Abstract:

During the 1930s, Filipinos struggled over how and whether to integrate territory and people from “Non-Christian” areas into the newly emerging nation-state. Under US colonial rule, these regions had been managed separately from the rest of the archipelago. Beginning in 1935, however, the Philippines began its 10-year transition to independence. Filipino governing elites, the vast majority of whom were Christian, began to take a firmer hold over majority-Muslim areas, like the southern island of Mindanao. They pushed to accelerate road building, mining, the titling of public lands, and Christian settlement as part of an effort to regularize, effectively tax, and extract resources from the region. Muslim residents fought against these programs. Many rejected national sovereignty as an ideal and linked local independence to continued US control. American colonial officials in Mindanao lent their support to retention of the majority-Muslim South, but the far more powerful US colonial state aligned its interests with Christian Filipino elites in Manila. This talk will examine these contradictory tensions. It will explore the links that Christian Filipinos drew between non-Christian identity and geographical space, and it will discuss the processes through which Christian and Muslim Filipinos pushed for different kinds of landscapes and economies. Ultimately, these questions are relevant for understanding the politics and genealogy of current conflicts over land, religion, and sovereignty in the Philippines.

Bio:

Karen Miller is Professor of History at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY. Her book, Managing Inequality: Northern Racial Liberalism and Urban Politics in Interwar Detroit, came out in 2014. She is currently a fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion.