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Inter-area/Border Crossing
Organized Panel Session
This paper will show how American colonial policymakers and Filipino political elites utilized a transnational anti-communist politics aimed at delegitimizing communist anti-imperialist politics and transpacific labor solidarity. Anti-imperial activists rooted their vision of Philippine nationalism and independence in an analysis that placed U.S. imperialism in the Philippines within the framework of western imperialism in Asia more broadly. In addition, by arguing that the western imperial order was a product of capitalism, Philippine anti-imperialists articulated a politics of global solidarity that connected the struggles of Philippines laborers to the struggles of U.S. laborers, including Filipinos who had migrated to the US as laborers. As transnational political class of Americans and Filipinos anticipated Philippine independence they increasingly deployed anti-communist politics as a means to contain the ideological and political/economic challenge communists and labor activists posed to the US-Philippine colonial order. This paper will show that anti-communist policing in the Philippines had two goals: one was to exert influence over the direction of Philippine nationalism and politics, and the other was to maintain the political economy of pacific labor relations.
Colleen Woods
University of Maryland, College Park