In today’s episode, I was lucky enough to speak with not one but two researchers! Both Funie Hsu and Malini Johar Schueller look at the role of race and racialisation in shaping education policy during the American occupation of the Philippines. Our discussion focuses on the introduction of compulsory, English-language education, the role that conceptions of race played in developing that system, and how their professional identity shapes the ways they approach their research.
Episode Transcript
Michael Donnay
Rather than focus on a specific scholar or a piece of research, today’s episode is going to do something a little different. Instead, we’re going to look at a particular historical moment and talk about how a couple of different scholars have studied that. And in this case, we’re going to be talking about the American invasion of the Philippines, and the subsequent attempts by the occupation government there to implement a system of compulsory primary education. Now, with the increased scholarly focus on American imperialism in the last decade or so, the occupation of the Philippines has become a major focal point for examining different elements of the imperial project. And you’ll probably not be surprised to hear that education is chief among these elements. Nor will you be surprised to hear that researchers working in different fields have used education as a lens to explore other aspects of the American occupation.
Now recently, I was lucky enough to have a conversation with two scholars actively involved in that research. And they take different perspectives on the role that race and racialization played in the compulsory education system implemented by American colonial administrators. Today’s episode is also a bit more wide ranging than usual. We’re going to touch of course, on the implications of this research for history of education. But we also spent a lot of time talking about theories of race and racialization, about critical theory, and the way that discipline shapes research questions themselves. So with that, let’s jump in.
Now, my first guest today is Funie Hsu, an associate professor of American Studies at San Jose State University. In her forthcoming book Instructions for (Erasing) Empire: English, Domestication, and the US Colonization of the Philippines, she makes the case that the imposition of English-language education in Philippine schools was the result of a racialized understanding of Filipinos. She argues that American ideas of race, especially among colonial administrators in the Philippines, were tied up with ideas of species difference drawn from scientific fields like zoology. This understanding of race had a number of policy implications, including the decision to implement English-language instruction in the classrooms. Funie, thank you so much for joining me today. I think a good place to start would be talking about this idea that you focus on in your book, that English language instruction in the Philippines was the result of a racialized understanding of language. Can you explain that relationship – between the pedagogical choice of English teaching in the classroom and the other political and ideological forces at play in the American colonial project there?
Funie Hsu
Well, it was at once a political commentary in the belief about the democratic force of English and it was also a biological, and relatedly a racial commentary on the force of English and its ability to literally take a group of people that were seen as being evolutionarily backward, and being able to kind of project them into the future. Into a state of civilization and help them rapidly progress – biologically and evolutionarily – into a stage of civilization that would be on par of what the Anglo-Saxon Americans saw themselves as being able to embody. So English therefore was not just a matter of – it wasn’t simply a pedagogical decision – though it was a political decision, it was also infused with these notions about nature and biology and evolution and being able to uplift people, in a sense that was a democratic political sense. And uplift people in being able to help them progress through the evolutionary stages of history and humanity.
Michael Donnay
Our second guest today, Malini Johar Schueller, also looks at race in education in the Philippines, but from a slightly different viewpoint. Malini is professor of English at the University of Florida, and her recent book Campaigns of Knowledge: U.S. Pedagogies of Colonialism and Occupation in the Philippines and Japan, looks at the role different types of racialization played in American educational policy. While our main focus today is on the Philippines, I highly encourage you to read her book. The comparative narrative perspective with Japan makes really clear how different views of the Asian “Other” influenced American administrators. Thanks so much for joining me today Malini. Your book focuses a lot of attention on the role that education played in shaping appropriate subjects of the colonial state. Can you explain what that process of creating colonial subjects looked like, and the role that understandings of race played in that process?
Malini Johar Schueller
The main argument of the book was that there are means of creating appropriate subjects in colonized and occupied spaces. And the means of creating these are not just, you know, violence, or, you know, strict kind of rules and so on, of what to follow, but through what I call “technologies of care.” Which education is one, you know, so you’re in the classroom with young people, helping them. Those are the ways in which by different means these kind of ideas of being appropriate subjects are created. And I wanted to see also the role that racialization plays in these technologies. And so I looked at – it might seem very strange – I looked at the Philippines, and instead of looking at another moment, in 1898, which would have been, you know, looking at Hawaii, for instance, or Puerto Rico or Guam. I chose a very different moment, in order to see the kind of continuities and discontinuities in those two very different spaces, I was able to trace both similarities and differences in those two very different sides so that I could see that yes, you know, there was a continuity. Yes, there was attention to racialization. But it wasn’t the same, it was different. And that, to me was was particularly interesting.
