In a landscape in which all resistance was "insurgency" and insurgency was punishable by death, the best and the brightest of a generation of Filipino men and women were exiled, excommnicated, imprisoned, tortured, hanged, shot, starved and blow up with artillery. This process of overcoming native resistance by force was called "pacification." In an action of classic guerilla warfare foreshadowing Vietnam, villages were burned to the ground, civilian food supplies destroyed, carabaos killed, and local economies shut down so that villagers could not supply resources to a general population who might all be potential resisters. Better to burn twenty-five tons of rice than to let resisters eat. Better to "shoot all natives who may be found on the road between dark and daybreak" around American telegraph lines and "cause all houses in the vicinity to be burned to the ground" than to risk the sabotage of communication lines by local villagers night after night. Better to hang as spies and traitors those who fed resistance fighters a hot meal, or who transported medical supplies. or who carried a message, or who rang the church bell upon arrival of troops than to recognize that the entire culture might be resistant to American occupation. The other face of American Manifest Destiny was colonial violence, something that was little recognized or represented at the time, and something that remains remarkably forgotten now in the American cultural psyche.
Editorial review:
In this anthology of essays about Philippine cinema, geopolitics takes off from the post -- World War II detente foreign policy of the United States to illuminate issues of transparency of power and power relations. It lays bare the geopolitics of the visible in order to render the almost invisible working operation that makes both visibility and invisibility possible.
Title Geopolitics of the visible: essays on Philippine film cultures
Author Roland B. Tolentino
Editor Roland B. Tolentino
Contributor Roland B. Tolentino
Edition Illustrated
Publisher Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2000
ISBN 9715503586, 9789715503587
Length 384 pages
http://books.google.com/books?id=eO0VVq9
No comments:
Post a Comment