highlight the temporal convergence of the histories of European colonialism, American imperial ventures in the Pacific, and the rise of “colonial postcards” in the nineteenth century that featured naked women from Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. Postcards of bare-breasted Alge- rian women popularized both the sexual images of North African women and the project of French colonialism, and functioned as “war booty,” artifacts of war that underscore racism, voyeurism, and colonial violence as the context of French-Algerian relations.14 In nineteenth-century Britain, on the other hand, the production and consumption of colonial postcards and pornographic literature emerged with the likes of the writer-adventurer Sir Richard Burton and his inner circle in the Anthropological Society of London (later called the London Anthropological Society). Members of Burton’s core group were called the “Cannibal Club,”15 and many were

Figure 1. Captured land, captured bodies: a photo of an Ifugao man, woman, and child beside a U.S. flag, ca. 1914. From William D. Boyce, United States Colonies and Dependencies (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1914)

92 Nerissa S. Balce

aristocrats who participated in Britain’s imperial ventures and wrote por- nographic texts that included colonial themes such as slavery and misce- genation. The fascination for colonial breasts remains even in the early twenty-first century, with Web sites such as eBay and www.postcardman. net offering “vintage postcards” of “nude women” from Africa and Asia, which sell for $50 or more each.

While postcards were ephemeral popular texts that underscore the banality of the idea of the sexual female savage in nineteenth-century England, U.S.-published illustrated travel books were popular middle- brow reading fare readily available to middle-class Americans at the turn of the twentieth century. Through meteorological data — such as average temperatures, hot and wet seasons, and weather conditions—these books, informed by racial and gendered logics, established “colonial intimacy.”16 The “intimate” facts about savage lands had material consequences, since such information was enabled by and, conversely, facilitated military occupation and colonial rule. Images such as this photograph (fig. 1) popularized the notion of the Filipina savage in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century United States, a discourse of savagery founded on American discourses on the sexually perverse female “Indian” body and images of the female black body. The icon of the naked Filipina sav- age will be read as a nexus of the histories of Native American genocide and slavery.

I propose what I term as the erotics of the American Empire, the discur- sive and material processes that created the sexual and racialized repre- sentations of the Filipina colonial subject in American popular culture. While José Eduardo Limón discusses the “erotics of culture” or “the play of eroticism and desire in the relationship between Greater Mexico and the United States,”17 the erotics of empire is the play of earlier racialized and gendered discourses that constructed the Filipina as a new nonwhite other whose alterity incorporated the ideas, images, and vocabularies of the conquests of the New World, the frontier, and the legacies of slavery.

To shorthand the histories that inform the erotics of U.S. imperialism, I consider two tropes — those of savagery and docility. In the American imperial imaginary, savage bodies were also docile bodies needing disci- pline and tutelage. Violence and benevolence went hand in glove in the American imperial project, as it operated in the pedagogy and practice of imperial sites of discipline such as the Hampton Institute and the various Indian boarding schools of the early twentieth century. Discipline was a “tender violence” (Wexler) that inaugurated the savage or nonwhite body as a modern subject, oftentimes at the cost of pain, physical and mental suffering, and even death.18 For this essay, I examine images of the naked Filipina as visual proof of the savagery of the Filipino race, how

The Filipina’s Breast 93

her nakedness emphasized the necessity of disciplining Filipino bodies through violent and benevolent means. The visual image of the naked Filipina was disseminated at a time of empire and war, at a time when the U.S. Congress debated on the constitutionality of the American military occupation of the Philippines even as more than seventy thousand troops were stationed there after 1898.

Both imperialists and anti-imperialists, while vigorously disagreeing on the issue of colonization, freely and interchangeably used the stereotype of the Filipino savage. Harry Pratt Judson, a University of Chicago profes- sor, wrote in favor of colonizing the Philippines as an “annexed territory” without extending citizenship or constitutional rights to “inferior races.”19 A Yale professor, Theodore S. Woolsey, on the other hand, objected to colonizing the Philippines because colonization was a financial burden that meant controlling the conduct of 7 million “savage Filipinos.”20

Recalling the project of Edward Said in his book Orientalism (1978), this essay charts the origin of the ideas behind the image of the Filipina savage. In particular, what sorts of “intellectual, aesthetic, scholarly and cultural energies” went into the making of an American imperialist tradi- tion from the late nineteenth century onward?21 How did late-nineteenth- century U.S. visual culture come to the service of American imperialism? As I write this, I write at a time of the American Empire in the early twenty- first century. My study of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American imperial culture then is an attempt, borrowing Said’s work, “to inventory the traces upon me,” to historicize my life as a neocolonial subject of the American Empire, and to inventory “the [imperial] culture whose domination has been a powerful factor” in the life of all Filipinos (25).

