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

Body Parts of Empire is a study of abjection in American visual cultureand popular literature from the Philippine-American War (1899-1902).During this period, the American national territory expanded beyondits continental borders to islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean.Simultaneously, new technologies of vision emerged for imagining thehuman body, including the moving camera, stereoscopes, and moreefficient print technologies for mass media.

Rather than focusing on canonical American authors who wrote at thetime of U.S. imperialism, this book examines abject texts-images ofnaked savages, corpses, clothed native elites, and uniformed Americansoldiers as well as bodies of writing that document the goodwill andviolence of American expansion in the Philippine colony. Contributingto the fields of American studies, Asian American studies, and genderstudies, the book analyzes the actual archive of the Philippine-AmericanWar and how the racialization and sexualization of the Filipino colonialnative have always been part of the cultures of America and U.S.imperialism. By focusing on the Filipino native as an abject body of theAmerican imperial imaginary, this study offers a historical materialistoptic for reading the cultures of Filipino America.