But it was very clear that in these spaces, the way in which these educational projects were carrying out had to do with a difference from whiteness, right? So that some of the racial means by which dominance is carried out in the US is by no means dissociated from what is happening in these spaces. So two things are going on. One is how to bring appropriate subjects to be happy being part of the larger American empire, in a simple way, and also how these particular techniques were developed according to perceptions of what these people were like racially. And that’s very complicated, because you know, there are so many different racial groups in the Philippines, but we can get into that.
Michael Donnay
One of the aspects of both of your work that I find so illuminating is the attention you give to the role of ideology in shaping colonial practice. Funie, I’d like to turn back to you now. Can you discuss how ideas about political and evolutionary fitness intersected in the American administration of the Philippines? What influence might these ideologies have had on the education policy being implemented by administrators on the ground?
Funie Hsu
So one of the arguments that was used time and again, that the colonial administrators referred to as a justification for arguing that the Filipinos were not ready for self-rule was this idea that they were too diverse. And so diversity became somewhat of an obstacle or was presented as an obstacle. And they were diverse in both the ways that they represented this array of languages across the archipelago. And they were seen as diverse in the ways that they were categorized as being parts of different tribes. And the reason why this diversity was seen as something that was inhibiting the development towards democratic self-rule was because it was seen as causing disunity, and disarray and leading to the continuation of what was seen as tribal warfare. And a lot of the scholarship on the Philippines, especially in regards to the racialization of the different Filipino peoples, talks about the importance of understanding this construct of tribalism. And how it really engendered this notion that these are not “a national people” – that they’re people that they actually don’t have much in commo. That they, in the views of the American colonial officials, they can’t even communicate with each other because they have so many different languages. In addition to the idea that there was a diversity of languages and that that was bad, was this idea that some of those languages don’t quite constitute human languages because they’re so far backward in the evolutionary chain of that divide between humans and the non-human other. And so the arguments were made that in some of these languages, they don’t even have the capacity or the words to conceive and express the idea of democracy. And so colonial officials were able to, after making such biological and “scientific” arguments, were able to lay claims that, therefore, it’s inconceivable to think that these people can cohere when they don’t have a coherent language to be able to communicate across the different islands and across the different so called tribes.
Michael Donnay
And that complexity is a really interesting element to focus on. Malini, I know that idea of complexity plays a role in your research as well but often coming from the opposite direction. Can you explain how you see American administrators reducing nuance, lumping together different cultural groups rather than focusing on differences?
Malini Johar Schueller
The Philippines a very complex area for administrators because of the different kinds of races that they encountered. And so they so I should also say that the educational system that I’m dealing with is not in Mindanao, which had a completely different context, because Mindanao was Muslim-dominated, and there was a way of dealing with Christians versus Muslims. So that was the, you know, first dichotomy that they had – so I am dealing more with the rest of the archipelago. In the Philippines, they were kind of dumbfounded in terms of, you know, what to think in terms of dealing with these races. So they had what they call the “tribal people”, they were at one and the tribal people needed, Christianizing, and so on, they were extremely backward. And then they were, of course, the Malays, who were a little bit more assimilated and so on. But by and large, when you look at the way that they talk about people in the Philippines, the administrators don’t tend to make these small, you know, these kind of calculated differences amongst these groups.
Even though they say that, okay, they will talk about the well-educated versus the less-educated, but they tend to give the Filipinos certain kinds of overall characteristics that I have called part of a tropicalist Orientalism. Which is that in the tropics, people are indolent, lazy, carefree. They have an easy lifestyle, things are easily available to them. Whereas something like Orientalism would look at a culture that has a long-standing print culture and literature that was great in the past, but has fallen down in the present, that doesn’t happen with the Philippines. But some aspects of Orientalism in terms of the kind of inferiority, sensuality, and all gets transposed here. But it’s a lot to do with these people who are living in the tropics and who have tried to become better. Have become better with the influence of the Spanish but of course, the Spanish are not the right kinds of colonizers. The Spanish – with a belief in hierarchy – have also transmitted to the educated Filipinos a love of aristocracy. So they’re not democratic by nature, right? And so they’re being backward in that sense, not really having a literary culture history of their own. They were taught by the Spanish but they were this, by and large, this this tropical kind of race.
Michael Donnay
Yeah. And it seems like that language – drawing on ideas of nature and evolution is really important. Funie, your research focuses really explicitly on these connections between the natural and the imperial. How do you see that connection showing up in your research?