Published in the late 1970s, during a decade that witnessed the oil crisis, the Israel-Palestine wars, the massacre of eleven Israeli athletes by Palestinian guerrillas in the Munich Olympics, and the Iran hostage cri- sis, Orientalism was a genealogy of Western hegemony in the Middle East or the Orient, a hegemony whose genocidal results continue in this era of Bush’s War with No End. Knowledge of the Orient, or what was then called the Far East, was inextricably tied to the Western project of empire building, as evident in the narrations of memoirs, anthropological writ- ing, accounts of travelers and explorers, and music. Orientalism was “the discipline by which the Orient was (and is) approached systematically as a topic of learning, discovery and practice” (73). It is also the language of imperialism, “the collection of dreams, images and vocabularies” deployed by the West to construct the East (73).

Violence and power define the language and practice of orientalism. Early articulations of orientalism, in particular English writings on Egypt, such as the lectures of Arthur James Balfour in the House of Commons,

94 Nerissa S. Balce

describe orientals as “subject races” (36), and knowledge of the oriental was used in the service of military violence and colonial rule. As subject races, orientals were a literal subject of imperial power and knowledge. As Said noted, the oriental was “something one judges (law), something one studies (curriculum), something one disciplines (in school or prison), something one illustrates (zoological manual)” (40), and the term “Ori- ent” extended over time to include Asia, though for many Americans, the Far East still refers only to China and Japan. But by 1898, the Philippine colony was referred to as a “new Oriental problem,” with debates over the constitutionality of the occupation of the islands while an armed insur- rection continued. Extending Said’s ideas, I read the Filipina savage as a subject of American imperialism.

An erotics of American imperialism thus argues for an intersectional approach to the study of U.S. imperial histories dating from the late nineteenth century. While scholars such as Shelley Streeby have argued for reconsidering the distinctions made by historians and cultural studies scholars between the “continental frontier of 1848” and the “imperial frontier of 1898,”22 my own study of U.S. imperialism, culture, and Fili- pina images examines the heterogenous U.S. imperial cultures that inform early-twentieth-century ideas of the Filipina savage.

The Erotics of American Imperialism

My project of coupling “erotics” and “American Empire” together focuses on the relationship of U.S. imperial culture with the play of eroticism, racism, desire, and fantasy that constructed the figure of the Filipina savage. I examine bodies in the imperial archive that account for the post- colonial effects of the racial and sexual politics of U.S. imperial culture. By “imperial archive” I refer to more than a library or museum but “a fantasy of knowledge,” what Thomas Richards has called “imperial fic- tions” collected and united in the service of the state and empire.23 Oscar V. Campomanes describes the American imperial archive as “a massive political and cultural archive which de-nationalized Filipinos and deemed them as racialized subjects” unfit for independence and self-government; the creation of the American imperial archive, observes Campomanes, went hand in hand with “a colonial war,” the Philippine-American War of 1899, that was waged until the archive became “a self-fulfilling phan- tasm.”24 The tropes of savagery and docility are products of American imperial fictions about Native Americans and African Americans, and these representations formed and informed popular discourses about the Filipino colonial subject.

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Drawings and

photographs of

breast-baring

brown women

from indigenous

cultures have

long been part of

American porno-

tropic tradition.

Anne McClintock describes an “erotics of ravishment” in the writings of European male travelers that feminized and eroticized the “uncertain continents” of Africa, the Americas, and Asia.25 McClintock offers the term “porno-tropics” to highlight the relationship between pornographic fantasies of the tropics and the brutal, often violent facts of conquest. This European porno-tropic tradition constructed nonwhite women as “the epitome of sexual aberration and excess” (22). We witness what McClintock terms as the “metaphysics of gender violence,” with the unknown world as feminine object to be owned and possessed by a male explorer (23).

The black female body has long been part of the imperial archive of Europe informed by the politics of colonization, slavery, prostitution, and pornography. The sexualization of the black female body can be mapped in the canonical writings of nineteenth-century French writers such as Balzac, Zola, Baudelaire, and others. The figures of the mulatta, the pros- titute, or the slave woman in nineteenth-century French novels and essays were what T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting refers to as icons of the “Black Venus” or “sexualized savages.”26 The lubricious images of black women, as sexual and dangerous bodies, are constructions of “feminized darkness” and representations of French imperial power (11). Drawings and photo- graphs of breast-baring brown women from indigenous cultures, on the other hand, have long been part of American porno-tropic tradition. Island women, particularly the cultures and peoples of the Pacific, have been part of an American Pacific fetish even before the arrival of Admiral George Dewey to Manila in 1898. Figure 2 is a photograph of Pacific Islander women of Hawai‘i published in the travel book United States Colonies and Dependencies. As far back as 1791, when American geographic knowledge of the Pacific was limited, the region had already attracted economic and political interest.27 In the decades that followed, maps of the Pacific increased. White American writers have long imagined the “South Seas” as a place inhabited by dark-skinned, cannibalistic savages or as a space for an interior voyage of the self facilitated by the white author’s or narrator’s encounter with primitive cultures. Paul Lyons has observed what he calls an “American Pacific Orientalism” tradition in the writings of hundreds of whale ship captains who sold their pamphlets to the American public in the 1790s, and traces this tradition to more-established writers such as Edgar Allan Poe in his South Seas novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.28 During the first decades of the nineteenth century, American traders, explorers, and politicians wrote about the Pacific and its peoples through racialized and gendered grammars of inferiority. The Pacific by then had been colonized by cartographers who drew images of naked native women in maps as metonymic representations of an exotic paradise.

