Postcolonial disorientations: colonial ethnography and the vectors of the Philippine nation in the imperial frontier DANIEL P S GOH Introduction Within a fortnight of the beginning of Spanish-American hostilities over Cuba in April 1898, warships of the imperialist powers of the age filled Manila Bay. The final gasp of the decaying Spanish Empire meant that its colonial remnants had become frontier zones of uncertainty and opportunity in a crowded imperialist global arena. Witnessed by German, French, British and Japanese warships, the US Pacific Fleet destroyed the Spanish squadron in the Bay and landed Filipino revolutionaries from the rump of the abortive 1896 revolt. The latter rapidly raised a popular peasant army and surrounded Manila. The Filipino revolutionaries were later suppressed in a brutal war by American troops, inaugurating over three decades of colonial rule in the Philippines before Filipino self-rule was granted in the Commonwealth of 1935. The Philippines was not treated as America’s backyard to be protected against the schemes of the European imperialists, as Cuba was, but as America’s ‘frontier’, in which restless natives were quelled and the territory prepared for democratic self-rule and assimilation into the Union. Here, I am not treating the frontier as an indelible fact in imperial formations that can therefore be analyzed typologically in terms of its function. 1 Rather, I am concerned with the discourse shaping the knowledge of the colonialists tasked to deal with the frontier and govern the natives and settlers peopling it. In short, I am interested in the question of governmentality in the imperial frontier and its postcolonial consequences. The fact that the Filipino political elites eventually chose independence in 1946, after the interruption of the Japanese occupation, did not change the momentum and direction, that is, the vectors of the Philippine nation established by colonial frontier governmentality. It meant that this frontier governmentality was successfully Filipinized, a process which began in earnest in the second decade of American colonial rule. Indeed, the Philippines soon found itself in the Cold War frontier, as China fell to Mao’s communists and communist revolts consumed the European colonies of Southeast Asia. Its own Hukbalahap insurrection was confined to Central Luzon and the rebellious peasants were easily persuaded to return to the ISSN 1368-8790 print/ISSN 1466-1888 online/08/03025918 # 2008 The Institute of Postcolonial Studies DOI: 10.1080/13688790802226652 Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 259276, 2008 Downloaded By: [2007-2008-2009 National University Of Singapore] At: 04:18 14 April 2009