Funie Hsu
Yeah, there are several direct connections and one of them being one of the superintendent of public instruction in the Philippines has this history. He completed a PhD in anthropology and one of his areas was looking at Native Americans in California. And another connection is through the realm of science. And this idea that people can be studied and created into objects of study through sciences like ethnology, philology, and also zoology. And when I mentioned earlier that a lot of the scholarship does pay attention to the constructs of the tribal in trying to understand the racial dimension in the Philippines or the American racial formation in the Philippines. What I feel like deserves a lot more attention is this zoological component. That helps to create a foundation for the biological basis and the anthropological basis of the arguments of tribalism. And that’s what I’m really interested in looking at. This foundation that was established early on through not just the study of ethnology and different peoples, but how that really relied on a study of the nonhuman – these zoological studies. And so these connections to zoology, ethnology, philology, we see that as well in the continental expansion that happened in the displacement of Native American peoples in in the United States. So there’s that connection as well.
Michael Donnay
These connections between the mainland US and its colonial holdings are really helpful to highlight I think, particularly because American educators are often drawing very explicitly on institutions designed for Native American or Black students when building programs in the Philippines. Malini, how do you see those connections playing out in your research?
Malini Johar Schueller
The Native American model was probably I would say would be more useful even though there are African Americans, but the industrial schools were a lot for the Native Americans. Because the laws regarding African Americans were not federal they were sectional. And so I think that in terms of serving overall broad strategy, it was the Indian schools where the idea was to acculturate them to Americanness. So you take the Indian, put them in the schools, particularly boarding schools, I think, you know, everybody knows about that, right? You take take them, you put them in the boarding schools and hopefully out come an Americanised person. You had similar kinds of photographs of Filipinos, right, these children who had this very long hair, dress differently, and they were photograph stages of civilization ending up with the Filipino who was, you know, wearing a suit, who had short hair, who kind of looked American. Whereas I’m sure there are African American similarities as well, but people argue that by 1898, you didn’t need to Americanize African Americans as much because a couple of hundred of years of slavery had already done that. Whereas with the Indians at that moment, there was still the boarding school effort going on. Because it was only in 1870 that Indians were named as wards of the state, they were still not citizens. And so attempts to civilize them were more appropriate analogues to the attempts to civilize Filipinos.
On the other hand, Booker T. Washington’s, you know, he was a graduate of Hampton. And so this idea of industrial education being appropriate, although, he saw it for different ends, but that seeps into the Philippine schools as well. So I would say, you know, those attempts to acculturate Native Americans into modernity, that’s what’s happening in the Philippines. And then the emphasis on industrial education, in both, I think, also spill over to the Philippines. So I would say that there’s that kind of parallel going on. And it’s not, you know, it’s not surprising that this would happen because the needed model, so you have Atkinson and all that. They go and visit Hampton, Tuskegee. Before going to the Philippines like, you know, let me see what’s happening here. So I know what to do. That there’s definitely that kind of racial model. And I don’t think it’s actually transposed in exactly the same manner. But there are definitely connections and you know, teachers go back and forth. It’s very interesting. There were some teachers from Carlisle, who went to the Philippines and then the teachers when they finish the tenure in the Philippines, they went back to teach in Native schools. It was really interesting.
Michael Donnay
Yeah. And that’s such a good reminder that these aren’t just ideas flowing between the US and the Philippines, but people as well. Funie, one of the people you focus on in your research is Dean Worcester, who is a major figure in the American colonial administration in the Philippines. How is he emblematic of this flow of people that’s moving alongside ideas at this time?
Funie Hsu
So Dean Worcester, is a really fascinating character. And he is somebody who raised from the ranks in the colonial administration and really built a name – a professional name, and we might in today’s terms, call it a brand for himself – through his work in the Philippines. And part of what fascinates me about him is he actually started his career in the Philippines before the Philippine-American war. Before the American conquest and occupation of the Philippines, through his undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan in zoology. He was interested in birds. And as part of his interest in zoology, he went with Joseph Steer, who was a professor of zoology at the University of Michigan, on these zoological expeditions to the Philippines. Again, this is still during the Spanish period – at the end of the Spanish period. And he goes to discover what the Philippines is. And his lens for understanding the Philippines is this scientific lens that is about trying to understand the fauna there, and also the flora, and really trying to know and categorize and collect these specimens. And they had a particular focus on birds, because he was a ornithologist. To go and try to create a system of knowledge that was seen as a scientific system of knowledge and create the scientific order of the world of the Philippines, through an understanding of the diversity of the birds there.