96 Nerissa S. Balce

By the late nineteenth century, anonymous photographers brought their Kodak brownie cameras and took photographs of Pacific Islander women for their personal collections, for publication, and for scientific study, and generations of American children grew up with adventure stories about the West and the Pacific seacoast.29

These photographs of Pacific Islander women were circulated at the turn of the twentieth century, at a time when commonsense notions of the Pacific and Pacific Island peoples were already formed by and through visual and print cultures. We have no information on the subjects of the photograph or the photographer, yet this anonymity undergirds the erotics of American imperialism in two ways. First, anonymity aestheticizes the colonial panoptic. The ubiquity of such photographs of Hawai‘ian women in 1900 illustrates the textual traffic in gendered images of primitive island cultures, beginning with the eighteenth-century adventure narratives by whale-ship captains and continuing with the scientific discourse of National Geographic, which functioned as a “wellspring of masturbatory

Figure 2. Pacific fetish: photographs of Hawai‘ian women circulated in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, ca. 1914. From Boyce, United States Colonies and Dependencies

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fantasies” for a generation of fin de siècle American men.30 Second, ano- nymity underscores imperial intimacy,31 how the bodies of Pacific Island peoples function metonymically as the knowable and accessible Pacific.

The earliest articulation of an American porno-tropic tradition can be read in the representation of native women, in particular the narra- tives of Sacagawea, Pocahontas, and La Malinche. In popular accounts of the lives of these indigenous women, they are reduced to heroines or antiheroines based on their actions at the dawn of conquest. Sacagawea is enshrined as a mythic icon of American expansion, leading the Lewis and Clark expedition with her infant son on her back; yet her myth centers on her beauty and her superhuman abilities as a scout — how she enabled the project of American imperial expansion in the Pacific Northwest.32 In the case of Pocahontas, American history books immortalize her as a beautiful Indian princess who saves the life of John Smith and becomes the savior of the fledgling Jamestown colony; though she marries another Puritan, she is the most celebrated female figure of miscegenation, what Robert Tilton has described as “the quiet genocide of the native popula- tion.”33 The life of La Malinche, or Doña Marina, is a more complex nar- rative. In historical accounts, “as translator, informer, mistress and sexual pawn,” she aided Hernán Cortés in his conquest of the Aztec empire.34 Her acts are mythologized as acts of female treachery, the original race traitor of Mexican history. The mestizo population of Mexico descends symbolically from her treacherous deeds, “the first mixing of Indian and European blood.”35

In British and Dutch colonies at the turn of the nineteenth century, white women were held in high esteem in a metropolitan bourgeois dis- course on the endangerment of white middle-class morality and white motherhood. This privileging of white women occurred in tandem with the debasement of native women’s bodies as sexual servants or concubines of European men. Native women’s bodies served as sexual medicine for the “colonial soul.” In travel handbooks for incoming plantation employees bound for Tonkin, Sumatra, and Malaya, European men were urged to have native mistresses “for quick acclimatization, as insulation from the ill-health that sexual abstention, isolation, and boredom were thought to bring.”36

Thus the histories of European conquest and American imperial expansion are the contexts of the representation of the Filipina savage. As sexual bodies and as laboring bodies, the representations of native women in general are artifacts of empire. Portrayed in popular culture as bodies that serve Western empires, both in the sexual and domestic sense, these women remain virtually unknown to us as actors or as historical

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agents. In the history of the American Empire, the Pacific Islander and Filipina women we have seen are merely bodies in the National Archive of Washington, DC, yet they are more than this. Their corporeal presence, as bodies in the imperial archive, must always be read against the grain of the military conquest of native America and the Pacific. The Alaskan native theorist Shari Huhndorf observes that by the turn of twentieth century, the conquest that began with Columbus’s arrival ended with the genocidal campaigns against native peoples in the West and a turn to innocence and nostalgia.37 By the 1890s Native Americans were no longer a threat to white civilization and “began to play a more ambivalent role in the American cultural imagination” (21). The ambivalent image of the nonwhite or native body, as noble and ignoble savage, was inaugurated by white America’s anxiety over the history of conquest and, as Huhndorf observes, “serves in part to recast this terrible history by creating the illu- sion of white society’s innocence” (21).

