Transcolonial Influences on Everyday American Imperialism: The Politics of Chinese Domestic Servants in the Philippines

Martínez, Julia; Lowrie, Claire

doi:10.1525/phr.2012.81.4.511

Cited by 19 publications

References 2 publications

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Rickshaws and Filipinos: Transnational Meanings of Technology and Labor in American-Occupied Manila

Panté

2014

Int Rev of Soc His

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This article tells the hitherto unknown history of the rickshaw in the Philippines. The Filipinos’ encounter with this transport mode was brief and largely revolved around a failed rickshaw business in Manila in 1902. The venture quickly fizzled out, but not without controversy, deeply rooted in the colliding socio-political forces in the city at that time: the reliance on a non-motorized transport system; the consolidation of American colonial rule against the backdrop of an ongoing revolution; the birth of the first Filipino labor federation; and the implementation of a law banning the employment of Chinese workers from unskilled trades. The controversy turned the rickshaw into a disputed symbol. On the one hand, the rickshaw enterprise was criticized by Filipino carriage drivers and nationalist labor leaders, who viewed the vehicle as an essentially foreign apparatus that would enslave Filipinos. On the other hand, the Americans used the Filipinos’ opposition to the rickshaw to prove the supposed un-modernity of the lazy native workers, who failed to grasp the idea of the dignity of labor. These disputes were inextricably linked to the clash of discourses between Filipino nationalism and colonial modernity, two competing perspectives both influenced by a comparative transnational frame.

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Rickshaws and Filipinos: Transnational Meanings of Technology and Labor in American-Occupied Manila

Panté

2014

Int Rev of Soc His

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‘What a Picture Can Do’: Contests of colonial mastery in photographs of Asian ‘houseboys’ from Southeast Asia and Northern Australia, 1880s–1920s

Lowrie¹

2018

Mod. Asian Stud.

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The archives of colonial Southeast Asia and northern Australia contain hundreds of photographs of masterly white colonizers and their seemingly devoted Asian ‘houseboys’. This article analyses this rich photographic archive, drawing on examples from the Netherlands Indies, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and the Northern Territory of Australia. It explores how photographs of ‘houseboys’ worked as a ‘visual culture’ of empire that was intended to illustrate and immortalize white colonial power, but that also expressed anxieties about colonial projects. As well as a tool for understanding the assertions and insecurities of white colonizers, the article argues that photographs of servants can be used to illuminate the working lives of these Chinese, Malay, Javanese, and Filipino men. Drawing on a remarkable studio portrait that was commissioned by three Filipino servants and an oral history account from a Chinese servant, I conclude that both masters and servants used the photographic medium to assert their power in the home and the colony.

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Securing Domestics. Andrew Urban. Brokering Servitude: Migration and the Politics of Domestic Labor during the Long Nineteenth Century. New York: New York University Press, 2018. xi + 355 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8147-8584-3.

Haskins

2019

J. gilded age prog. era

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Transcolonial Influences on Everyday American Imperialism: The Politics of Chinese Domestic Servants in the Philippines

Cited by 19 publications

References 2 publications

Rickshaws and Filipinos: Transnational Meanings of Technology and Labor in American-Occupied Manila

Rickshaws and Filipinos: Transnational Meanings of Technology and Labor in American-Occupied Manila

‘What a Picture Can Do’: Contests of colonial mastery in photographs of Asian ‘houseboys’ from Southeast Asia and Northern Australia, 1880s–1920s

Securing Domestics. Andrew Urban. Brokering Servitude: Migration and the Politics of Domestic Labor during the Long Nineteenth Century. New York: New York University Press, 2018. xi + 355 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8147-8584-3.

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