And that, to me, was endlessly fascinating and and I felt that there was something important about that, and I wasn’t quite sure how to make the connection until much later in my research. But what happens is, then he takes these zoological expeditions and the techniques of science from zoology and measurement, the ability to discern what is a different species, and the placement of certain bird species within specific regions to then extrapolate this idea of different tribes – of different “wild tribes”. So it builds a foundation for his ethnology and for his argument that there are these 84 different tribes of Filipino people. And they are, in fact, distinct and separate, which I see is building from his research on these birds. And being able to decipher – like this bird is distinct from this previous bird that we found in this region of the Philippines – to argue that these people are distinct and separate. And they have distinct and separate languages, therefore, they can’t communicate because they lack a common language. And what’s interesting, too, is that these biological arguments were a critique of the people, obviously, in the Philippines, but they were also a critique of the Spanish Empir. By saying that these people are wild people, he was also saying that the Spanish Empire failed to do their duty in uplifting the Filipino people. And it created a way for the United States to argue that their presence in the Philippines was not the presence of occupiers, like the Spanish, but it was the presence of friends who are there to bring this civilizing force of uplift and English instruction.
Michael Donnay
Those scientific ideas are really interesting to think about. Could you maybe say a bit more about how those connections between zoology and education have shaped the project?
Funie Hsu
One of the reasons why I’m so fascinated and drawn to this zoological basis of colonial administration in the Philippines is because it allows us to understand the ways in which this linguistic racialization – or racial linguistics is another way that people have been talking about the link between language and how it gets raced and how race is languaged as people have said – is that it helps us to unsee what we assumed to be binaries between the human and the nonhuman. And sometimes in the growing popularity of animal studies, in humanistic fields, there might be a focus on how people have been dehumanized through animalization and sometimes it’s talked about as if it’s a metaphor. And sometimes it’s talked about as if it’s comparison. What I’m really interested in the zoological dimension is how it also requires us to think about the violence done to the nonhuman or to the more-than-human, as some people have described these other living beings, and how that’s not just tangential to this human exceptionalist lens that I think still in captures a lot of the way that humanistic research is done. With prioritizing the human. But to think about colonial empire and American occupation in the Philippines as not just a project that affected human beings, but also affected animals and what that meant for the animals there. And for us to expand our idea of violence and expand our idea of domination.
And one of the things that I think is fascinating is to even look at the way that language is used in the zoological expedition that Worcester was conducting and there’s a lot of talk about collecting specimens. And I think in the scientific lens, there’s an assumption of well, collecting specimens specimens is the method because then you can do your measurements, you can categorize, etc, etc. But if we step back and think about what that really means, that means people were going there and killing these animals to collect them, to ensnare them and trap them and bring them back. And that is an important component of empire and the knowledge formation that undergirds empire and the eventual construction of a colonial education project. So I really wanted to spend time highlighting that component. And this book is entitled Instructions for (Erasing) Empire. And initially, it was focused on how English instruction erased empire and it still retains that focus. And at the same time, I think the zoological component helps us understand how there are other ways that these foundations – these biological, zoological foundations and the violation of violence done to other living beings – are also erased. And that’s harder for us to think about, because we live so deeply with these assumptions.
Michael Donnay
A major challenge for writing histories of empire is bias in the sources towards the imperial viewpoint. There are a number of ways to work against this bias – one of them being to highlight stories of resistance, which I think both of your work does really well. Funie, what role might English-language education specifically have played in the Filipino resistance to the American occupation?
Funie Hsu
Definitely, yeah. And so when we talk about resistance in the Philippines, there’s a very long history of resistance starting from the Spanish Empire, the start of the Spanish occupation in the Philippines, and that history continues through the revolt against the Spanish. And then during the Spanish-American War, Emilio Aguinaldo’s forces fighting against the Spanish. And then after the end of the Spanish-American War, the establishment of the Philippine Republic, which was short lived, because the United States then came in as the new occupying force. So there was a history of resistance that was long lasting, and it continued through the American occupation. So resistance towards English education, American English education is part of that longer history. And some of the ways that the resistance happened were through these linguistic social movements that occurred. At the same time that American colonial officials were arguing that English was important and for the good of the various Filipino peoples, there were Filipinos who were advocating for the use and the establishment of Tagalog as a national language. And there were people in the Philippines who were trying to establish Castilian as a national language. And there were local languages that were being advocated as well. So we have these social movements, these organized attempts to contest the primacy of English during the American occupation.
