Imagining Manila

Literature, Empire and Orientalism

Tom Sykes

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780755602889
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'Inde et de l'Asie du Sud

The city of Manila is uniquely significant to Philippine, Southeast Asian and world history. It played a key role in the rise of Western colonial mercantilism in Asia, the extinction of the Spanish Empire and the ascendancy of the USA to global imperial hegemony, amongst other events. This book examines British and American writing on the city, situating these representations within scholarship on empire, orientalism and US, Asian and European political history. Through analysis of novels, memoirs, travelogues and journalism written about Manila by Westerners since the early eighteenth century, Tom Sykes builds a picture of Western attitudes towards the city and the wider Philippines, and the mechanics by which these came to dominate the discourse. This study uncovers to what extent Western literary tropes and representational models have informed understandings of the Philippines, in the West and elsewhere, and the types of counter-narrative which have emerged in the Philippines in response to them.

1

‘A Seething Cauldron of Evil’

Hispanophobia, Manila-as-hell and third world blues

Western literature has been likening cities to the Christian hell for at least 700 years. At one end of this spectrum of representations are urban spaces that are mildly redolent of hell or that have hellish features which are explicable rationally in what Tzvetan Todorov, inspired by Sigmund Freud, calls ‘the Uncanny’. At the other end of the spectrum are cities that are closer imitations of hell – such as the fiery metropolis of Dis in Dante Alighieri’s fourteenth-century poem Inferno – as it has been limned in religious texts, and that therefore belong to Todorov’s category of ‘the Fantastic’, where people and places in narratives are only comprehensible in supernatural terms.¹ Furthermore, each textual city-as-hell is shaped by cultural and material determinants specific to its historical moment of origin; for example, Joan M. Ferrante observes that Dante populated Dis with suffering heretics because that sin was ‘intimately associated with politics for Dante’s audience’. The politics of the time were notable for Pope John XXII’s clampdown on opponents who rejected Christian dogma, and the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II’s conflation of religious dissent with sedition.²

This chapter analyses how, since the early Victorian era, a significant current within Manilaist writing has marshalled the city-as-hell motif in its constructions of Manila. These representations share many of the characteristics Todorov mentions and, like Ferrante’s critique of Dante, can be understood with reference to their various economic, social and political contexts. Moreover, they cohere with Orientalist idées fixe about the inferiority of Eastern beliefs, mores and political-economic structures, as articulated by Edward Said and, more specifically to the thesis of this chapter, Alain Grosrichard, who asserts that French Enlightenment commentators on the Arab world conceived of a ‘despotic state’ that ‘tends to reduce itself to one vast single city, surrounded by an infinity of ruins and fallow land’.³ Aside from targeting the ‘savage’ Asians that are the staples of Said’s and Grosrichard’s Orientalisms, the early exponents of Manila-as-hell are strongly critical of the reputedly illiberal, impious and arcane Spanish colonial regime in Manila.

The Manila-as-hell model emanated from the mid-nineteenth century when Britain, France, Germany and the United States were expanding their imperial influence over parts of Africa, Asia and the Americas while the Spanish Empire was disintegrating in a process that had begun centuries before. According to Martin Green, right from its genesis in the late fifteenth century the Spanish Empire was plagued with internal divisions and revolts. When King Charles V abdicated the Spanish and Holy Roman thrones in 1554–6, the ‘idea of [Spanish] empire was discredited’ in the eyes of England, which was at this time starting its own imperial ascent.⁴ The Reformation added a theological dimension to England’s perception of Spain as a geopolitical adversary and fuelled negative portrayals of Spanish behaviour abroad. As Green avers, ‘The cruelty of the Spaniards to their Indian subjects was a constant theme of Protestant moralists everywhere.’⁵ The growth of Protestantism was of course synchronous with the growth of capitalism, and Protestant England was able to industrialize in the sixteenth century while the Catholic Spanish Empire could not. In the 1690s, England ‘made itself the source of financial credit’ and saw itself as a consummate ‘mercantile state, and a mercantile world power’.⁶ Thus, the nation was well-prepared for the crucial next phase of Euro-imperialism, in which empires ‘[competed] against each other for the profits to be derived from exploiting the periphery and trading with the arena surrounding the system’.⁷ Woefully unprepared for this next phase, Spain lost its West African possessions to Portugal in 1778 and its territories in North America, including West Florida, to the United States in the 1810s and 1820s. By 1865, all of Spain’s colonies in Latin America save Cuba and Puerto Rico had gained their independence.

