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Southeast Asia
Organized Panel Session
The years between the two world wars witnessed a series of global capitalist crisis, displacing and launching a multitude of circulating bodies throughout the U.S. Pacific empire. Myriad political and economic authorities in the American colonial Philippines and the Hawaiian Territory anxiously attempted to capture Filipino bodies within labor and social hierarchical orders. In the interwar period, therefore, paranoia over racialized labor in U.S. colonies became knotted ever tighter with fears over unemployment in the “domestic” United States. I build off of Cedric Robinson’s concept of “racial capitalism”—exploring how racial capitalism was largely dependent upon the “scientific” examination and manipulation of the “able” body of the “native” Filipino laborer. I draw from sociological and anthropological scholarship, plantation and industrial reports, newsprint, and congressional hearings to illustrate how race became essential in determining who was mentally and physically able to live and work in certain spaces and who was not. Simultaneously, I show how the biological or cultural abilities and disabilities of “native” populations shaped racialized subjectivities and socialities. Thus, this paper illustrates how race and ability were mutually constituted within and through imperial divisions of labor across insular and mainland agribusiness plantations.
Allan Lumba
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University