And we also have students in the classroom. Accounts of students who are using English, the English skills and the fluency that’s being imposed on them and imparted on them through this colonial project to contest not just English, but to contest the American occupation. And so I’ve read of accounts of a student in a classroom, and of course, when this account is being told by the American teacher, it’s kind of told in this mocking way, but of a student who stands up and protests the American occupation and makes this parallel reference to the Americans who contested taxation without representation in the British Empire. And how she felt like that was happening in her situation as well. And then she refused to attend school after that. So that is both this intertwined resistance against American education that we cannot tease apart from English instruction, because English was the medium of instruction. So it was this kind of large scale resistance in this individual body of the student in the classroom.
Michael Donnay
Malini, you also draw on examples of Filipino resistance in your book. And in particular, you use close reading of literary sources to inform your analysis. One of the authors who you focus on a lot is Bienvenido Santos, who grew up attending American-run schools in the Philippines. How do you see resistance playing out in his work in particular?
Malini Johar Schueller
In his memoirs, you know, he talks about, on the one hand, being really upset with the memory of going to the school and seeing signs that say, “You can only speak English.” And you will be punished if you don’t speak English. And at the same time, one of his most poignant memories, which he repeats like three times, once in a memoir, and a couple of times in his short stories is, “My teacher, she was reading to me a poem by Whittier – Snow Bound – and I listened to her totally entranced.” And this is this is one of the most interesting kind of moments because here are students who are sitting in the Philippines, where at least where he was, you know, you don’t you don’t have anything like snow or snow bound. And they’ve been totally enraptured with this other space that is presented to them as nostalgic. So it’s a nostalgia for what they never had and a nostalgia for a space that is not this. And so both these things are happening at the same time. The the kind of memory of humiliation, Santos even talks about how he had handed in, I think it was an essay to one of his teachers, and the teachers said, “This can’t be yours, because no Filipino could actually write like us.” And at the same time, there are these memories of the teachers, you know, sort of taking them to this other space.
So I think that what you see in some of the writers is sort of a memory of that, you know, the colonial classroom as being the space at once of discipline, and also of care. But clear attempts by these writers to tell us that, “No, there were spaces outside areas of cultural control, which will always remain outside and which are important for the imagination of the Filipinos.” So I think you can see see the do thing going on. What these are showing is in a literary way is what of course, we historically know that elements of resistance go on always in different spaces. At the same time, as there’s always some form of you can call it collaboration, acceptance, assimilation, whatever terms you want to use.
Michael Donnay
As you have both made clear, at this point, I think you draw on a pretty wide range of disciplinary practices and perspectives to inform your work. Can you talk a bit about how you see those different perspectives shaping your research? Malini, Let’s start with you.
Malini Johar Schueller
I do draw on, of course, a lot of postcolonial theory and post colonial theory in relation to education. Actually, there hasn’t been a hell of a lot. I mean, you had someone like, you know, Gauri Viswanathan’s Masks of Conquest – people talking about some educational practices in India. There’s been Decolonizing the Mind by Thiong’o, in relation to Kenya. People have written that kind of work. And there is actually now, I would say, there has been more work being done on the Philippines and education. Just as my book came out the other books that that also came out. They had different kinds of focus. So I think in terms of field, I definitely see fitting within postcolonial studies and within the field of US Empire studies. I think is a field kind of strange when people still talk about oh, “US was never considered a wasn’t considered an empire.” I mean, it’s been now almost, you know, 20 years or so, more than 20 years that in literary and cultural studies, people have recognized that as major. So I guess American Studies, US Empire studies.
Asian American Studies, in the sense of Asian American studies being considered not only national, but transnational. And I think that has to be considered. I’m not saying you can collapse, you know, the two Asian Studies and Asian American studies, but people have recognized that there’s this transnational element as well. So there are a lot of slots that fits into and my fear is actually that it will be missed by some of the slots that I consider important. I wish I had put – somehow we didn’t play around with the title as much – I wish I had literature somewhere in the title, because in some of the reviews. Well, there was a nice, very nice review in American literary history. So that literature aspect was recognized.
But I think there’s it’s in the field of Asian American Studies, American Studies, more broadly post colonial studies, those would be studies of education. But I really hesitate to call myself an expert in any way in the field of education. But the part that I have looked at in education studies are, you know, the postcolonial study of education, and I think it’s a very new and emerging field. Honestly, people who are working in education haven’t done that much in terms of, you know, looking at colonialism and education. So I mean, I think they’re pretty interdisciplinary, but I am obviously indebted to, you know cultural studies, critical thinking, post colonial studies. Those are my main kind of anchors.
