Join us for an online discussion on Cornell University's Gerow D. Brill Collection and Michigan University's Dean C. Worcester Photographic Collection, hosted by the Committee on Research Materials on Southeast Asia (CORMOSEA), the Southeast Asia Program (SEAP), and the Southeast Asia Digital Library (SEADL).

Speakers:
Claire Cororaton, PhD Candidate, Cornell University

Claire Cororaton is a 6^th year Ph.D. Candidate in History at Cornell University. Her dissertation, tentatively titled “Emplotments of Freedom: Agricultural Development and ‘The Philippine Question’, 1898 – 1941” examines the relationship between ideas of agricultural development and state capitalism in the Philippines. She explores how imperial and racial understandings of land and property suffuse American and Filipino discourses of “national development” through the first half of the 20^th century. The Janus-faced nature of American and Philippine exceptionalist rhetoric prior to the era of decolonization —that the Philippines was a great “democratic experiment” in Southeast Asia, amidst other colonized regions—belied the development of an authoritarian postcolonial imaginary, one that remains alive in the modern Philippine Republic. Her work draws on the fields of Southeast Asian History, US Imperialism, and European Intellectual History, working at the intersection of legal history, development studies, and settler-colonial studies.

Abstract: The Gerow D. Brill Collection, housed in Cornell University Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, includes glass plate negatives taken by Brill during the early years of the US Occupation of the Philippines. The photographs are part of a current digitization project that explores how discourses of agricultural productivity informed the American imperial project in the Philippines. Brill’s photos from his relatively short trip in the Philippines (March 1902 - December 1902) provide a unique lens into an important moment in Philippine history, when many were still reeling from war. While most scholarship on Philippine colonial photography deal with discourses of race and savagery, these photos focus on subjects that might interest an engineer or a scientist: soil science, pests, topography, agricultural implements, infrastructure, home industries, and markets. Overall,  the collection reveals the intersection between science, violence, and empire underpinning the United States' supposedly "benevolent empire" in the Philippines.

Dr. Mary Dorothy Jose, Associate Professor, University of the Philippines Manila

Mary Dorothy dL. Jose is an Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the College of Arts and Sciences, University of the Philippines Manila, where she also served as the Convenor of the Manila Studies Program and Coordinator of the Office of the Gender Program. She finished her BA History, MA in Asian Studies, and PhD in Philippine Studies at the University of the Philippines Diliman. Her research interests help further the feminist perspective. In January 2018, she was awarded the University Library Fellowship by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Michigan for her research entitled “Race, Gender, and Photography: Images of Filipino Women at the 1904 St. Louis Exposition” which was also awarded 1^st Prize in the 1^st Virginia B. Licuanan History Writing Contest sponsored by the Ateneo de Manila University Library of Women’s Writings in 2018. The U-M research fellowship also helped her finish her dissertation entitled “Women, Photography, and History: An Analysis of the Images of Women in American Colonial Photography” where she used photographs from the 1904 St. Louis Exposition, the Dean Worcester Collection, and American travelogues from the U-M archives as primary sources.

Abstract: In the early years of American imperialism in the Philippines, photography was extensively used to document the colony. Most of these photographs were taken by Dean Worcester while serving as the Secretary of Interior in the US colonial government from 1901 to 1913. By the end of his term, he was able to take and archive more than 15,000 photographs of the Philippines and the Filipino people. While significant studies have delved into how Worcester used these photographs to promote his imperial interests, I have decided to focus on his images of Filipino women to interrogate if they were also utilized to propagate gender ideology since gender continues to be an unexplored topic in colonial photography. After all, it has been noted that of the 5,000 images of women in his collection, many were nudes from the so-called “non-Christian tribes.” In analyzing the portrayal of women in the Worcester collection, the images become commentaries on social roles, status, and civilization (or lack of it) not only in the context of race but also gender. Looking at these photographs will show how photography has been used as an instrument to create gendered images of Filipino women.