Echoing + Resistant Imagining: Filipino Student Writing Under American Colonial Rule

ABSTRACT

This article articulates the concept of echoing + resistant imagining through an analysis of Filipino student writing under American colonization at the turn of the twentieth century. Following scholarship in postcolonial studies and cultural rhetorics, echoing + resistant imagining accounts for the pressures on colonized writers to imitate, reproduce, and affirm colonial discourses, while noting the agentive and resistant possibilities of their writing.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Christa Olson, Terese Monberg, and a third anonymous reviewer, as well as Rebecca Lorimer Leonard and Haivan Hoang, for their generous comments on this article. She would also like to thank her research assistants Kyle Arena and Danielle Jin, the staff of the University of Michigan Bentley Historical Library, and the staff of the American Historical Collection at the Ateneo de Manila University. The archival research in this chapter was supported by a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the University of Massachusetts Amherst Graduate School.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Though the vast majority of American colonial teachers and administrators were white, there were also several notable Black teachers whose experiences with racial identity in an American colony have been documented. See Sarah Steinbock-Pratt’s recent volume, Educating the Empire (2019).

2. See To Islands Far Away (U.S. Embassy in the Philippines, 2001) and Bearers of Benevolence (Mary Racelis and Judy Ick, 2002).

3. This estimate is based on the content and vocabulary of the essays, as well as inference based on other archival sources. In a 1905 report on schools in the Philippine Islands, the Superintendent reported that Victor Oblenas received a scholarship for further study in the United States. His age was reported as 17 years old.

4. Based on multiple copies labeled “First time”, “second time”, etc. of the essays in the archive, all essays indicate that they have been revised multiple times. I chose to work with the latest versions of these essays available.