American literature and U.S. imperialism in the Philippines
Erschienen:
(c)2011
Verlag:
New York University Press, New York
In the late nineteenth century, American teachers descended on the Philippines, which had been newly purchased by the U.S. at the end of the Spanish-American War. Motivated by President McKinley's project of "benevolent assimilation," they...
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Universitätsbibliothek der Eberhard Karls Universität
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In the late nineteenth century, American teachers descended on the Philippines, which had been newly purchased by the U.S. at the end of the Spanish-American War. Motivated by President McKinley's project of "benevolent assimilation," they established a school system that centered on English language and American literature to advance the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, which was held up as justification for the U.S.'s civilizing mission and offered as a promise of moral uplift and political advancement. Meanwhile, on American soil, the field of American literature was just being developed and fundamentally, though invisibly, defined by this new, extraterritorial expansion Introduction: educated subjects: literary production, colonial expansion, and the pedagogical public sphere -- The alchemy of English: colonial state-building and the imperial origins of American literary study -- Empire's proxy: literary study as benevolent discipline -- Agents of assimilation: female authority, male domesticity, and the familial dramas of colonial tutelage -- The performance of patriotism: ironic affiliations and literary disruptions in Carlos Bulosan's America -- Conclusion: "An empire of letters": literary tradition, national sovereignty, and neocolonialism.