The Romance and Violence of U.S. Travel Cultures

At the turn of the twentieth century, photography made possible a recast- ing of imperial violence. By visualizing empire through the lens of domes- ticity, the bloodier and more disturbing aspects of U.S. imperial expan- sion were excised from the American nation’s myths. At the time, “new insular possessions” became topics of popular reading for a public curi- ous to learn about the islands of Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, Hawai‘i, and the archipelago known as the Philippine Islands. To satisfy that curiosity, dozens of illustrated travel books were published after 1898. Before the publication of such books, popular turn-of-the-century magazines such as National Geographic, Leslie’s Illustrated, and Harper’s Weekly featured articles on the Spanish-American War and on the colonies of the belea- guered Spanish Empire. While many journalistic accounts expressed American patriotism and support for “the War for humanity,” as the Spanish-American War was called, some writers described the economic possibilities the colonies offered. In National Geographic, two special issues on Cuba and the Philippines appeared in 1898 with articles on the islands’ land masses, climates, flora and fauna, and agricultural indus- tries. As scholars of Western colonialism and culture have argued, travel cultures functioned ideologically by romanticizing what Said has termed as the pleasures and the profits of empire.38

After 1898 the United States built what Lanny Thompson termed an “imperial archipelago,” a visual and textual archive created by writers, artists, journalists, soldiers, schoolteachers, academics, and politicians who wrote

As scholars

of Western

colonialism

and culture

have argued,

travel cultures

functioned

ideologically by

romanticizing

what Said has

termed as the

pleasures and the

profits of empire.

The Filipina’s Breast 99

about the culture and peoples of the new “U.S. colonies” (fig. 3).39 Books such as José de Olivares’s Our Islands and Their People, as Seen with Camera and Pencil (ca. 1899) were popular fare that produced images of America’s new colonial subjects.40 Olivares was a native of California and a journalist for the Globe Democrat of St. Louis.41 Published as two oversized texts, Our Islands and Their People was an imperial racial spectacle that featured 1,200 black-and-white photographs along with 19 hand-colored photographs. The book was a commercial success, selling 400,000 copies and launching an industry of illustrated books on the “insular possessions” of the United States after 1898.42 The Filipino studies scholar Benito Vergara Jr. summarizes the title’s significance and this emergent imperial genre: “The transfer of ‘our islands and their people’ to the printed page through photography wrested the colonies from beyond and brought them into the domestic realm. Not only were the Philippines a political possession, but a visual possession as well, to be gazed at in the comfort of the American home.”43

In Olivares’s book, photographs of naked indigenous Filipino women were displayed alongside the clothed images of Cuban and Puerto Rican women (fig. 4). These contrasting images — the clothed Latina versus the naked Filipina — would influence how Americans viewed the Filipino race and would have violent consequences for Filipinos then waging a war against U.S. military rule. Photographs of naked Filipinas (fig. 5) would indelibly define the Filipino race as a savage people in the minds of Ameri- can readers. The Filipina’s naked body, like other native women’s bodies, ritualistically feminized the colonized land. As a visual catalog of racial inferiority, travel books would often compare Filipinas with the “savage beauties” of the Hawai‘ian Islands, but American writers did not always write favorably about Filipinas. In Olivares’s text, for example, Filipino women were described as both the object of desire and scorn.

In the first place, she is the unloveliest of women. . . . After seeing Porto Rican [sic] and Cuban maidens, a man entering Manila will expect to be thrilled again by great, lustrous, dark eyes; but the glance of the Filipino woman will never thrill you. Her eyes are not large, but they are black and beady and unreadable. Very often hunger looks out at you; often hatred, but it is not passionate hatred. . . . She cannot understand why these white men with guns intrude upon her ancient customs. She doesn’t like the white man anyway. Her eyes tell him so and she wishes he were back in his own land.44

The ambivalent position of the Filipina body — as savage, as divine crea- ture, as surly and “unlovely” — was a stark contrast to the image of the properly dressed and attractive “Spanish maidens” of Cuba and Puerto Rico. But as Vergara reminds us, the portraits of unsmiling Filipinas and

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Figure 3. American porno-tropics: José de Olivares’s book, Our Islands and Their People, as Seen with Camera and Pencil, was published circa 1899 and sold 400,000 copies.

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the scowling natives confirm other things. Olivares himself mentions this — that Filipinos refused U.S. rule and registered their refusal bodily, through guerrilla warfare, and aesthetically, through the Filipina native’s scowl. More than nakedness thus marked the racial difference of Filipinas in the American imperial imaginary. The most compelling evidence of savagery was the Philippine-American War itself, a protracted war led by Philippine revolutionaries who continued their war for independence even after the arrest of their leader General Emilio Aguinaldo in 1901. Much to the surprise of the American military, the Filipinos would continue an organized guerrilla war against the United States for a decade, even after President Theodore Roosevelt declared the war over in 1902.

Older racial logics were at work during the Philippine-American War, as we can read from Olivares’s text:

They are a dark people — some are distinctively black — and our soldiers have fallen into the habit of calling them “niggers.” . . . Many of the people

Figure 4. The clothed Latina: Puerto Rican schoolteachers, ca. 1899. From Olivares, Our Islands and Their People

102 Nerissa S. Balce

resemble the negro in appearance, but that is as far as the similarity goes. For all the practical purposes of civilization, the mirthful, easy-going African is superior to these treacherous and blood-thirsty hybrid Malays. . . . The lamented General Lawton knew them well; a green mound in Arlington Cemetery attests his intimate acquaintance with these people, and he declared that the only good Filipinos were the dead ones. (559)

