Creating Identity: Exhibiting the Philippines at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition

Abstract

The Philippines Reservation at the 1904 World’s Fair was a living display of nearly 1200 Philippine people. This exhibit presented a fused Philippine/Filipino identity through a series of strategies which first naturalised, then normalised, United States policy surrounding the Constitutionally illegal but de facto colonisation of the Philippines; impending Congressional assessment of Philippine competency for self-rule; and incarceration of Filipinos in American-administered prisons and reconcentration camps. The exhibit radically disavowed claims of a unified Philippine national identity through extensive, racialised display of disparate Filipino ‘tribes’, effectively shifting the grounds of identity from the political discourse of nation to the scientific discourse of the anthropological object.