[On February 4th,
1899 Filipino rebels launched an attack on American troops in Manila, the
opening salvo in what would become the Philippine American
War (or Philippine
Insurrection—see Thursday’s post for more on that distinction). So this
week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of contexts for that largely forgotten,
brutal turn of the 20th century conflict, leading up to a weekend
post on the war’s legacies for 20th and 21st century
histories!]
On a couple ways
to contextualize a complex, important essay.
I wrote one
of my earliest blog posts, just a week into this blog’s existence back in
November 2010 (ah, how young we all were!), on Mark Twain’s turn to
anti-imperialism (and specifically to the Philippine question) in his 1901
essay “To
the Person Sitting in Darkness.” I had the chance to re-read the essay when
I taught my Mark
Twain Special Author course in Fall 2017 (more on that course in a moment),
and felt then even more strongly what I had already thought was the case about “Person”:
that it walks a very fine line between critiquing the kinds of paternalistic
and patronizing attitudes that underlie imperialistic enterprises and
ironically furthering those attitudes. That is, when Twain opens his essay with
the sentence “Extending the Blessings of Civilization
to our Brother who Sits in Darkness has been a good trade and has paid well, on
the whole,” he is clearly satirizing the motivations behind those who extend
such “blessings,” and thus implicitly criticizing the notion of the “blessings”
themselves; but I’m not as sure that he is using “darkness” entirely
satirically, here or at any point in the essay. In any case, it’s a complex
essay, and one that deserves extended reading beyond my brief engagement here!
Like all
literary texts Twain’s essay also benefits from contextualization, however, and
here I want to highlight a couple particular such contexts. For one thing, “Person”
was part of an organized, unified turn of the 20th century anti-imperialist
movement. Twain’s essay was published through the New York Anti-Imperialist
League, a local branch of the American
Anti-Imperialistic League. Founded in June 1898 in direct response to the ongoing
Spanish American War—in the same month that yesterday’s subject, Emilio
Aguinaldo, declared Philippine Independence from both Spain and the U.S.—the League
gathered an impressive array of political, social, and cultural voices in
opposition to precisely the kinds of imperial ventures that the war helped
extend. Twain was a particularly prominent member of the League throughout its
existence, and his 1901 essay should thus be read in the context of both his own many
anti-imperalist statements from 1898 on and the voices and ideas of his
fellow anti-imperialists over those same years. A text always speaks in
part on its own terms, of course, but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and these contemporary
contexts are vital ones for understanding “Person.”
So too are
contexts related to Twain’s half-century writing career. As I detailed
in this post, one of the most enlightening discoveries I made through teaching
the Twain-focused class was of his early efforts at social satire and critique.
I had always thought that those genres were part of the final decade and stage of
Twain’s career; but while he certainly turned to them more
fully in the early 1900s, they had been a part of his journalistic and
writing repertoire since at least 1866’s masterful satire “What Have the Police Been Doing?”
As that piece reflects, Twain tended to maintain his satires straight through
(a la Jonathan
Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”), meaning that it is entirely up to the readers
to read between the lines and understand the authorial perspective and
arguments behind the voice being both employed and satirized. I don’t know if
that’s necessarily the case for “Person,” and again any piece has to work to at
least some degree on its own terms as we can never know with what contexts an
audience would be familiar; but at the same time, we can’t read a satirical
essay from an author who frequently worked in the genre as entirely separate from
those career-long efforts. Just one more layer to reading Twain’s complex and
crucial contribution to the debate over the Philippines and U.S. imperialism.
Next war context
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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