Semi-Civilized

C. Hawkins Michael

Description

Semi-Civilized offers a concise, revealing, and analytically penetrating view of a critical period in Philippine history. Michael C. Hawkins examines Moro (Filipino Muslim) contributions to the Philippine exhibit at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904, providing insight into this fascinating and previously overlooked historical episode. By reviving and contextualizing Moro participation in the exposition, Hawkins challenges the typical manifestations of empire drawn from the fair and delivers a nuanced and textured vision of the nature of American imperial discourse. In Semi-Civilized Hawkins argues that the Moro display provided a distinctive liminal space in the dialectical relationship between civilization and savagery at the fair. The Moros offered a transcultural bridge. Through their official yet nondescript designation as "semi-civilized," they undermined and mediated the various binaries structuring the exposition. As Hawkins demonstrates, this mediation represented an unexpectedly welcomed challenge to the binary logic and discomfort of the display. As Semi-Civilized shows, the Moro display was collaborative, and the Moros exercised unexpected agency by negotiating how the display was both structured and interpreted by the public. Fairgoers were actively seeking an extraordinary experience. Exhibit organizers framed it, but ultimately the Moros provided it. And therein lay a tremendous amount of power.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Luisiana
• History of the Americas
• History of Asia
• Philippines
• Louisiana
• Asia

Informations

• Publié par: Cornell University Press
• Date de parution: 15 mars 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781501748233
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 6 Mo

Extrait

Semi-Civilized

Semi-Civilized

TheMoroVillageattheLouisiana Purchase Exposition

MichaelC.Hawkins

Northern Illinois University Press animprintof Cornell University Press IthacaandLondon

Frontispiece.

A group of Samal Moros in the Moro Village at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition

A volume in the NIU Southeast Asian Series Edited by Kenton Clymer For a list of books in the series visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

Copyright©2020byCornellUniversity

Allrightsreserved.Exceptforbriefquotationsinareview,thisbook,or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. Visit our website at cornellpress.cornell.edu.

Firstpublished2020byCornellUniversityPress

LibraryofCongressCataloginginPublicationData

Names:Hawkins,Michael(MichaelC.),author. Title:Semicivilized:theMorovillageattheLouisianaPurchase Exposition/Michael C. Hawkins. Description:Ithaca,NewYork:NorthernIllinoisUniversityPress,an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2020. | Series: NIU Southeast Asian series | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identiers:LCCN2019026549(print)|LCCN2019026550(ebook)| ISBN 9781501748219 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781501748226 (epub) | ISBN 9781501748233 (pdf) Subjects:LCSH:LouisianaPurchaseExposition(1904:SaintLouis,Mo.)| MuslimsPhilippinesExhibitionsHistory20th century. | EthnologyPhilippinesExhibitionsHistory20th century. | Human zoosMissouriSaint LouisHistory20th century. | Imperialism in popular cultureMissouriSaint LouisHistory20th century. Classication:LCCDS666.M8H3952020(print)|LCCDS666.M8 (ebook) | DDC 305.6/970977866074dc23 LCrecordavailableathttps://lccn.loc.gov/2019026549 LCebookrecordavailableathttps://lccn.loc.gov/2019026550

Cover image: A group of Samal Moros in the Moro Village at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. Courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society.

Preface

Acknowledgments

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Introduction: The Complicated and Collaborative Art of Colonial Display

1.SensationalSavages

2.NostalgiaandtheFamiliarSavage

3.MeasuringMoros

Conclusion:TheParadoxofPreservationand Performative Extinction

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

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xiii

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40

65

88

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105

125

137

Preface

TheLouisianaPurchaseExpositionof1904wasbyfarthelargestworlds fair ever organized. Occupying 1,272 acres on St. Louiss west side, on what is now Forest Park and the campus of Washington University, the exposition took in nearly twenty million visitors over eight months. The fteenmilliondollar project drew participation from fortythree Ameri can states and more than sixty countries. The German immigrant George Kesslers elaborate design consisted of fteen hundred structures, which included twelve major exhibit buildings and a hotel known as the In side Inn with two thousand rooms and a capacity of fortyve hundred 1 people.More than seventyve miles of internal roads and walking paths laced the fairgrounds. An additional fteen miles of doubletrack railways circled the event with seventeen different stops. These ameni ties were designed to assure the highest degree of convenience, ease, and comfort for visitors who [came] to inspect the wonders contained within 2 its enclosure.Electric lights, in their most striking and most effective form, lined the avenues so liberally that the Exposition grounds and

