Remaindered Life of Citizen-Man, Medium of Democracy

東 南 アジア 研 究
49 巻 3 号
Fig. 1 Digital Reproduction of Philippino
Women Washing beneath a Banana
Tree, an Oil Painting by C. W. Andrews
Source: [http: //www. flickr. com/photos/rafaelminuesa/5302647947/]
(accessed March
27, 2011)
Fig. 2 Digital Reproduction of Indigena de la
Clase Rica, Photographic Print by
Francisco von Camp.
Source: [http: //es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fotograf
%C3%ADa_en_Filipinas]
(accessed March 23, 2011)
Note: “While Ilustraction Filipina benevolently aims to grant the native an aesthetic representation
through his idealized harmony with a sublime and unexplored Filipino nature, the idealization itself
contained a critique of both as lacking in civilization”[Blanco 2009: 167].
visual and literary representation, as evidenced by the paintings and writings of emergent
Filipino nationalists in the late nineteenth century, a growing shift in the status of the image
from expressive medium to reality artifact (that is, the technical image as evidentiary part of the
reality it represents) becomes quite marked and arguably fully realized under U. S. imperialism.
U. S. imperial deployments of the photographic and cinematic image as technical
reproduction of the objective reality of imperial power thus contrast sharply with the efforts of
self-fashioning as well as gift practices that Rafael describes as characteristic of the production
and circulation of the photographic image among Filipino nationalists in the nineteenth century
[Rafael 1990] (see Fig. 3). In this context, the photographic image served as token of affection,
commemorative object, proof and memory of love. While such practices would continue during
the U. S. colonial period with the production and circulation of portrait photography in the early
twentieth century, suggesting, as Rafael argues, “the existence of another world that existed
within but was not wholly absorbed by colonial representation,” 19) a survey of the vast archive
of photograph images “taken” and “captured” by amateur as well as professional
19) As Rafael argues, “Filipino portraits indicate another path for the recognition of native remains.
They constitute a kind of anti-ethnology in their insistence on an empirically unassailable subjectivity
and the evidence of their indeterminate and unknowable reception in the future” [Rafael 2000: 99].
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