Body Parts of Empire: Visual Abjection, Filipino Images, and the American Archive [Hardcover]

Body Parts of Empireis a study of abjection in American visual culture and popular literature from the Philippine-American War (1899–1902). During this period, the American national territory expanded beyond its continental borders to islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean. Simultaneously, new technologies of vision emerged for imagining the human body, including the moving camera, stereoscopes, and more efficient print technologies for mass media.

Rather than focusing on canonical American authors who wrote at the time of U.S. imperialism, this book examines abject texts—images of naked savages, corpses, clothed native elites, and uniformed American soldiers—as well as bodies of writing that document the goodwill and violence of American expansion in the Philippine colony. Contributing to the fields of American studies, Asian American studies, and gender studies, the book analyzes the actual archive of the Philippine-American War and how the racialization and sexualization of the Filipino colonial native have always been part of the cultures of America and U.S. imperialism. By focusing on the Filipino native as an abject body of the American imperial imaginary, this study offers a historical materialist optic for reading the cultures of Filipino America.
 

A cross-disciplinary reading of American popular culture at a time of U.S. imperialism and the occupation of the Philippine Islands.

Nerissa S. Balceis Associate Professor of Asian and Asian American studies at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Winner: Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) 2018 Best Book in Cultural Studies, Filipino Section 

"Prompts us to ask about the global lineage of gendered and racial violence that subtended white supremacy and privilege from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, and how we might read their continuities (l)