The Filipino Primitive. Sarita Echavez See

da Silva’s description and elaboration of the “subject of transparency” in her 2007 book Toward a Global Idea of Race.60 In other words, the Subject without properties is the subject of property and ownership. Noting the close proximity between people of color—in Silva’s phrase, the subjects of affectability—and the very idea of content, Hiram Pérez writes in the aforementioned essay, “Colored folk perform affect but can never theorize it.”61 Indeed, brown bodies “must never improvise on their brownness. Whiteness experiences such improvisations as the theft of something very dear: its universal property claim to the uniqueness of being.”62 Together these scholars remind us, as I will elaborate in chapter 1, that the objectivity belonging to the universal subject of critique in fact constitutes a masked and particular subjectivity: the European subject of transparency who possesses a monopoly on the capacity for thought and judgment.

      Even more, these scholars remind us that if we cannot “have” a space in the university, we must create a temporary space—a contingent stop—for unowned knowledge that sees no contradiction between Moten’s call for singularity and Perez’s reminder about unoriginality. It is a stop or a pause, rather than a space. It has to be. We have to be okay with being on the move. We have to abandon the seductions of belonging and settling. We have to roll the dice for the riskier yet deeper pleasures of the rhythm of temporary shelter in a world overwhelmingly but not totally devoted to the habits of accumulation by dispossession.

      PART I

      The Archive

      Dispossession by Accumulation

      1

      Progress through the Museum

      Knowledge Nullius and the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History

      The giant canoe stands still. The small child is shy. She approaches the canoe. Carved by Jim Pashegoba (Ojibwe) in the 1890s, the dugout canoe is landlocked on the floor of the anthropology gallery in the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History (UMMNH). Located in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the museum is visited by about eighty thousand people every year, including twenty thousand schoolchildren.1 Pashegoba’s canoe stretches across the length of the museum’s anthropology gallery and divides the Native American display cases along one side of the room from the Philippine display cases along the other side. Nothing stops the child from walking up to the canoe. There is no glass partition. No rope-off stands. She knows she is not supposed to touch anything here. She knows she is not supposed to run or shout. This is a museum. But her arm cannot help stretching forth. Her fingers point at the boat that in turn points itself forward. The grownup standing beside her reads aloud from the sign posted high above her head: “Please sit carefully in the dugout canoe. Have fun!” The grownup nods, and the child clambers into the canoe. She runs her fingers wonderingly across the wood.

      Figure 1.1. Dugout canoe carved by Jim Pashegoba (Ojibwe). University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor. Photograph by Mark Gjukich.

      Touch. Do Not Touch. Desire and prohibition. These are the two drives that confront and divide the school-age children who are the typical visitors along with their families to educational museums today like the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History. The first drive consists of a desire to touch what they see. The second drive consists of a prohibition against that desire. Children repeatedly are schooled in the lesson of not touching and of successfully suppressing their desires, especially in institutional spaces. But on the UMMNH’s fourth floor, in the anthropology room, Pashegoba’s dugout canoe provides children with a rare release from that prohibition. During my several visits to the museum, I have witnessed the sheer joy of children clambering into the deep canoe, momentarily freed from the rules and etiquette that typically govern the display of things, animals, and people in the natural history museum. The children’s delight stems from the absence of the glass screen that usually serves as partition, dividing them from objects in display cases.

      Even as Pashegoba’s canoe offers to children a momentary freedom from the museum’s rules of exhibition, it embodies the museum’s crisis of representation about the politics of its collections and their display. Made over into a child’s plaything, the canoe becomes an example of how indigenous cultures or first nations are made to “last” for others, as Jean O’Brien has put it, an instance of what Gustavo Verdesio calls “epistemic violence.”2 The museum, moreover, provides little to no context—historical or otherwise—for the appearance of the Philippines in proximity with Native America. It has no narrative to account for the American conquest of the Philippines, let alone the university’s role in founding and administering the colony.3 The proximity between the Native and the Filipino is left entirely unexplained by the museum. But the spatial design of the exhibition speaks volumes. As it is experienced by the museum’s visitors, the canoe comes to mark the boundary and proximity between the Native and the Philippine and the Child. Sitting in the canoe, the child mediates between the Indian and the Filipino.4 If we understand the child as a kind of primitive within the family, as yet untutored in the mores of civilized behavior, she triangulates the primitives in the anthropology room. But if the child ever asked her grownup about the relationship between herself, the Ojibwe canoe, and the Visayan burial items, neither child nor grownup would receive help from the museum. The relationship between the museumgoer and the exhibitions that they have come to see and learn about is left unexplained. This lack of explanation indexes the museum’s larger crisis of representation about the politics of its collections, even as this lack also allows the racist and colonial ideology of the backward or disappeared primitive to occupy that space and thus become self-evident, a form of unquestioned common sense.

      Figure 1.2. Sign posted in the anthropology room at the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History, Ann Arbor. Photograph by Mark Gjukich.

      This chapter addresses the museum’s crisis of representation by addressing two questions: What is the nature of the relationship between these two instances of the racial primitive, the Native and the Filipino and, hence, between these two instances of primitive accumulation, the material, literal collecting of artifacts and the ideological collecting of knowledge? I propose that the university is an exemplary site for the investigation of the politics of knowledge production and that the literal and ideological foundations of knowledge production are most visible in the university’s museum. I focus on the collection and display of the Filipino in the university museum, and I take up this problematic of the proximity of the Filipino to the Native to show how these primitive proximities—and the distinct kinds of colonial and settler colonial structures of domination that they index—play a crucial role in facilitating how the university advances its commitment to knowledge. These kinds of primitive proximities are created by the university museum’s commitment to two processes of accumulation: the material and the epistemological. The material accumulation of the backward or disappeared primitive forms the epistemological foundation of Western knowledge production. In pedagogical spaces like the UMMNH’s anthropology exhibition, the collections of the “primitive” symbolize both the racial origins that (white European) Man has transcended and the ideological origins of the accumulative drive toward power/knowledge. In short, the literal accumulation of the primitive instantiates an accumulative epistemology, the endless and violent quest for accrued knowledge. As I elaborate toward the end of the chapter, the colonial fantasy of terra nullius—the creation of empty land by the genocidal emptying of land—is accompanied by what I call “knowledge nullius.” The university’s commitment to knowledge turns out to be rhetorical cover not only for the construction of accumulative epistemology as knowledge but also for the will to power.

      Filipino Foundations

      The contemporary display of Philippine things and peoples in the UMMNH serves as a powerful allegory and a “real” case of the primitive accumulation subtending imperial knowledge. The University of Michigan established its natural history and anthropology collections in the late nineteenth and