| This is a study of imperial ideology as revealed by a colonial place. That place is a Philippine hill station-town called Baguio. Progressive-era urban planner Daniel Burnham, renowned for his 1893 World's Fair "White City" design in Chicago, plotted this retreat far north of the Manila capital for U.S. colonialists and their families not long after the United States acquired the Philippine archipelago in 1898. Far from the torrid climate and politics of the lowlands, mountaintop Baguio was to be a place where the colonial regime could be safely reproduced, and from which the colony might be securely governed. I take place, and this place in particular, as an expression and evidence of imperial aspirations. As an enclave and relatively small territorial take, Baguio was in keeping with the light footprint style of "new" empire. The place also gave evidence of relations between colonialists and Philippine peoples. It reflected a defensive posture: Philippine resistance forced Americans literally, into the mountains. Baguio was a retreat indeed.;Through a history of Baguio, American Imperial Pastoral excavates the material and symbolic architecture of the greater imperial regime—its soaring ambitions and the practices that buttressed them. I show that the creation of this new empire, hailed as the frictionless, natural, and benevolent expansion of capitalism, was underwritten by acts of material and cultural dispossession. These included forms of violence, coercion, and material change more often associated with older, formal colonial rule. I also suggest the irony of U.S. grand strategy, as this imperial grab in the Pacific quickly became a "Philippine tangle," as William James so aptly put it. Recalcitrant, if not rebellious natives, the resistance of nature, the contradictory imperial mission, and the ideological constraints colonialists unwittingly imposed on themselves, seemed to ambush imperialism's greatest advocates.;To contend with this unexpected blowback and to order the frustrating contradictions of a self-styled anti-colonial empire, American imperialists re-tooled the classic design of the pastoral, that fantasy of a peaceful middle ground poised between an untamed wilderness and the artifice and constraints of civilization. Through Baguio, Americans sought to make the pastoral real in spatial and social terms. This American imperial pastoral—the vision of Baguio as a respite from war and conflict and as a place of harmony between natives and colonialists—helped to rationalize those acts of dispossession and to neutralize contradictions of the empire both for imperialists and their subjects. This imperial pastoral fantasy of benevolently tending a new empire was, of course, a self-deception and also an evasion of U.S. domestic politics and social strife, which drove the violent, imperial take in the first place.;By stressing ideology, place, imperialism on-the-ground, capitalism and its contradictions, and the frustrations and disappointments of the imperial mission, my work builds on, but is distinct from recent studies of U.S. imperialism. These develop our understandings of racial formation, gender, statecraft, and the creation of categories of knowledge within imperial and colonial contexts. These studies, often focusing on technologies of rule, view power as the construction of rationales and hierarchies of difference by which political recognition and the rights of citizenship could be withheld. While these problems figure into this project, American Imperial Pastoral also emphasizes economic forms. Rather than take the colonial economy and imperial political economy as given, as obvious, or law-like in operation, I elucidate their cultural and symbolic dimensions and attempt to add these, largely neglected concerns, to the field of American imperial studies. The interests of this project are, thus, cultural and material and all that lies between: perception, self-deception, experience, contradiction, and meaning. My interest is as much the structure of imperial power as its personality and character: its architecture, the cultural forms that emerge when imperial fantasies hit the ground. |
