Writing Past Colonialism. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2010. xi, 282 pp. (Tables, maps, B&W photos.) US$28.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-8248-3488-3.
Despite repeated protestations to the contrary, expressed over the course of several different historical periods, the United States has had a long history of colonial expansion, and has proceeded either to incorporate the conquered peoples of other lands into its body politic or to establish some more obviously imperial form of rule over them. This book closely examines one of those expansionist bursts, the conquest and/or acquisition of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawai’i, the Philippines and Guam in 1898, and provides a careful comparison of how the United States then set about establishing its dominion over them. Thompson’s goal here is to examine the ways in which various writers, photographers and functionaries represented the peoples and cultures of these islands to the American government and populace in words and photographs, and to then consider the relationships between the specific discursive strategies and the kinds of administrative and legal solutions ultimately applied to the political status of each. He concludes that “the operative principle of this imperial discourse was that the multiple imperial subjects were to be ruled differently, according to their level of civilization and capacity for self-government” (246).
He employs two overarching approaches. In the first, he focuses particularly on gender, race and class, and on the ways in which each region’s potential for political development and eventual self-government or incorporation into the union is gauged as a consequence of imagined masculine, white and elite virtues, or the absence of them. In the second, he demonstrates, with notable success, the attention given to ethnic, racial, religious and geographic differences within and between the different island possessions. Perspectives drawn from understandings of Darwinian evolution popular at the time loom large, but even more prominent are the social evolutionary categories that were being formulated by thinkers such as L.H. Morgan and E.B. Tylor, with their sociocultural hierarchies leading through stages characterized as “savage,” barbarian” and “civilized.” We can see here an early example of the ways in which the social sciences were put to use serving government policy.
At the time, enormous attention was paid to the intersecting questions of where exactly these peoples were located on an evolutionary scale and just how feasible it would be for outsiders—American administrators—to advance them along the scale. Thompson captures this well: “[T]he theory of social evolution deployed both a trope of classification and a narrative of progress. On the one hand, peoples were classified, ranging on a scale from the most backward to the most advanced. On the other hand, the narrative of progress held out the hope that backward peoples could advance, especially under the tutelage of superior civilizations” (90). To my mind, however, he falls a bit short when it comes to evaluating the contradictory perspectives that lay behind these positions. In the same way that expansionists were conflicted about whether and how to bring “inferior” peoples into the fold, anti-imperialists, it should be remembered, also struggled with their own doubts about the right thing to do: should the United States simply walk away or should Americans help the peoples they subdued and, if they did, how would the US ever be able to walk away from these commitments? Such questions continue to plague Americans today as they contemplate their country’s involvements in Afghanistan, Iraq and a dozen other situations.
There is also a thoughtful chapter dealing with the legal wrangles entangled in establishing the new patterns of government in each of the territories. In the “insular cases” the Supreme Court had to decide islands’ status within constitutional bounds, and questions about who had ultimate authority over them. Its majority opinion defended the country’s right to conquer territory and to subjugate the inhabitants; it further held that “We are also of the opinion that the power to acquire territory by treaty implies not only the power to govern such territory, but to prescribe upon what terms the United States will receive its inhabitants, and what their status shall be in … the ‘American Empire’” (207). While rendered well over a century ago, these rulings continue to inform American control over Puerto Rico and Guam, and remain relevant to issues in Hawai’i and elsewhere.
I would point briefly to two drawbacks in what is an otherwise excellent work. First, Thompson has an unfortunate tendency to repeat, in slightly paraphrased terms, almost every quote he employs; I suspect that most individuals likely to read this would be able to glean the meanings without this redundancy. Second, because the book focuses so much on representations, it relies extensively on period photographs. Unfortunately, the University of Hawai’i Press, which is otherwise to be praised for its willingness to produce work of this sort, has for some time now failed to provide much in the way of support for its authors, who are charged with nearly all the tasks ancillary to publication. This undoubtedly accounts for the rather mediocre quality of the reproductions here. When we are being asked to carefully consider details in photo after photo, it is frustrating to gaze at images that do not enable us to see the details.
Glenn Petersen
City University of New York, New York, USA
p. 686