When Olivares mentions the practice of American soldiers referring to Filipinos as “niggers,” he justifies the violence and the carnage of the U.S.-led war against the Filipino revolutionaries. By describing Filipinos as “distinctively black,” when in truth many Filipinos at the time were of varying tones because of race mixing, Olivares underscores an American racist logic predicated on misrecognition and the stereotype of black infe- riority. By labeling Filipinos as “niggers” and by mentioning the words

Figure 5. The savage Filipina’s body, ca. 1899. From Olivares, Our Islands and Their People

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of General Lawton — that the only good Filipino is a dead one — Olivares unintentionally links the history of the conquest of the West to the con- quest of the Pacific with the Philippines as the new frontier. Lawton’s participation in the extermination of Native Americans was an experience he shared with other officers and American soldiers sent to the Philippine Islands. In fact, over 80 percent of the U.S. soldiers sent there had fought in the U.S.-Indian wars.45

With the violence of the Philippine-American War in mind, it thus becomes possible to “picture the invisible,”46 to imaginatively reconstruct the violence of American rule in the Philippines. The photographs of Filipinas in illustrated travel books display docile bodies under imperial control. The notion of “docility,” or how a human body is an “analysable and manipulable object,”47 was indeed an objective of U.S. colonial rule and Progressive Era ideas of social engineering. Filipinos needed to become meek and useful to be considered educated and civilized. Thus it was not enough to jail, deport, execute, or hang Filipinos who joined the revolution against the United States. The next generation of Filipinos had to be disci- plined through a U.S. system of education to become colonial subjects of the empire. Travel cultures supported the project of docility by presenting Filipino subjects in need of American tutelage. Echoing earlier travel texts that presented non-Western cultures as primitive and backward, many of the texts would emphasize how far removed the Philippine Islands were from the modern and civilized cultures of the West. For the writer Anna Northend Benjamin, disciplining the natives through corporal punish- ment is best: “I would say that where principle is involved it is impossible to be too firm with the Philippine native. . . . In whipping a native you are speaking to him in terms which he can understand.”48 Such advice is echoed by a statement from the American general Arthur MacArthur, father of General Douglas MacArthur, who was quoted saying that the Filipinos would need “the bayonet treatment” for ten years.49

These Filipina photographs we view today are indexical and iconic signs of the U.S. Empire. As indexes of empire, they document the forced establishment of American rule in the Philippines and disturb the official histories supporting American exceptionalism and innocence by laying bare the gendered and racial logics at work in visual representation. As iconic signs of empire, they articulate the violent and benevolent nature of U.S. rule. Photography as a technology of empire embodies the figurative and literal effects of American colonization for Filipina subjects. These archival bodies disturb and complicate contemporary ideas of American benevolence and innocence entrenched in official accounts of the U.S. nation’s history. The contexts of Filipina iconography are thus the histories of conquest, control, and discipline. Civilized bodies were white bodies that

104 Nerissa S. Balce

exemplified the ideals of white imperial masculinity and femininity. Those outside these ideals were subjected to the terrors of discipline expressed in acts of political disenfranchisement, the experience of economic hardship, and physical violence such as war.

Filipina Bodies Then and Now

Since the colonization of the Philippines by the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, sexual and racial discourses continue to haunt the term Filipina in the early twenty-first century. American orientalist fantasies of the Filipina savage continue in new media such as the Inter- net. Media scholars and Filipina feminists observe a disturbing phenome- non that many Filipinos know but prefer to ignore: a Google search of the word Filipina brings up Web sites for mail-order brides, pornography, and domestics for hire. The same cannot be said of the term Latina, though there are porn sites that display bodies of Latina women. The prurient and proletarian cyber associations for the term Filipina are imbricated, as the theorist Roland Tolentino has suggested, in “colonial, militarist and capitalist histories,” with the Internet as a technology of racialization and sexualization.50

While the media scholar Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and others have charted how the narratives of cyberspace and electronic communications “manage and engage” with orientalist myths such as Asian women’s sexu- alities and representations,51 my interest with the Filipina image returns to Tolentino’s trenchant critique on the geopolitics of Filipina bodies: that Filipinas have been “integrated into the circuits of transnationalism” as laboring bodies (domestic helpers and nurses) and as sexual bodies (entertainers and mail-order brides). I would add, however, that the inte- gration of Filipinas into the circuits of transnational capital begins with and is facilitated by what Shawn Michelle Smith terms as “technologies of vision” traceable to the nineteenth century, in particular photography and writing.52 The incorporation of Filipinas in cyberspace is connected to older American forms of photography, writing, and representation, older “American archives” from the beginnings of European and Ameri- can imperial expansion.53 Technologies of visuality such as photography in the past, and the Internet in the present, enable the incorporation of Filipina bodies. If, as the visual theorist Laura Wexler reminds us, turn- of-the-century photographs of Filipino men and women served as images of war displayed as peace,54 the images of Filipina women on the Internet at the turn of the twenty-first century are images of neocolonial violence displayed as postmodern capitalism. As new media technologies promise

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and deliver ever-increasing powers of information, mobility, and surveil- lance,55 the Filipina bodies in cyberspace are haunted by the histories of empire and the postmodern realities of capital as bodies that serve and as bodies for sale.

