Fearing the Flood: Transportation as Counterinsurgency in the US–Occupied Philippines

Abstract

Examining intra-colonial punitive relocations during the first decade of US occupation in the Philippines, this article shows how colonial police and prison officials used incarceration and transportation in tandem to suppress incipient populist revolutionary movements. They exploited historic regional and religious tensions in their effort to produce new modes of racialized and gendered prison and labor management. Finally, while colonial officials sought to brand certain imprisoned subjects as criminal outlaws, rather than political prisoners, many of these anticolonial fighters actually sharpened their ideas about freedom through their experience of being criminalized, incarcerated, and forcibly relocated.