No abstract

Management of labor was central to articulating and constructing U.S. colonialism in the southern Philippines. Governed by American military officers for fifteen years (1899–1914), the major island of Mindanao and those of the Sulu Archipelago became sites of intensive race management efforts. Colonial officials identified racialized Muslim and Lumad societies as out of step with the modern world of work and developed myriad programs to address this “problem,” including mandatory service on public works projects, carceral labor, industrial education, and directed markets. Unevenly applied and frequently contested, these initiatives generated a range of responses from local actors. The drive to create disciplined laborers through incentive, coercion, and violence shaped state building in the region and linked it to preoccupations with work and racial reform in other U.S. imperial possessions and the wider colonized world.

This chapter mentions Arthur S. Pier, who wrote American Apostles to the Philippines that celebrated many of the men responsible for colonial development in the Muslim South, such as Leonard Wood and John Pershing. It highlights tales of heroic civilizing feats in the book that were accomplished in the face of local resistance and anti-imperialist naysaying. It also mentions the book “The Brethren” that makes a case for U.S. extraterritorial power, which includes an essay exploring U.S. colonialism relative to other empires. The chapter explains how the United States borrowed from and bettered upon European models. It refers to authors that contended trusteeship and decolonization were natural outcomes of a four-decade march toward freedom in the Philippines.

This chapter talks about Moros and Americans negotiating an increasingly globalized world beyond colony and metropole. It mentions a vernacular dime novel about the St. Louis World's Fair published in 1904 titled Uncle Bob and Aunt Becky's Strange Adventures at the World's Great Exposition. It also describes how overseas colonies appeared to a skeptical metropolitan public and how cultural producers appropriately portrayed the America's foreign subjects. The chapter mentions the U.S. newspapers that followed the Moros closely as they met with presidents, performed for midwestern crowds, took in the Manhattan skyline, and embraced collegiate life. It cites the Moros' appearance in assorted fictions, such as comic operas, children's adventure stories, radio serials, and motion pictures that manufactured Muslim colonial subjects and presented them in varied ways to a curious public.

This chapter examines the pleasures and anxieties of American colonials as they negotiated landscapes significant with hazard. It reviews the writings of Charles Ivins and others that contain vivid depictions of how schismatic notions of the tropics and their inhabitants shaped colonial rule. It also describes the social environment of Mindanao-Sulu that laid bare the tension between the integrationist claims of the tutelary colonial state and the continued operation of racially exclusionist structures. The chapter mentions Outlook magazine journalist and playwright Atherton Brownell, who fawned over Zamboanga as a model of cleanliness and tropical picturesqueness. It notes empire builders in Mindanao-Sulu that looked to preestablished discourses on tropical architecture, sanitation, and urban planning for inspiration.