In Dream Jungle, Jessica Hagedorn explores different articulations of the visual “other” central to the formation of the American cultural nation while she remaps, with attention to colonial cartography, the U.S. South onto the American Pacific. She demonstrates how different technologies and discourses of display, violence and empire worked to produce the Philippines and Filipinos for global consumption as laborers and commodities. My paper looks at the forms of ethnic tourism in the Philippines in order to explore the continuities and discontinuities in how contemporary tourism embodies familiar colonial trajectories of discovery, conquest, conversion, and display. In doing so, I trace the history of the Philippines and of Filipinos within the overlapping cultural, social and political cartography of American colonialism in the Pacific and U.S.-driven development projects that focus on tourism in the global South. By focusing on the histories of pedagogical display within popular and academic anthropological discourses and practices, and their recirculations of certain narratives and visual tropes of the “native” in modern tourism, my project seeks to link the ambitions of the United States in the Pacific to the production of the U.S. South in the Philippines.
Reprinted in Center for Art and Thought (CA+T) virtual exhibit: Empire’s Eyes: Colonial Stereographs of the Philippines, 2018: https://www.centerforartandthought.org