Although Spain was still clinging on to its Philippine colony by the time the first Manilaists Charles Wilkes, Nicholas Loney and Robert MacMicking were active in the 1840s and 1850s, Spanish authority had been rocked by a series of religious-inspired native revolts and the temporary occupation of Manila by the British (1762–4).⁸ Until the late 1840s, the British took full advantage of Spain’s inability to repress the Moro Muslims in the southern Philippines by ‘encroaching’ on these ‘territories’ with their navy.⁹ Predictably perhaps, these defeats and humiliations informed a consensus among early Victorian Manilaists that Spain was grievously mismanaging Manila due to a combination of anachronistic fiscal policies, administrative incompetence and authoritarian oppressiveness. These writers caricatured peninsulares (citizens born in Spain now holding influential posts in Manila society) as brutally and corruptly holding on to undeserved power in a marginal backwater. In 1851, the British trading company Kerr & Co. (which at the time also employed Robert MacMicking’s older brother Thomas) sent its rising star Nicholas Loney to Manila to evaluate its investment potential. In his letters – collected and published in 1964, almost a century after his death – he decries the decadence, greed and inertia of the then-governor of Manila, symbolized by his ownership of an excessive ‘25 horses’.¹⁰ A disciple of free-market dynamism and rationalization, Loney would later run his own firm, Loney & Kerr Co., which sought to increase the efficiency of Philippine sugar production by making loans to farmers and importing state-of-the-art machinery from Europe. Loney embodied a new nexus between Western economic aspirations and political imperatives regarding the Philippines given that, simultaneous to these business activities, he served as the first British vice consul to the Philippines with special responsibility for advising foreign companies on how to penetrate local markets. With similar repugnance towards the Spanish leadership of Manila, Charles Wilkes complains of cigar-smoking officials who devote their three-year terms to enriching themselves,¹¹ behaving in ways ‘so cruel as to be a disgrace to the records of the nineteenth century’.¹² Wilkes was the commander of the United States Exploring Expedition (1838–42), a colossal operation comprising seven ships ranging from 250 to 780 tonnes in size that transported sailors, soldiers, botanists, cartographers, naturalists, a mineralogist and a philologist to dozens of destinations in the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. The expedition signalled the United States’ ambitions to increase its global power by gathering scientific knowledge about ‘all doubtful islands and shoals’¹³ and by ruthlessly subjugating native populations in Fiji and elsewhere. Funded by Congress and authorized by presidents John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, this staunchly patriotic mission invested Wilkes with a sense of superiority over all the regimes that he visited, Spanish Manila included.

For Orientalists of Wilkes’s stripe, having Spaniards ruling in Asia was no less rebarbative than having Asians ruling in Asia. To understand this mentality we can return to Grosrichard’s observations about other Asian polities located nearer to the West than the Philippines. ‘The despotic City’ of the Arab world, he writes, was envisaged by French intellectuals as ‘an absurd economy, its only goal the jouissance of the One [the vizier or king], not the country’s enrichment’.¹⁴ Rampant graft at the highest level causes an ‘internal haemorrhage of wealth’ and disincentivizes the masses: ‘they do not work, they make no improvement in anything’.¹⁵ This iniquitous and dehumanizing order produces a hellish textual space, ‘a silent, dismal desert, haunted by a flock of dispirited victims’.¹⁶ Similarly, the lower-class Malay Filipinos of Spanish Manila are ‘idle’ in the view of Loney, Wilkes and Robert MacMicking, because there is little hope of social mobility within this backwardly bureaucratic peripheral site. Like Grosrichard’s diabolical terra nullius bereft of European modernity, Loney’s Manila is a miserably inert environment where ‘Energy grows listless and benumbed’.¹⁷

