1
âWhich Way to the Philippines?â
United Stages of Empire
The fame of the Philippine exposition has captured the Worldâs Fair city, and the most constant question which the Jefferson Guards have to answer is, âWhich way to the Philippines?â
âNew York Times, 1904
In the early decades of the twentieth century, the Filipino/a performing body appears in piecemeal form on diverse U.S. stages, including the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, also known as the St. Louis Worldâs Fair, and touring assemblies called âchautauquasâ that featured music, lectures, speeches, and other acts combining education and entertainment. Some choice (and well-known) representations included Filipinos as buxom âVisayan girls, noted for their beautyâ or as savage âdog-eating and head-hunting Igorotsâ (âWhich Way to the Phillipines?â). Filipinos were also objects of mimicry in theater productions, by both white and black Americans, in venues across major American cities such as New York and Chicago. On the one hand, the sheer number of such reproductions of the Filipino/a performing body speaks to its formulaic, and often numbingly savage presence on the stages of U.S. empire. On the other hand, the familiarity and portability of the Filipino/a performing body occludes the very material and affective attachments that found its visibility. In this chapter, I track this recurring appearance of the Filipino/a as an imaginative and embodied consolidation of the institutions of empire, and as a corruptive presence on the stages of empire: Filipino/a bodies are consumed for profit even as they are appropriated for pleasures that exceed the workings of empire.
I turn to two prominent performance sites, the St. Louis Worldâs Fair and the genre of American musical theater, to consider what role Filipinos played within the larger imaginary of U.S. empire. These various performing stages function, in many ways, as a âcontact zone,â a complex terrain of interaction between American patrons and Filipino/a performers, and so also between the United States and the Philippines. In her well-known formulation, Mary Louise Pratt defines âcontact zonesâ as âsocial spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world todayâ (7). Pratt offers the concept of âcontact zonesâ to shift away from the over-determined expansionist expression of âcolonial frontierâ and âdiffusionist accounts of conquest and dominationâ (7). The term âcontact zonesâ stresses the âinteractive, improvisational dimensions of imperial encounters, emphasizing how subjects get constituted in and by their relations to each otherâ (8). This semantic shift, from âcolonial frontierâ to âcontact zones,â extends our readings of imperial encounters to include multiple viewpoints, decentering the hegemonic perspective of conquest and domination. âInteraction,â âcopresence,â and âinterlocking understanding and practicesâ undo the totalizing script of colonialism to emphasize a relational process. The mutually constitutive character of the âcontact zone,â as Rafael Perez-Torres argues, is not a âsimple mĂŠlange or passive mixture but a volatile, contested, contestatory, and endlessly innovative dynamicâ (33). The concept of âcontact zone,â as interactive and improvisational, I suggest, forges affinity with the analytic of performance.1 The lens of performance foregrounds a structure of hermeneutics that leaves open the possibility of interpreting the colonial script. Through spectacular acts of performance, through puro arte, Filipino/a bodies instantiate and exceed the totalizing script of colonialism, inviting forms of critical engagement that emphasize more the incompleteness of and the possibilities of inherited histories. Here, the concept of âcontact zonesâ frames the various stages upon which U.S.-Philippine history are re/enacted, insisting on the uneven relations of power that undergird these exchanges and events.
Ambivalence marks the early years of U.S. imperial rule, as colonial fantasies collided with the spiraling dreams of Philippine nationhood. Sites such as the St. Louis Worldâs Fair, chautauquas, and theater productions convey the extent to which popular entertainment participated in the consolidating of U.S. imperial culture.2 They had a shared interest in developing the pedagogical dimension of popular entertainment as a vehicle of empire. These cultural sites performed the necessary labor of imagining the âunknownâ of imperial contact, of literalizing the kinds of relations it would produce. The St. Louis Worldâs Fair, more so than other sites, sought to demonstrate the United Statesâ emergence as an industrialized nation at the forefront of technological explorations. The allâAfrican American musical theater production The Shoo-Fly Regiment, which toured in numerous states, including New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Arkansas, was among a repertoire of plays and musicals that also dramatized the vagaries of U.S.-Philippine conflict. Together, these two seemingly diverse cultural sites, the Worldâs Fair and American musical theater, compel, I will suggest, complex brownface performances of the U.S.-Philippine contact zones.
