Contesting dismemberment: rumor, revolt, and empire in Peru and the Philippines (1920-1930)

Abstract

In an effort to disrupt traditional borders of Area Studies, this dissertation studies two regions rarely put into conversation with each other—Southeast Asia and Latin America—in comparative perspective to study the anxieties that emerged among local élites in Lima and Manila when dealing with threats to the geobodies of their nations. The territories under threat of dismemberment from the nation—the Amazon basin and the southern islands of Mindanao and Sulu—though claimed for centuries by their predecessor state, the Spanish Empire, had only relatively recently been effectively incorporated into the territory administered from the capital cities of Lima and Manila, and despite the apparent “solidity” of the nation, continued to be understood as fragile additions that could be amputated with far greater ease than their “core” territories. The study of the rumors and revolts that took shape in and surrounding these territories unearths the anxieties and fears that revolved around them and gives us insight into the differentiated manners in which those spaces and the indigenous peoples living there were understood and what their relationship with the nation as a whole was. These threats emerged in a context of American empire, which was understood to seek territorial reorganization for its own benefit. Paradoxically, it was the country subjected to direct colonial control, the Philippines, that more successfully weathered the challenge, while Peru, subjected to indirect empire or necolonialism, proved less capable of doing so, thus also blurring the boundaries between both kinds of imperialism.