vi i i

Preface

buildings [blazed] with light at night so as to rival the attractions of 3 daylight.Led by the Apotheosis of St. Louis, fair organizers commis sioned more than one thousand sculptures at a cost of ve hundred thou sand dollars. The fairs main thoroughfare, known simply as The Pike, boasted over fty worldclass attractions from every part of the globe. Never had an event been so publicized. In a single month preceding the opening of the exposition 1,848,960 lines of newsprint across the country, excluding St. Louis, heralded and described every aspect of the impending 4 event. This amounted to an average of 431,424 words a day.Despite the expositions global and even universal scope, the fair was ultimately an unabashed celebration of American modernity. The centenary of the Louisiana Purchase provided a broadly recognizable historical marker to gauge the United States rapid ascent to global and industrial prominence. Exposition president David R. Francis proclaimed the exposition

[an] obligation on the part of the people of the Louisiana Purchase Terri tory to give expression of their gratitude for the innumerable blessings that have owed from a century of membership in the American Union, to man ifest their appreciation of the manifold benets of living in a land, the cli mate and soil and resources of which are unsurpassed, and of having their lots cast in an age when liberty and enlightenment are established on foun dations broad and deep, and are the heritage of all who worthily strive.

ForFrancisthepeoplesoftheLouisianaPurchaseTerritorypersoni ed the American impulse to excel, which operates in the United States with an aggressive force seldom exhibited in other countries. The St. Louis Fair thus offered an unprecedented opportunity for millions of visitors from around the world to learn from and pay homage to Ameri cas achievements. The farreaching effect of such a vast display of mans best works on the intelligent and emulous minds of fty or sixty millions of students, is beyond computation, marveled Francis. Mans competi tive instinct, the spontaneous lever that arouses human activity and exalts human effort, directing it to higher standards of excellence, will surely 5 work with a high potential current here. Suchsentimentshadaddedsignicancein1904.Sixyearspriorto the exposition, the United States had suddenly acquired a vast string of colonial possessions spanning thousands of miles across the Pacic and the Caribbean. Like the Louisiana Purchase Territory a century before,

Preface

i x

US colonies provided a new frontier with unprecedented opportunities to share and benet from Americans impulse to excel. Nowhere was this more important than in the Philippines. By 1904 the United States had successfully subdued the Philippine insurgency and begun to implement various governmental and cultural institutions. The United States policy 6 of benevolent assimilation was in full bloom.Hence, from the very initial planning phases, fair organizers determined to make the Philippine exhibit a centerpiece of the expositions message. TheresultingPhilippineVillageconsistedofninetytwototal structures spread over fortyseven acres on the southwest side of the fairgrounds. The amalgam of native dwellings, restaurants, exhibit build 7 ings, and service houses for the public cost an astounding $613,418. A Philippine Exposition Board oversaw the collection of seventy thousand 8 exhibits organized into three hundred classes and one hundred groups. By far, however, the most critical aspect of the Philippine Village was its eleven hundred live exhibits who were brought in to demonstrate the 9 islands wide variety of physical and cultured types.These Filipinos comprised half of all live exhibits at the fair; a massive assemblage of co lonial subjects meant to illustrate profound lessons regarding the life and 10 civilization of a whole people.In this way, the Philippine display was intended to provide a living analogy of human evolution on a grand scale. Fair patrons could theoretically behold the aggregate of humankinds evo lutionary journey from savage primitivism to modern civilization, with all of the inherent selfreexive ponderings that this might provoke. AtthecenterofthisbookisacurioussubsectionofthePhilippine exhibit known as the Moro Villagea display comprised of Philippine Muslims from the southern islands of Mindanao and Sulu. My interest was essentially born out of an anonymous 1904 editorial in theMind anao Heraldichofferedblun,hwMheoorhiExtbirctcitimsitforhtfaete Louisiana Purchase Exposition. I included this editorial in my rst book as a segue into discussions of subsequent expositional efforts in the Philip pines. At the time I did not bother to question the sentiments expressed in theHeraldpiece, as it seemed to largely agree with existing literature on the subject. However, in 2015, I published an article examining the 1899 11 Greater America Exposition in Omaha, Nebraska.This was my rst se rious foray into deep research on colonial exposition. I quickly discovered that the subject matter offered an unexpectedly profound opportunity for