Filipino activists document and organize against these realities: (1) Filipinas comprise most of the 10 million Filipino migrant workers around the world; (2) in 2002, overseas Filipino migrants remitted or wired 7 bil- lion dollars to the Philippines; in effect, the very bodies of Filipinas keep the Philippine economy afloat; (3) from 1983 to 1995, around 50,000 Filipinas left the Philippines for the United States as mail-order brides; (4) while the last of the American military bases closed in 1992, there are still approximately 500,000 women and children engaged as sex workers.56 As the feminist scholars Vernadette Gonzalez and Robyn Rodriguez write, Filipina bodies counter “the ‘innocent’ notions of cyberdemocracy” and its claims to “transparency,” an American claim to innocence we can recall from the beginnings of empire building in the late nineteenth century: “Trafficking in women has intensified globally with the advent of telecom- munications technology, and while Filipinas are not the sole commodity in this traffic, they represent unique sites where histories of U.S. . . . imperial- isms, militarisms, and capitalisms coalesce.”57 Thus, while other scholars have examined the discourses of cyberspace in relation to nineteenth- century discourses of Manifest Destiny and orientalism, a discussion of Filipina bodies requires a historical engagement with both American imperialism and neocolonialism.

If colonial texts fetishized the native female’s breast as metonyms for the colony’s resources, late capitalist technologies such as the Internet fetishize the Filipina’s hands and breasts. Filipinas’ bodies, metonyms of the neocolonial status of the Philippines, live out the traumas of diaspora as mobile subjects forced to leave their home countries and work under severe exploitative conditions because of the globalization of poverty and inequality through industrialization. Disembodiment then, as a structural logic of cyberspace,58 takes on a menacing turn when we consider how Filipina bodies in the imperial archive and in cyberspace are indexical and iconic signs of the violence of empire and capital. The surly Filipinas of the imperial archive are now replaced by globalized smiles of female labor, yet like colonial representations of old, their smiles belie the violence of inhuman conditions of exploitation, physical and sexual abuse, poverty, maddening loneliness, and the terror of uncertainty and deportation. This year, a representative of the Philippine government, Secretary of Foreign Affairs Delia Albert, disclosed that approximately 500,000 out of 2 million Filipino men and women in the United States are undocumented.59 Since 9/11, Filipinos have been targets of arrests and deportation. In 2002 the

The Filipina

bodies in

cyberspace are

haunted by

the histories of

empire and the

postmodern

realities of capital

as bodies that

serve and as

bodies for sale.

106 Nerissa S. Balce

Department of Homeland Security deported 713 Filipinos, and Filipino community activists say that more than 80,000 Filipinos are now targets for arrest and removal under the program called Operation Endgame.60

The erotics of empire continue as Filipinas are visualized in our elec- tronic age. On 27 August 2004, news about an abused Filipina domestic worker, Nena Ruiz, appeared in print and electronic media. Ruiz was awarded $ 825,000 after she sued her employers, James J. Jackson and his wife, Elizabeth, for slavery. Jackson was vice president of legal affairs at Sony Pictures Entertainment. Ruiz, who is in her early sixties, was recruited from the Philippines by Elizabeth Jackson, who might be Filipina. The Jacksons own real estate in the Philippines, and this would be possible only if Elizabeth Jackson were a Filipino citizen. According to news reports, Ruiz claimed that “she was kept as an indentured slave for more than one year,” “received payments of only $300 for the entire year,” “was locked up, forced to care for the family dog,” and slept on a dog bed.61 Apart from her forced confinement, the Jacksons withheld her passport to discourage her from escaping, and even physically assaulted her. The jury found the Jacksons guilty of “false imprisonment, involuntary servitude, invasion of privacy, negligence and Labor Code violations.” While Filipino American newspapers celebrated Ruiz’s legal triumph, her case refracts the darker realities of hundreds of thousands of Filipinas in the United States who work for less than minimum wage and who live in fear as undocumented workers. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the legacy of American porno-tropical fantasies of the sexualized female savage continues in the era of globalization and late capital.

The queer African American novelist James Baldwin once wrote that “history is written in the color of my skin.”62 We could add that the violent histories of empire and capital are written on the bodies of Filipinas, on our bruised and bleeding hands and our brown neocolonial breasts.

Notes

An early version of this essay was first read as a lecture at the University of Mas- sachusetts, Amherst; Wellesley College; and the University of California, Berkeley, in October 2004; and at Mount Holyoke College, in March 2005. In Massachu- setts, I thank Fidelito C. Cortes, Mia Ong, Jeff Santa Ana, Greg Mullins, Richard Chu, Paula Chakravartty, Gianpaolo Baoicchi, Alice Nash, David Glassberg, and Amy Martin for their support and friendship. At UC Berkeley, I am indebted to the Critical Filipino Studies Working Group, with special thanks to Joanne Ron- dilla and Gladys Nubla. Early drafts of the essay were written during my term as a postdoctoral fellow and as a visiting faculty member for the University of Oregon’s Ethnic Studies Program. Maraming salamat to my mentor and colleague, Shari Huhndorf; salamat din to Steve Morozumi, Lyn Fujiwara, Cynthia Tolentino, and

The Filipina’s Breast 107

Martin Summers; thanks to Ruby Lazatin for her companionship and special thanks to my excellent research assistant, Maria Cecilia Regalado Hwang.

