The Filipino Primitive. Sarita Echavez See

      

      THE FILIPINO PRIMITIVE

      The Filipino Primitive

      Accumulation and Resistance in the American Museum

      Sarita Echavez See

      NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

      New York

      NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

      New York

       www.nyupress.org

      © 2017 by New York University

      All rights reserved

      References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

      ISBN: 978-1-4798-4266-7 (hardback)

      ISBN: 978-1-4798-2505-9 (paperback)

      For Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data, please contact the Library of Congress.

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      CONTENTS

       Acknowledgments

       Introduction: Accumulating the Primitive

       PART I. THE ARCHIVE: DISPOSSESSION BY ACCUMULATION

       1. Progress through the Museum: Knowledge Nullius and the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History

       2. Foreign in a Domestic Space: Progressivist Imperialism and the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum

       PART II. THE REPERTOIRE OF DISPOSSESSION

       3. Lessons from the Illiterate: Carlos Bulosan and the Staged Wages of Romance

       4. The Booty and Beauty of Contemporary Filipino/American Art: Stephanie Syjuco’s RAIDERS

       Conclusion: Accumulation Now and Then

       Notes

       Bibliography

       Index

       About the Author

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      I am indebted to Stephanie Syjuco, Lonnie Carter, and Ma-Yi Theater Company, especially Ralph Peña and Jorge Ortell, for their brilliant work, and I thank them for their kind forbearance as I have tried to do justice to their creations. For their generosity in spirit and time, I am grateful to the staff at the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, especially John Klausmeyer and Amy Harris; and the staff at the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum, especially Barb MacGowan and Bobbie Ramsey. I thank the Dean’s Office of the College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the University of California Riverside for a timely grant that helped to fund book production. Special thanks to Joshua Sung, Jason Corañez Bolton, Dakota Lindsi Tu, and Alex Ratanapratum for their research assistance; Mark Gjukich, Matt Zugale, and Lynda Fitzgibbon for permission to reproduce their photography; Bradley Cardozo and the other members of the Ethnography As Activism Subgroup on Repatriation at the University of Michigan for their insistence on the merging of politics and research; and my colleagues in Media and Cultural Studies at U.C. Riverside, who make the day job a joyous challenge.

      Eric Zinner helped me see that there was indeed a there there before I could discern anything. Fred Moten, Bakirathi Mani, Lucy Burns, Karen Tongson, Thea Tagle, Alexandra Dalferro, and Chairat Polmuk kindly invited me to give talks at their respective campuses that helped me to develop the book. Paula Chakravartty, Denise da Silva, and Lorenzo Veracini provided excellent editorial feedback on earlier essay versions. Allan Isaac and again Denise da Silva provided feedback both generous and sharp at a later critical stage. Clare Counihan’s editorial acumen is wondrous and frightening and helped the chapters take on shape in ways that allowed me to despair less. I have the finest of writing companions, those who continue to believe in the importance and even primacy of talking about rather than merely reading one another’s work: Marie Lo, Sadia Abbas, David Lloyd, Kimberly Alidio, Nadine Naber, Jodi Kim, Karlyn Koh, and Christine So; the “Hangouts” Faye Chen, Anthony Ocampo, and Jason Magobo Perez; the FSP gang Lorena Llosa, Nicolas Zegre, Hall Bjornstad, and Joy Gayles; and the PTF gang of women professors at U.C. Riverside. Alan Krohn talked me into doing the writing. And Hiram Pérez has helped me keep hope alive all these years we’ve known each other by refusing to discuss the writing. For their love and support throughout, I am profoundly grateful to my parents, Anicia Echavez See and See Chak Mun, and my brother and sister-in-law, Gerald and Amy See. David Lloyd does it all—reads the writing, talks about the writing, doesn’t talk about the writing, walks away from the writing—and it is my luck to be able to learn daily from him how to give, so thoughtfully and unthinkingly.

      Introduction

      Accumulating the Primitive

      They must be soldiers or militiamen. They are armed white men. They must be readying themselves for frontier war or at the very least a skirmish with dangerous savages. But they are not soldiers. They are scientists. This is a portrait of a professor encircled by his students. In the 1870s the amateur naturalist Joseph Beal Steere left his home in Michigan and embarked on a circumglobal expedition that included the Philippines and that resulted in a donation of sixty thousand specimens—botanical, zoological, and anthropological—to his alma mater, the University of Michigan. This massive donation prompted the university to award Steere its first honorary doctorate and to build its first natural history museum building. In 1887, the year of this portrait with his students, Steere went to the Philippines for the second time and returned with even more animals, shells, and plants to donate to the university’s collection. Today, Steere’s accumulation of this material is known for constituting a significant part of the founding collection for the University of Michigan’s Museum of Natural History, and this portrait of Steere and his students is displayed in the museum’s Philippine exhibition. In this book, I understand the imperial archive as a mode of accumulation. More specifically, I understand the imperial archive as a mode of accumulating a special kind of capital—knowledge—and I contend that this accumulation of knowledge depends on the idea of the racial primitive.

      Figure I.1. Photograph displayed in the Philippine exhibit at the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor. Photograph by Mark Gjukich.

      In the chapters that follow on Philippine