Michael Donnay
Thanks for that. And, Funie, how about you?
Funie Hsu
Well, first, I would say that I feel quite fortunate to be in a department that is really interdisciplinary. It’s a department – the Humanities Department at San Jose State University – that houses both American Studies, creative arts, the Liberal Studies, teacher prep program, and religious studies. So it just so happens to be that I feel I have very strong resonances with several of those programs, if not all, in in different ways. So there’s a lot of support and encouragement for thinking outside the box in terms of faculty research and supporting that kind of research and being really excited about our colleagues’ research in that way. And the other element is these different areas that I work on, ranging from history of education and education policy and language to Buddhist studies. And a lot of my work is on mindfulness and Asian Americans. And also I write about Taiwan and language in Taiwan, and Taiwan, and political status around independence and things like that. They come from who I am, and my different communities.
I used to be an elementary school teacher in Los Angeles Unified, and really, that’s where the impetus for this work came about. So it’s an expression of wanting to find out more about something I encountered with my students when I was teaching first and fourth grade in Los Angeles Unified. And I was teaching in a really segregated community, where maybe half the population was Asian Pacific Islander, and then half was Latinx. And of those students, many of them were Filipino American. And I noticed that many of them were being labeled as English language learners, when I knew that their parents spoke English and their family context was at least a bilingual or multilingual context that included in English. And so it was quite curious to me how this labeling of those students as English language learners really served to erase the history of American empire and the fact that English instruction was part of the American conquest. And that’s why their families do have this familiarity with English.
That component coming from my personal experience. And then the Buddhist part of me, it’s another part of my community that in some ways, a lot of that research came out of a sense of urgency. To provide an intervention in the conversation around the popularity of mindfulness and what’s being overlooked in regards to Asian American Buddhists. And then also in Taiwan. I’m Taiwanese American, and the conversations around Taiwan and language and independence and sovereignty and things like that. They all speak to different parts of me – that the way that I live those parts is always intertwined. And so being able to do research that speaks to those ways, I feel like has been really an important aspect of how I see myself as a scholar and being able to be responsive to my communities. And also, though, in some regards, they are kind of written in separate ways, there are aspects of each that kind of are infused in the other.
And more and more I see them kind of coalescing, for example, in the Buddhist studies part, it really helps me to think about other worlds and other conceptions of the universe and conceptions of an order of the world. So that I can sit back and think about, for example, that idea of collecting specimens. Which I think the side of me that grew up in the United States, I hear that and I don’t really question what that means. But then the side of me that thinks back about the importance of respecting the value of the lives of all living beings, really pushes me to think about what that means tht they’re killing these birds. And that’s really important. And when we’re thinking about colonial occupation and violence, that’s not a nothing thing. And I think sometimes when we study empire, what happens to the nonhuman doesn’t really get considered because we’ve been taught that that is kind of a nothing thing. That these things – first of all these living things are things – and that they’re nothing when compared to humans. So those are kind of the ways that they intertwine. And I really appreciate being able to draw from these different traditions to infuse each other even though sometimes it feels a bit overwhelming. But I feel that there’s a lot of meaning in approaching things in that way.
Michael Donnay
I want to thank both of my guests for speaking with me. If you want to know more about what we discussed today, I highly recommend that you read Malini’s book Campaigns of Knowledge: U.S. Pedagogies of Colonialism and Occupation in the Philippines and Japan, which offers a really rich comparative perspective that I think informs a lot of what we talked about today. And while you wait for Funie’s book to be released, I highly suggest reading her article, which is titled The Coloniality of Neoliberal Global English: The Enduring Structures of American Colonial English Instruction in Puerto Rico and the Philippines. I’ll link to both of these as well as some of their other work in the show notes.
Passing Notes is a production of the History of Education Society UK. Our social media manager is Elena Rossi, and our executive producer is Heather Ellis. This episode was written and produced by me Michael Donnay. You can find a transcript of this episode, as well as more information about our events, publications and conferences at our website, historyofeducation.org.uk.
Sources
Resisting the Coloniality of English: A Research Review of Strategies by Funie Hsu
Campaigns of Knowledge: U.S. Pedagogies of Colonialism and Occupation in the Philippines and Japan by Malini Johar Schueller
U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation and Gender in Literature, 1790-1890 by Malini Johar Schueller