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Southeast Asia
Organized Panel Session
This paper explores how institutions of “uplift” targeted Filipino girls for their “dusky,” “dainty” and “deft” fingers and manufactured a workforce for the export of embroidered white goods to American markets. By the 1910s the U.S. colonial government began infrastructural changes to expand local industries into a much larger import-export business model. To do this, the U.S. colonial state used institutions of uplift to help expand a commercial enterprise. The new colonial state promised to uplift Filipinos and bring modernity, industrialization, and wealth. However, an examination of embroidery production, one of the most profitable exports, in industrial schools and prisons, reveals a troubling story of racialized and gendered exploitation. Prisons and schools provided a controlled environment where educating “pupil workers” and women prisoners became a way to create a vulnerable and exploitable workforce for the profit of the colonial state and American investors. By linking embroidery and labor to colonial education and prison systems, this paper questions the “benefits” of American colonialism and explores the hidden cost of uplift.
Genevieve Clutario
Harvard University