The Filipino Primitive: Accumulation and Resistance in the American Museum
How museums’ visual culture contributes to knowledge accumulation





Sarita See argues that collections of stolen artifacts form the foundation of American knowledge production. Nowhere can we appreciate more easily the triple forces of knowledge accumulation—capitalist, colonial, and racial—than in the imperial museum, where the objects of accumulation remain materially, visibly preserved. The Filipino Primitive takes Karl Marx’s concept of “primitive accumulation,” usually conceived of as an economic process for the acquisition of land and the extraction of labor, and argues that we also must understand it as a project of knowledge accumulation.



Taking us through the Philippine collections at the University of Michigan Natural History Museum and the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum, also in Michigan, See reveals these exhibits as both allegory and real case of the primitive accumulation that subtends imperial American knowledge, just as the extraction of Filipino labor contributes to American capitalist colonialism. With this understanding of the Filipino foundations of the American drive toward power and knowledge, we can appreciate the value of Filipino American cultural producers like Carlos Bulosan, Stephanie Syjuco, and Ma-Yi Theater Company who have created incisive parodies of this accumulative epistemology, even as they articulate powerful alternative, anti-accumulative social ecologies.

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The Filipino Primitive: Accumulation and Resistance in the American Museum
How museums’ visual culture contributes to knowledge accumulation





Sarita See argues that collections of stolen artifacts form the foundation of American knowledge production. Nowhere can we appreciate more easily the triple forces of knowledge accumulation—capitalist, colonial, and racial—than in the imperial museum, where the objects of accumulation remain materially, visibly preserved. The Filipino Primitive takes Karl Marx’s concept of “primitive accumulation,” usually conceived of as an economic process for the acquisition of land and the extraction of labor, and argues that we also must understand it as a project of knowledge accumulation.



Taking us through the Philippine collections at the University of Michigan Natural History Museum and the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum, also in Michigan, See reveals these exhibits as both allegory and real case of the primitive accumulation that subtends imperial American knowledge, just as the extraction of Filipino labor contributes to American capitalist colonialism. With this understanding of the Filipino foundations of the American drive toward power and knowledge, we can appreciate the value of Filipino American cultural producers like Carlos Bulosan, Stephanie Syjuco, and Ma-Yi Theater Company who have created incisive parodies of this accumulative epistemology, even as they articulate powerful alternative, anti-accumulative social ecologies.

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The Filipino Primitive: Accumulation and Resistance in the American Museum

The Filipino Primitive: Accumulation and Resistance in the American Museum

by Sarita Echavez See
The Filipino Primitive: Accumulation and Resistance in the American Museum

The Filipino Primitive: Accumulation and Resistance in the American Museum

by Sarita Echavez See

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Overview

How museums’ visual culture contributes to knowledge accumulation





Sarita See argues that collections of stolen artifacts form the foundation of American knowledge production. Nowhere can we appreciate more easily the triple forces of knowledge accumulation—capitalist, colonial, and racial—than in the imperial museum, where the objects of accumulation remain materially, visibly preserved. The Filipino Primitive takes Karl Marx’s concept of “primitive accumulation,” usually conceived of as an economic process for the acquisition of land and the extraction of labor, and argues that we also must understand it as a project of knowledge accumulation.



Taking us through the Philippine collections at the University of Michigan Natural History Museum and the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum, also in Michigan, See reveals these exhibits as both allegory and real case of the primitive accumulation that subtends imperial American knowledge, just as the extraction of Filipino labor contributes to American capitalist colonialism. With this understanding of the Filipino foundations of the American drive toward power and knowledge, we can appreciate the value of Filipino American cultural producers like Carlos Bulosan, Stephanie Syjuco, and Ma-Yi Theater Company who have created incisive parodies of this accumulative epistemology, even as they articulate powerful alternative, anti-accumulative social ecologies.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781479825059
Publisher: New York University Press
Publication date: 11/14/2017
Edition description: New Edition
Pages: 272
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Sarita Echavez See is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California Riverside and she is the co-founder of the Center for Art and Thought. She is the author of The Decolonized Eye: Filipino American Art and Performance (2009).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Accumulating the Primitive 1

Part I The Archive: Dispossession by Accumulation

1 Progress through the Museum: Knowledge Nullius and the University of Michigan Museum of Natural History 25

2 Foreign in a Domestic Space: Progressivist Imperialism and the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum 55

Part II The Repertoire of Dispossession

3 Lessons from the Illiterate: Carlos Bulosan and the Staged Wages of Romance 99

4 The Booty and Beauty of Contemporary Filipino/American Art: Stephanie Syjuco's Raiders 141

Conclusion: Accumulation Now and Then 171

Notes 189

Bibliography 211

Index 225

About the Author 237

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