Malini Johar Schueller
Temple University Press
2019
Amidst the throes of the Philippine-American war, American soldiers opened the first school in Corregidor, initiating a comprehensive system of education; following Japanese surrender, the U.S.- led occupation commenced its educational reform. Campaigns of Knowledge argues that the creation of a suitable pedagogical subject through schooling was a major technology of U.S. power. U.S. educational policies in the colonial Philippines and occupied Japan were contrasting projects of Orientalist racial management: Filipinos were little brown brothers to be uplifted and deemed fit for industrial education; the Japanese had to be decivilized and re-educated. Literary, filmic, and autobiographical works have registered these programs of subjectification through a complex interplay of assent and defiance, questioning the ubiquity, yet persistence of US pedagogical biopolitics. Contrapuntally viewing colonial archives alongside native textbooks, novels, films, and autobiographies, Campaigns of Knowledge highlights the tension between the ideal subjects scripted by colonial pedagogy and the complex and uneven materialization of this pedagogy in cultural texts.