Let me first qualify the two forms of brownface performances at work here. First is the Filipino/a body at the St. Louis Worldâs Fair, staged as a spectacular exemplar of racial difference. The U.S. government, in collaboration with Filipino state officials, brought Filipinos to St. Louis as anthropological/ethnographic displays. People from different parts of the Philippines were exhibited in their native garb, and made to perform their daily life for the fairgoers. A distinct area of the fairground was designated as the Philippine Reservation, also known as the Philippine Village, to approximate the spatial and material origins of its savage inhabitants. The Philippine Reservation and its activities were designed, in short, to route the Filipino/a body into a discourse of civilization. The exposure of the Filipino/a body in this instance is a brownface performance orchestrated for and by an imperialist agenda.
The second form of brownface performance I wish to demarcate is the portrayal of the Filipino/a and the Philippines by non-Filipinos, enacted to service the narrative of a benevolent U.S. empire. While the St. Louis Worldâs Fair has been the subject of numerous scholarly works in Filipino Studies, The Shoo-Fly Regiment has yet to be interrogated for its staging of the Philippines and the Filipino/a body. The brownface performance of the Philippines and the Filipino/a body in this musical accentuates the radical malleability of the black performing body. In an attempt to depart from the dominance of minstrelsy as the only recognizable form for the expression of the black performing body, this staging of the exotic Filipino/a provided an avenue for black performers to transgress constrictions imposed by the white-black binary of the U.S. racial hierarchy. At a time when Jim Crow laws brutally restricted African American freedoms, such brownface performances vividly demonstrated the transformative powers of the performing black body. By focusing on an all black-musical theater production that sought to advance African American citizenship, we can explore instead a more robust âminorâ view of the contact zone, and of the Filipino/a performing body. âMinor,â as invoked here, draws its analytical force from Francois Lionetâs and Shumei Shihâs theory of âminor transnationalism,â which emphasizes lateral relationships among minoritized groups (2).
There is of course no doubt that in both instances brownface performances of the Filipino/a body were largely Orientalist productions for consumption by the American public. My interest in these early brownface performances considers the crucial affective and material role of cultural production in the emergence of a U.S. imperial imaginary.3 As Daphne Brooks and Angela Pao have variously argued, such enactments of racial otherness are crucial to understanding the genealogy of the racialized performing body (whether it be blackface or yellowface), which at times functions to defamiliarize the spectacle and/or technologies of otherness.4 What is of import here is the necessary engagement of the contemporary Filipino/a performing body with such early and decidedly fraught brownface performances. After all, these performances (in all their variegated racial forms) constitute the ways in which Filipinos existed in the larger U.S. imperialist imaginary.5 Indeed, this book regards the Filipino/a performing body in different sites and genres of performance as a laboring body that is racialized, gendered, and sexualized, precisely as it negotiates critical moments in U.S.-Philippine imperial relations. These enactments of Filipinos on U.S. colonial sites and by African Americans impersonating Filipinos challenge attachments to the fixity and object status of the Filipino/a performing body. To read the Filipino/a body through performances of brownface is to consider a genealogy of the Filipino/a performing body beyond the celebratory essentialisms of historical recuperation. In turning to such a model of historical genealogy, I echo the cautions of Coco Fuscoâs formative essay, âThe Other History of Intercultural Performance.â Through her collaborative performance with Guillermo Gomez-PeĂąa, A Couple in a Cage, Fusco reminds us of racialized performanceâs own entanglements with the very imperial ideologies and practices it seeks to exceed. I follow the lead of contemporary Filipino American performance projects and artists, such as KulArts, Inc.âs POMO Festival of Pilipino American Modern Art, Gigi Otalvaro-Hormillosa, Julie Tolentino, and Pearl Ubungen, who similarly confront colonial representations of Filipino/a performing bodies alongside the desires and ambitions of contemporary Filipino/a American performance.
I: The Worldâs Fair on My Mind: Dogeating, G-Strings, and Bare Breasts
The significance of the 1904 St. Louis Worldsâ Fair is most vividly captured in the film Meet Me in St. Louis. As the Smith family gazes in awe at the magnificent lights and awesome structure of the fair, Esther Smith breathlessly exclaims, âAnd itâs all right here in St. Louis. Right here where we live.â Meet Me in St. Louis, Sally Bensonâs memoir-turned-film-remade-for-television-twice-turned-play, is set in 1903, a year before the opening of the âgreatest fair on earth.â The book records the Bensonâs family life from the point of view of a young woman (Sally), capturing a local view, if you will, of a powerful nation on the verge of imperial conglomeration. Though Meet Me in St. Louis is a story of the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, both the memoir and the film were released in the midst of World War II. The movieâs closing words, âright here,â focus on the local comfort of a small city, held up as equally promising against the big city. As the war among nations brings uncertainty to the world, Estherâs utterance of âright here, in our own cityâ is a reassurance of the safety of American lives within U.S. borders. Within such a volatile historical context, the staging of the Worldâs Fair emerges as a stabilizing symbol and a reaffirmation of U.S. international involvement.6 âRight here in St. Louisâ declares the arrival of the world in the United States and of U.S. presence in the world.
We know now that the St. Louis Worldâs Fairâs most popular stop was the Philippine Village and that the Filipino/a performing body was the spectacle to behold. David R. Francis, head exposition director, noted, âninety-nine out of a hundred fairgoers visited the reservationâ (qtd. in Rydell 170).7 Though Filipinos were present in earlier world expositions in the United States, the heightened focus on them in the St. Louis Worldâs Fair is the subject of many writings on Filipinos in nineteenth-century world expositions. At the Philippine Village, approximately twelve hundred Filipinos were exhibited, including Igorots (from Bontoc, Suyoc, and other regions), Manobos, Moros, Visayans, and Negritos, as well as the Philippine Scouts and Constabulary. So grand was the Philippine portion of the exhibition, and so expensive, that it has been referred to as the fair within a fair (Fermin 63).
âThe fame of the Philippine exposition has captured the Worldâs Fair city, and the most constant question which the Jefferson Guards have to answer is, âWhich way to the Philippines?ââ (âWhich Way to the Philippines?â). What are we to make of fairgoersâ enthusiastic response to the Philippine exhibit? What solicited their reaction? How did fairgoers react to what they were seeing? Recorded accounts, specifically in newspapers, drew attention to the Igorot dog-eating rituals, various Filipino peoplesâ manner of (un)dress, the beautiful Visayan maidens, and the Philippine Scouts and Constabulary. References to âdog-eating and head-hunting Igorots,â to Filipinos as âsavage,â and to the Negrito as âthe missing linkâ were made with ease, naturalizing Filipinos/as as savage and barbaric.8 The Philippine Village was designed to display different people from the Philippines in their ânatural environmentâ (âWhich Way to the Philippines?â), thereby collapsing everyday life with a decontextualized display of the exotic. Scenes such as the Igorotsâ dog-feast, âdwarf Negritos ⌠shooting with their bows and poisoned arrows, light[ing] fires with the friction of bamboo sticks,â the âVisayan girls, noted for their beauty, ⌠weaving bamboo hats and basket work,â and âthe little naked Moro boys tumbl[ing] in and out of their small dugout canoesâ beneath the bridge of Arrowhead Lake were presented as depictions of typical life in the newly acquired tropical colony (âWhich Way to the Philippines?â). These activities may well have been daily routines to the peoples of the Luzon mountain provinces and women of the Visayan region. On the platform of the Worldâs Fair, however, the display of everyday activities subscribed to a racist imperial ideology that characterized Filipinos as the âmissing linkâ in human evolution (Fermin 107).9
During the seven months of the Filipino exhibit at the Worldâs Fair, the spectacular and the mundane intertwined in some strange and comforting twists: elders died, couples wed, and children were born.10 One of the children born on the fairgrounds was named after the city of St. Louis and the fairâs presiding officer, David Francis. While Americans set up colonial shop in the Philippines, by way of governance, education, and other forms of repressive and ideological state apparatuses, the St. Louis Worldâs Fair paved consent for the U.S. imperial project in the metropole. It was, par excellence, a pedagogical exercise, teaching not just about the outside world but also about how theyâas Americansâinhabited the world.