1. The term colonial breast is from Laura E. Donaldson, “The Breasts of Columbus: A Political Anatomy of Postcolonialism and Feminist Religious Dis- course,” in Postcolonialism, Feminism, and Religious Discourse, ed. Laura E. Don- aldson and Kwok Pui-lan (New York: Routledge, 2003), 41 – 58.

2. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper Perennial, 1984), 34 – 35.

3. Ibid., 35. I am mindful of the colonial context and the history of the geno- cide of native peoples with my use of the problematic term Indian. I examine in this essay the racist logic that is part of the term in relation to the image of Filipi- nos after 1898. The Spanish equivalent, indio, was also a common term used for Filipinos during the Spanish colonial period in the Philippines, which lasted for close to four hundred years. See Teodoro Agoncillo, A History of the Filipino People (1960; rpt. Quezon City: Garotech, 1990).

4. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 9. For a historical account of Columbus’s expedition as the beginnings of an “American Holocaust,” see David Stannard, American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

5. The term marvelous possessions is Greenblatt’s. 6. On sexual violence as a tool of genocide, see Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sex-

ual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge, MA: South End, 2005). 7. Scholars in feminist, colonial, and postcolonial studies have critiqued this

gendered tradition, particularly the sexual overtones of European and American imperial discourses. An abbreviated list of established and new scholars includes Oscar Campomanes, Lisa Lowe, Jenny Sharpe, T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Ella Shohat, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, M. Jacqui Alexander, Laura Donaldson, Anne McClintock, Gayatri Spivak, Lee Wallace, Mary Louise Pratt, Hazel Carby, Laura Wexler, Allan Punzalan Isaac, Kimberly Alidio, Sarita See, Haunani Kay Trask, Caren Kaplan, Amy Kaplan, Inderpal Grewal, and Antoinette Burton.

8. Rayna Green, Women in American Indian Society (New York: Chelsea House, 1992), 12 – 14. I am indebted to Shari Huhndorf for sharing this and other sources on Native American women and representation.

9. Laura E. Donaldson, “Introduction: God, Gold, Gender,” in Donaldson and Pui-lan, Postcolonialism, 8.

10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal

Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 2 – 11. For feminist critiques on representations of black women and the context of slavery, see also Jennifer DeVere Brody, Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Caroline A. Streeter, “Was Your Mama Mulatto? Notes toward a Theory of Racialized Sexuality in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora and Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust,” Callaloo 27, no. 3 (2004): 768 – 87.

13. The term sexualized savages is Sharpley-Whiting’s. 14. See Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad

Godzich (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986).

108 Nerissa S. Balce

15. On the history of colonial postcards and pornographic texts, see Lisa Z. Sigel, Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England, 1815 – 1914 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 50 – 80.

16. On colonial intimacy, see Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Impe- rial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of Califor- nia Press, 2002).

17. José Eduardo Limón, American Encounters: Greater Mexico, the United States, and the Erotics of Culture (Boston: Beacon, 1998), 4.

18. General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, founder of the famed Hampton Institute, coined the term “tender violence” to refer to education for ex-slaves and “newly pacified Indians.” See Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 52-53. On the violent history of Indian boarding schools, see Andrea Smith, Con- quest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2005), 35–54.

19. Harry Pratt Judson, “Professor Judson on Annexation and the Constitu- tion,” Literary Digest, 7 January 1899, 1.

20. Theodore S. Woolsey, “Professor Woolsey’s Arguments against Ratifying the Treaty,” Literary Digest, 7 January 1899, 1 – 2.

21. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 15. 22. Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of

Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 9. 23. Thomas Richards, The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and Fantasy of Empire

(London: Verso, 1993), 6. 24. Oscar V. Campomanes, “The New Empire’s Forgetful and Forgotten

Citizens: Unrepresentability and Unassimilability in Filipino-American Postco- lonialities,” Hitting Critical Mass: A Journal of Asian American Cultural Criticism 2 (1995): 148 – 49.

25. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York: Routledge, 1995).

26. Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus, 1 – 15. 27. M. Consuelo Leon W., “Foundations of the American Image of the

Pacific,” in Asia/Pacific as Space of Cultural Production, ed. Rob Wilson and Arif Dirlik (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 23 – 24.

28. Paul Lyons, “Opening Accounts in the South Seas: Poe’s Pym and Amer- ican Pacific Orientalism,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 42 (1996): 291 – 326.

29. Leon W., “Foundations of the American Image of the Pacific,” 20 – 24. 30. Scholars have briefly commented on the imperialist and pornographic

discourse of National Geographic. See Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins, Reading National Geographic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Sigel, Governing Pleasures, 51.

31. The relationship between intimacy and European imperialism has been discussed by Achille Mbembe and Ann Laura Stoler. See Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power.

32. Ella Elizabeth Clark and Margot Edmonds, Sacagawea of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 1 – 13. I am indebted to Shari Huhndorf for information and sources on Sacagawea and Pocahontas.

