Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2023. US$30.00, paper. ISBN 9780226828480.
Among the key questions to emerge in the wake of the Spanish-American War, when the US added the erstwhile Spanish colonies of Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico to its roster of sovereign (but “unincorporated”) territories, was whether the US Constitution would “follow the flag,” i.e., provide the benefits of US citizenship to the diverse tropical islanders who had so suddenly become US subjects. Alvita Akiboh’s fascinating history, without eschewing this pivotal juridical question, instead “follows the flag itself” into the new US colonial territories (5), focusing on emerging practices of flag veneration through which meaning was invested (and sometimes contested) in colorful rectangles of undulating fabric, and on the symbolic economies of colonial stamps and currency. For Akiboh, these objects of official material culture are seen as symbols of national and imperial identity to which new colonial subjects existed in ambiguous relation, and as markers of sovereignty that were made visible and tactile in everyday life, even in settings that the relatively small US colonial cadres did not often reach. The object lessons offered are at times complex, reflecting the cultural work of what the author thoughtfully (if clunkily) calls “US American” imperialism, but also explore how the symbolic objects could be transformed by colonial subjects into objects of hope, and leveraged in ways intended to help meet their own needs and desires. As one Virgin Islander responded to being “taken under the Stars and Stripes” at a stagey Transfer Day event in 1917: “From this moment on it is our flag and in every respect we demand every privilege, all the rights and all the protection for which it stands” (31).
After a substantive introduction, the book is divided into five chapters that are organized thematically and unfold in a broadly sequential fashion followed by a brief conclusion. Chapter 1 returns to the aftermath of 1898 to follow the career of the Stars and Stripes as it was “planted,” “hoisted,” and “lived under” across the so-called Insular Territories and Hawai‘i, the latter annexed in 1898 as an incorporated US territory. The chapter also tracks the new rituals of flag veneration among colonial officials and private civil society organizations like the Grand Army of the Republic, a Union veterans’ association that raised funds to donate Old Glory to every schoolhouse in the newly acquired territories.
Covering roughly the same period, chapter 2 focuses on the “pocket-sized imperialism” of stamps and currency in US colonial settings, providing a window into the unsettled conditions of circulation for monetary as well as symbolic economies. Given the ardour of investment in these symbolic projects and their seeming ubiquity in everyday life, Akiboh argues, it is not surprising that symbols, especially flags, were sometimes contested or reappropriated as tools of resistance.
Chapter 3 looks at some of the challenges that emerged to the “symbolic supremacy” of US iconography and the responses generated from sometimes insecure US imperialists whose hackles were raised by them. Here the author asks us to broaden our understandings of resistance to include actions not intended to produce political change, such as the practice among Hawaiian women of creating Kingdom of Hawai‘i flag quilts in domestic spaces. As Akiboh observes, the Hawaiian colours were seemingly unobjectionable to US colonials, or else ambiguously received: “The flag’s association with the monarchy was muddled, such that an outside observer could not know if its display was a message of support or protest, allegiance or resistance” (91). And yet the flag bans described for the Philippines (1907–1919), and the police crackdowns on flag waiving nationalist protests in Puerto Rico, culminating in the brutal 1937 Ponce massacre, suggest that when flags were invested with more explicit political intent, the distinction between political expression and more active forms of resistance were sometimes perceived acutely by the actors involved.
The remaining two chapters turn to the Pacific War and its outcomes. Chapter 4 focuses on the Japanese occupation of the Philippines and Guam as erstwhile US colonial subjects shifted to life under the “Rising Sun,” offering opportunities for comparison and, for Akiboh, surprising similarities between the two colonial powers in their deployment of symbolic objects. In Guam, Akiboh interrogates the contradictions of an abiding tradition of US patriotism. This is reflected in accounts of CHamorus risk-taking by hiding contraband US flags during the Japanese occupation, but rejects explanations of the phenomenon as one of false consciousness, even as the paradox of promises of US protection came to be realized in a landscape devastated in the US reconquest and enduring role as “an American fortress in the Pacific” that has served to reproduce Guam’s geopolitical vulnerability. Chapter 5 takes the US empire to task for promoting decolonization among its European allies (and new allies Japan and Germany) while, with the notable exception of the Philippines, holding on to its own extraterritorial possessions, including internalizing Hawai‘i as a state, elevating Puerto Rico to commonwealth status, and adding new UN Pacific Trust territories.
Featuring more than 50 images harvested from archives, Akiboh hews closely throughout the book to the stuff of flags, stamps, and currency. Not surprisingly, given the wide historical and geographical scope of the contents, there were times when a thickening of context—for example, around the history of informal European and US imperialism in Hawai‘i that anticipated the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom and 1898 US annexation, or the internal class differences in the Philippines that an anti-colonial nationalism, and symbolic conflicts over the flag, may have allowed Philippine nationalists to elide—could have sharpened the analysis. Then too, some historic settings of US empire, including the Panama Canal Zone, territorial Alaska, even the long occupation of Haiti, are largely ignored in the study, though they would appear to meet the author’s criteria for colonial territories. But one book can only cover so many territories, and indeed, that I am now wondering about the nature of the currency exchanged in Port-au-Prince in the 1920s, or about the size and location of flags waiving across the Canal Zone for much of the twentieth century, is actually a pretty good indicator of Akiboh’s success in making US empire visible in new ways. Even where I disagreed with their interpretations, Akiboh’s narratives, which are plentiful in the book, tend to allow for complexity, and should lend themselves well to classroom discussion.
Imperial Material is a welcome contribution to studies of the (US) American empire as it stretched globally across the tropics but remained, paradoxically, local at all points, shedding light on the contested relations through which empires communicate materially and symbolically with their subjects while also calling attention to the persistence of US colonial relations in contemporary Pacific and Caribbean settings.
Scott Kirsch
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill