Sarita Echavez See
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781479842667
- eISBN:
- 9781479887699
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479842667.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
This book 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 ...
More
This book 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. The material collection and display of things associated with racially backward or so-called primitive peoples form the epistemological foundation of American knowledge production, which should more accurately be called knowledge acquisition or extraction. Nowhere can we appreciate so easily the intertwined nature of the triple forces of knowledge accumulation—capital, colonial, and racial—than in the imperial museum, where the objects of accumulation remain materially, visibly preserved. The Philippine exhibit in the American museum serves as an allegory and a “real” case of the primitive accumulation subtending imperial American knowledge just as the extraction of Filipino labor contributes to American capitalist colonialism. With this understanding of the Filipino foundations of the development of an American accumulative drive toward power/knowledge, this book then turns to Filipino American cultural producers like Carlos Bulosan, Ma-Yi Theater Company, and Stephanie Syjuco, who have created powerful parodies of an accumulative epistemology that has been naturalized in different sites and spaces (the museum, the art gallery, and the agribusiness farm) even as they also have proposed powerful alternative, anti-accumulative social ecologies.Less
This book 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. The material collection and display of things associated with racially backward or so-called primitive peoples form the epistemological foundation of American knowledge production, which should more accurately be called knowledge acquisition or extraction. Nowhere can we appreciate so easily the intertwined nature of the triple forces of knowledge accumulation—capital, colonial, and racial—than in the imperial museum, where the objects of accumulation remain materially, visibly preserved. The Philippine exhibit in the American museum serves as an allegory and a “real” case of the primitive accumulation subtending imperial American knowledge just as the extraction of Filipino labor contributes to American capitalist colonialism. With this understanding of the Filipino foundations of the development of an American accumulative drive toward power/knowledge, this book then turns to Filipino American cultural producers like Carlos Bulosan, Ma-Yi Theater Company, and Stephanie Syjuco, who have created powerful parodies of an accumulative epistemology that has been naturalized in different sites and spaces (the museum, the art gallery, and the agribusiness farm) even as they also have proposed powerful alternative, anti-accumulative social ecologies.
Sarita Echavez See
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781479842667
- eISBN:
- 9781479887699
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479842667.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
Carlos Bulosan’s story “The Romance of Magno Rubio” is about the plight of an illiterate Filipino field worker in Depression-era California going deeper and deeper into debt in order to woo a white ...
More
Carlos Bulosan’s story “The Romance of Magno Rubio” is about the plight of an illiterate Filipino field worker in Depression-era California going deeper and deeper into debt in order to woo a white American woman. This chapter argues that the story and its contemporary staged adaptation powerfully subvert accumulative values while also introducing a Filipino American alternative economy based on reciprocity and non-accumulation. The illiterate character Magno Rubio shows us how to read.Less
Carlos Bulosan’s story “The Romance of Magno Rubio” is about the plight of an illiterate Filipino field worker in Depression-era California going deeper and deeper into debt in order to woo a white American woman. This chapter argues that the story and its contemporary staged adaptation powerfully subvert accumulative values while also introducing a Filipino American alternative economy based on reciprocity and non-accumulation. The illiterate character Magno Rubio shows us how to read.
