Communicative Utopias

Abstract

The American occupation of the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century instituted a massive public education system that sought to transform the entire civilizational configuration of Philippine culture and society. A crucial part of this pedagogical project was the introduction of the English language to Filipino students, who had to learn and speak this foreign tongue as they climbed the educational ladder and eventually led the government bureaucracies and cultural and political affairs of the nation. In this essay, I dwell on the English colonial classroom as the primary site where American educators enacted epistemologies and embodiments revolving around speech. By examining a range of colonial archives, I historically map out the training that such enactment entailed and engendered, especially how it situated Filipinos into a new colonial order by transforming them into a kind of English-speaking subjects. I will argue that oral training was significant because it rehearsed and reified the supremacies of the English language, the directives for smooth utterance and masterful delivery, and the aspirations of verbal purity and vocal virtuosity. Such training was an embodied practice informed by hegemonic Western structures that suppressed locality and indigeneity, on the one hand, and riddled with local capacities of Filipino students and their limits that betrayed any cultural imposition and domination, on the other. This tension brought about a space that emphasized and policed the Filipino people’s linguistic errors, communicative failures, and untrainable bodies. I conclude this essay with critical reflections on communicative utopias purveyed by the American colonial regime in its acts of reordering, if not altering altogether, representations of language, speech, and the body in the Philippines.