The Filipina’s Breast 109

33. See Robert S. Tilton, Pocahontas: The Evolution of an American Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Thanks to Shari Huhndorf for this citation.

34. Clara Sue Kidwell, “What Would Pocahontas Think? Women and Cul- tural Persistence,” Callaloo 17 (1994): 145 – 49.

35. Gary B. Nash, “The Hidden History of Mestizo America,” Journal of American History 82 (1995): 941 – 64.

36. Ann Laura Stoler, “Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in Twentieth-Century Colonial Cultures,” in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 348.

37. Shari M. Huhndorf, Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagi- nation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001).

38. Said, Orientalism; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992); Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Durham, NC: Duke Univer- sity Press, 1996); Caren Kaplan, “Getting to Know You: Travel, Gender, and the Politics of Representation in Anna and the King of Siam and the King and I,” in Late Imperial Culture, ed. Roman de la Campa, E. Ann Kaplan, and Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1995), 33 – 52; Amy Kaplan, “Romancing the Empire: The Embodiment of American Masculinity in the Popular Historical Novel of the 1890s,” American Literary History 2 (1990): 659–90; Kaplan, “Manifest Domes- ticity,” American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliogra- phy 70 (1998): 581– 606.

39. Lanny Thompson, “Representation and Rule in the Imperial Archipel- ago: Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawai‘i, and the Philippines under U.S. Dominion after 1898,” American Studies Asia 1 (2002): 3.

40. José de Olivares, Our Islands and Their People, as Seen with Camera and Pencil (St. Louis: N.D. Thompson, ca. 1899).

41. Thompson, “Representation and Rule in the Imperial Archipelago,” 2. 42. Ibid., 3 – 4. 43. Benito M. Vergara Jr., Displaying Filipinos: Photography and Colonialism

in Early Twentieth Century Philippines (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1995), 81.

44. Olivares, Our Islands and Their People, 590 – 91. 45. The military and cultural connections between the U.S.-Indian wars and

the Philippine-American War have been discussed by Stuart Creighton Miller, “Benevolent Assimilation”: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899 – 1903 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982); Anne Paulet, “The Only Good Indian Is a Dead Indian: The Use of United States Indian Policy as a Guide for the Conquest and Occupation of the Philippines, 1898 – 1905” (PhD diss., Rut- gers University, 1995); Walter L. Williams, “United States Indian Policy and the Debate over Philippine Annexation: Implications for the Origins of American Imperialism,” Journal of American History 66 (1980): 810 – 31. I thank Oscar Cam- pomanes for introducing me to Williams’s essay.

46. The phrase “picturing the invisible” is from W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 40.

47. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (1975; rpt. New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 136.

110 Nerissa S. Balce

48. Anna Northend Benjamin, “Some Filipino Characteristics,” Outlook (1901): 1007.

49. William Pomeroy, “ ‘Pacification’ in the Philippines, 1898 – 1913,” France- Asie 21 (1967): 432.

50. I am indebted to the pathbreaking work of Vernadette V. Gonzalez and Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, “Filipina.Com: Wives, Workers, and Whores on the Cyberfrontier,” in Asian America.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cyberspace, ed. Rachel C. Lee and Sau-ling Cynthia Wong (New York: Routledge, 2003), 215 – 34; and Roland Tolentino, National/Transnational: Subject Formation and Media in and on the Philippines (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2001), 1 – 24.

51. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Orienting Orientalism, or How to Map Cyber- space,” in Lee and Wong, Asian America.Net, 3 – 36.

52. See Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).

53. The term American archives is Smith’s. 54. Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperial-

ism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 108. 55. Caren Kaplan, “Transporting the Subject: Technologies of Mobility and

Location in an Era of Globalization,” Publications of the Modern Language Associa- tion of America/PML A 117 (2002): 32 – 42.

56. Tolentino, National/Transnational, 1 – 11. 57. Gonzalez and Rodriguez, “Filipina.com,” 217. 58. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Orienting Orientalism, or How to Map Cyber-

space,” in AsianAmerica.Net: Ethnicity, Nationalism and Cyberspace, ed. Rachel C. Lee and Sau-ling Cynthia Wong (New York: Routledge, 2003), 3–36.

59. Carina I. Roncesvalles, “DFA [Philippines Department of Foreign Affairs] to Push for Inclusion of Filipinos in Bush Plan,” Business World online (Philippines), 12 January 2004.

60. On the Department of Homeland Security’s Operation Endgame pro- gram, see R. M. Arrieta, “The New Immigrant Roundup,” in AlterNet.org, 21 June 2004, www.alternet.org/story/18997.

61. “Woman Kept as Domestic Slave,” abc7.com, 27 August 2004; Joe Sayas, “Enslaved Pilipina Domestic Helper Wins $800,000 Jury Verdict,” Asian Journal On-Line, 18 September 2004, www.asianjournal.com/cgi-bin/view_info.cgi?code= 00006763&category=IM.

62. James Baldwin and Margaret Mead, A Rap on Race (New York: Dell, 1971), 190.