The common defects between Loney et al.’s Manila and the Grosrichardian despotic city might be explained by the fact that, while the Spanish in Manila were of Western heritage and therefore ought to belong to the same prestigious civilization as the British and the Americans, Manilaism casts them as a lower breed of Westerner. But why? At this time, a variety of politicians and intellectuals were setting forth the doctrine of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism. One of them, the British Liberal parliamentarian Sir Charles Dilke, proposed the concept of ‘Greater Britain’ as ‘a cohesive racial and political structure for the global diaspora of an Anglo-Saxon race which continued to share the same language and institutions’, as Robert J. C. Young views it.¹⁸ According to this conception, Greater Britain included the United States, New Zealand, Australia and parts of Canada, but did not extend to colonies or ex-colonies of other Western European nations (even, it would appear, a nation such as Germany, which could reasonably lay claim to the nomenclature ‘Saxon’).¹⁹ Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism is covert throughout MacMicking and overt in Loney, who writes, ‘Spanish and Anglo-Saxon ideas are so radically different about many things there can seldom be any sympathy.’²⁰ His conclusion is based on his ‘never [having] formed anything approaching to a friendship with a Spaniard’ and several personal observations about the demerits of the Spanish ‘dons’ he has encountered. They are not interested in expanding their knowledge of the world through travel, he claims, and he considers socially inferior those who have retired from employment in the navy to set up as small businessmen.²¹ Presumably, given Loney’s personal aspirations for high-ranking officialdom and involvement in large-scale commerce, it would be ungentlemanly to abandon honourable service to one’s country in favour of low-level petit bourgeois money-making. His more suggestive later remark that Spaniards have too many ‘French ideas’ and lament that he is ‘the only specimen of his race on the island’²² would appear to be couched in a dichotomy between Spanish and Anglo-Saxon cultural consciousnesses. At the same time as Anglo-Saxonism was being articulated by influential Atlantic Westerners, a corresponding phenomenon known as Latinidad was emerging in both Latin America and those Euro-imperialist states whose languages wer e Latin based. As the Argentine historian Walter D. Mignolo elaborates, the Colombian diplomat José Maria Torres Caicedo drew a cultural and political boundary between ‘Anglo-Saxon America, Danish America, Dutch America’ and ‘Spanish America, French America and Portuguese America’, while French ‘intellectuals and state officers [used Latinidad] to take the lead in Europe among the configuration of Latin countries involved in the Americas (Spain, Italy, Portugal and France itself), and allowed it also to confront the United States’ continuing expansion toward the south’.²³ Tensions between Latinidad and non-Latinidad interests in the Americas would result in ‘the imperial imaginary’ regarding ‘Latin Americans as second-class Europeans’.²⁴ Such prejudices towards Spaniards and ‘Latins’ deriving from the Americas may have been exported to Manila, given the Philippines’ colonial ties with Latin America (from the 1560s until the 1820s it was governed indirectly by Spain via the Mexican Viceroyalty) and the fact that many Manilaist writers of this phase and later were widely travelled sailors, traders and diplomats who would likely have been aware of the Latinidad-Anglo-Saxon binary. Certainly, other British and American commentators of the period were. ‘The Spaniards of this period,’ writes Green, ‘were in fact habitually described by nineteenth-century WASP [white Anglo-Saxon Protestant] historians as Visigoths, and as thus full of barbaric vigor’.²⁵

It is probable that, in the Manilaist mind, the sloth, greed and tyranny of the Spanish in Manila was not only a congenital fact of their Spanish-ness or Latin-ness but a consequence of their having spent too much time in the East, among Easterners who exhibited those same deficiencies. As MacMicking tellingly writes, ‘many of the natives of Spain who are even now selected to fill the highest offices, are about as despotic and as unscrupulous as any Asiatics in their notions of government and in their exercise of power.’²⁶ In like spirit, Grosrichard shows how European men of letters from Michel Nau to Montesquieu devised ‘physical determinist’ formulations about climate, biology and racial typology to conclude that Orient...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Manilaism as an Orientalism
• 1 ‘A Seething Cauldron of Evil’: Hispanophobia, Manila-as-hell and third world blues
• 2 ‘Known to All Students of History’: Adventure, imperial mythology and Orientalist rhetoric in Manilaism of the US conquest of the Philippines
• 3 ‘The Pious New Name of the Musket’: Language, gender, race and benevolent assimilation
• 4 ‘She Can Take on American Ideas’: Desire, capital and flawed simulation in twentieth-century Manilaism
• 5 The making of a supranational stereotype: Western constructions of the Chinese in Manila and Beyond
• 6 Call of Duterte: Cacique despotism and Western (neo)liberal crisis
• 7 Towards an anti-Manilaism
• Conclusion: Liberal Orientalism versus humanism, socialism and internationalism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright