The Filipino Primitive. Sarita Echavez See
where the objects of accumulation remain materially, visibly preserved. The 1887 portrait of Steere and his students shows how America’s scientific conquest anticipated its military conquest of the Philippines, from 1899 to 1913. Both modes of conquest were forms of extractive colonialism, and both modes of conquest were shaped and justified by the idea of the primitive Filipino. Primitivity first was used as a justification for scientific conquest, which preceded genocidal conquest. The settler colonial fantasy of terra nullius—empty land by way of the genocidal emptying of land—is accompanied by what I propose we call “knowledge nullius,” the American quest for knowledge that putatively was accrued about (rather than stolen from) Filipino primitives. I moreover propose that this concept of knowledge nullius demands that we reconfigure the study of representation. In this book’s examination of a range of ways of exhibiting the Filipino, I have had to turn away from the concern with misrepresentation—truth or fallacy—that typically informs the critical analysis of the racial subject so that I instead can bring to light this connection between the racial primitive and the processes of economic and academic primitive accumulation.
This book is divided into two parts that speak to and against each other, “The Archive: Dispossession by Accumulation” and “The Repertoire of Dispossession.” In the pair of chapters that make up “The Archive: Dispossession by Accumulation,” I draw on my research on the Philippine collections and exhibits at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and at Harbor Beach, Michigan, the hometown of the last American governor-general of the Philippines. In the chapters “Progress through the Museum: Knowledge Nullius and the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History” and “Foreign in a Domestic Space: Progressivist Imperialism and the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum,” I demonstrate how the university and the museum forward the colonial project by taking the colonized as objects of accumulation, which then can be studied in the traditional disciplines and which are to this day displayed before the general American public. In the pair of chapters that make up “The Repertoire of Dispossession,” I countermand the accumulative mandate of the imperial archive by exploring how Filipino Americans traverse the space of empire and represent themselves as agents and not merely as objects. In the chapters “Lessons from the Illiterate: Carlos Bulosan and the Staged Wages of Romance” and “The Booty and Beauty of Contemporary Filipino/American Art: Stephanie Syjuco’s RAIDERS,” I examine visual, literary, and performative economies of anti-accumulation in Carlos Bulosan’s story “The Romance of Magno Rubio” and its contemporary theatrical adaptation and in Stephanie Syjuco’s art installation RAIDERS, a parody of Asian art museum collections. In my concluding chapter on Syjuco’s social media presence and her use of online crowdsourcing, I move out of the museum per se in order to consider the ramifications of the contemporary transformation of crafting, DIY, and making practices into trendy objects of consumerism—from Walmart’s sale of “craft” beer to Etsy’s touting of homespun sweaters—in the era of the digital. Across the chapters in The Filipino Primitive, I show that the imperial project attempts and fails to put in order its vast collection of materials.
The Arkhe of Accumulation
Accumulation is a twinned phenomenon. More famously, it refers to the enclosure of land and resources that made what Karl Marx called the “primitive accumulation” of capital possible. Less famously, it refers to the developmental narrative from the primitive to the civilized that underpins the quest for accrued knowledge. Richard Halpern argues that accumulation contains “two histories: of the ‘primitive’ accumulation of capital, and of the ‘primitive’ accumulation of men” as labor.1 Ideological and intellectual wars have broken out over how to treat another set of twins, capitalist and colonial accumulation. Critiquing the teleological nature of Marxist theories of “primitive accumulation,” David Harvey came to the formulation “accumulation by dispossession” by foregrounding both Hannah Arendt’s insight about the “endless” (rather than originary) nature of capitalist voracity and Rosa Luxemburg’s insight about capitalism’s dependence on “something ‘outside of itself’ ” in order to stabilize itself.2 In The Accumulation of Capital, Luxemburg argues that the “accumulation of capital, once it has started, automatically leads farther and farther beyond itself,” and she then contends that capitalism “needs other races.”3 Capitalism, Luxemburg implies, is innately colonial. Her central thesis, according to Joan Robinson’s introduction to The Accumulation of Capital, is that “it is the invasion of primitive economies by capitalism which keeps the system alive.”4
As an alternative to what he calls Marx’s “rigidly temporal framing” of primitive accumulation, Glen Coulthard has urged us to shift our emphasis from the subject position of the waged male proletariat to that of the colonized.5 According to Coulthard, it is high time to shift from a focus on capitalist relations to colonial relations and from proletarianization to dispossession.6 While Robinson’s commentary on Luxemburg implies a naturalization of the notion of the primitive and, therefore, of the developmental narrative of primitive accumulation, Coulthard crucially restores an indigenous perspective that is an alternative and not a precedent to capital. However, to the extent that Coulthard’s shift to dispossession still retains the outlines of a developmental narrative of capital, if from another perspective, Halpern valuably suggests that Marx’s account of primitive accumulation must be understood as a genealogy of capital relations and colonial relations, a “tale not of embryonic development but of a fundamental break between modes of production.”7 Halpern approaches primitive accumulation as a “genealogical discourse [that] signifies both a history to be written and the limits such a history must observe.” The “vocation” of primitive accumulation is to “provide not a conclusive narrative but a useful one.”8 The value of Marx’s narration of accumulation thus lies in its ability to “identify a space where a history ought to be.”9 Primitive accumulation is a problem of—and not simply about—history. During my research at the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History and the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum, I found that these museums and their collections are an instance of the archive as accumulation, and that their Philippine exhibitions constitute “a space where a history ought to be.” Both museums offer little to no context—historical or otherwise—about the appearance of the Philippines in the Midwest, and that is how the idea of the racial primitive fills that space so easily. Ironically, this epic failure in knowledge production takes place at the very site of knowledge acquisition. The Filipino Primitive is dedicated to offering an image of that counter-history that ought already to have been.
Jacques Derrida notes, in a pun whose peculiar resonance in the Philippine context I will explore in later chapters, “It is thus, in this domiciliation, in this house arrest, that archives take place.”10 These museums are a signal example of the peculiar occlusion of the American conquest of the Philippines—what Dylan Rodríguez has called a “suspended apocalypse”—even as they reflect the Midwest’s history of institutional participation in the colonial governance of America’s first Asian colony.11 Derrida also reminds us that the etymology of the word “archive” reveals another set of twinned (or, more accurately, constantly fissuring) principles at work, the order of “commencement” and the order of “commandment.” According to Derrida, the arkhe of commencement refers to the “sequential” principle, which works “according to nature or history, there where things commence.” The arkhe of commandment refers to the “jussive” principle, which works “according to the law, there where men and gods command.”12 This is no simple set of twins, however. For Derrida, these two “orders of order: sequential and jussive” introduce a “series of cleavages [that] incessantly divide every atom of our lexicon.”13 For example, because the arkhe of commencement can refer to nature or history, a set of “belated and problematic” oppositions emerges, say, between nature and technology or between history and the law. The same fissuring complexity emerges within the arkhe of commandment. Nonetheless, all of these problems are waved aside and forgotten. Derrida notes that forgetting is embedded in the very idea of the archive: “The concept of the archive shelters in itself, of course, this memory of the name arkhe. But it also shelters itself from this memory which it shelters: which comes down to saying also that it forgets it.”14 The American archive constitutes just such a shelter for its Philippine collections: It offers shelter for its Philippine collections in ways that shelter itself from the memory of genocidal conquest, benevolent assimilation, and what I call “progressivist imperialism”