Collapsing moments: confronting anti-Black logics in the Philippines' colonial archive

Abstract

This thesis draws from Black geographies and Black studies to re-examine the Philippines’ colonial archives. I focus on the US Imperial perspective at the turn of the 20th century, and devote particular attention to how the US articulates Blackness in the Philippines through the caricature of the sambo, through racial pseudo-science, and through racializing the Philippines in larger currents of Pacific racialization. This project uses archival methodologies alongside discourse analysis to trace anti-Blackness from the archive to discuss Dean Worcester’s text Slavery and Peonage (1913) and the carceral logics of the US Forestry Bureau and the Philippines’ Public Lands Act of 1902. Foregrounding this project is the persistence of the racial organization of the plantation as a force extending beyond the bounds of its geographies and into the political forest. Using the analytic of anti-Blackness as a primary structuring force, I trace archival moments that together address US logics of racial capitalism in the Philippines that have previously been lesser attended to by Filipinx studies and Black geographies