Recorded responses of the patrons demonstrated that Filipino dog eating and the Filipino manner of dress drew much heated commentary. A fairgoer expressed strong response to the consumption of dog as food, writing the following to his wife: âI went up to the Philippine Village to-day and saw the wild, barbaric Igorots, who eat dogs, and are so vicious that they are fenced in and guarded by a special constabularyâŚ. They are the lowest type of civilization I ever saw and thirst for bloodâ (qtd. in Vostral 19).11 This dietary and culinary practice caused a lengthy debate, involving the Humane Society. For each response of disgust among the American public came offers such as the following from another American, printed in the Missouri Republic under the title âLetter Offering Dogs.â
Dexter, Mo., April 12, 1904.â
Governor Hunt, Manager Igorrote Tribe:
I have been noticing that for some time your charges, the Igorrotes, have been complaining about their not receiving any dogs for eating, as is their custom. I am desirous of furnishing them dogs for this purpose.
I put in many a weary day in their own country and many a day while there I have yearned earnestly for a few bites of those dishes which I left back in the good old State of Missouri. This has won my sympathy for the poor, disconsolate wretches, separated from the rations which they were reared upon.
Now, the Humane Society has no jurisdiction over the dogs of Southeast Missouri and I will send you as many dogs as you can use, up to the number of 200. I seek no remuneration whatever except that you pay the freight. Hoping for an early reply, I remain, yours truly
MORTIMER T. JEFFERS.
Offers to send dogs by the hundreds flooded the fairâs administration.12 These expressions of support for the dog-feast are a mix of cultural relativity, cultural sensitivity, patronage, and Orientalist fetishism. American responses to Igorotsâ dietary choices reiterate Karen Shimakawaâs notion of ânational abjection.â Linking feminist psychoanalytic theorist Julia Kristevaâs work on âabjectionâ to national identity formation and racism, Shimakawa emphasizes the mutually constitutive process between seemingly different or even opposite locations. As abjects within the U.S. racial hierarchy, racial others are regarded as repulsive. Fervent attention to dog-eating Igorots illustrates the persistence of perverse curiosity and desire directed toward racial others, despite and precisely because of their grotesqueness. The curious performance of the exoticized and âbarbaricâ Filipinos and their strange eating habits becomes a histrionic part of American identity formation during this period of empire building. The exchange over this dog-eating spectacle highlights that which is âoccupying the seemingly contradictory, yet functionally essential, position of consistent element and radical otherâ (3).
The clothing of the Filipino/a performing body also drew sensationalized attention. Igorot and Negrito men in bahag and the women with exposed breasts caused quite a stir among some of the fairâs patrons.13 As 1904 was an election year, debates on whether these Filipinos should cover their bareness extended to the White House. Warring parties exuberantly discussed the âPhilippine problem,â with anti-imperialist Democrats casting doubt on the benevolence of the U.S. role in the islands. For anti-imperialists who were against annexation for racist reasons, the bareness of the Igorots and the Negritos consolidated their bigoted perception of barbarism and savageness.14 Such representations provided ample fodder for the interrogation of the very narrative of progress, uplift, and civilization undergirding the annexation project. Additionally, Missouri was a key state in the 1904 election, and the local mediaâs lurid coverage of the Igorot and Negrito men and women threatened the incumbent Rooseveltâs pro-annexation stance.15 Fearing that the...