Settler expansion is gendered: Eri Kitada, Intimately intertwined: settler and indigenous communities, Filipino women, and U.S.-Japanese imperial formations in the Philippines, 1903-1956, PhD dissertation, Rutgers University, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

Settler expansion is gendered: Eri Kitada, Intimately intertwined: settler and indigenous communities, Filipino women, and U.S.-Japanese imperial formations in the Philippines, 1903-1956, PhD dissertation, Rutgers University, 2024

11Feb24

Abstract: My dissertation, “Intimately Intertwined: Settler and Indigenous Communities, Filipino Women, and U.S.-Japanese Imperial Formations in the Philippines, 1903–1956,” uncovers the little-known history and legacy of Japanese settlements in the U.S. colonial Philippines. It highlights Filipino women and brings out multiple relationships among the two empires, the colony, Filipinas, Japanese settlers, and other diverse residents. I pursue the experiences and perspectives of colonized women to analyze the intertwined nature of U.S. and Japanese imperial formations and the intersections of gender, race, and space-time in the history of settler colonialism. I ask how Filipino women, Japanese settlers, and other diverse—and often marginalized—communities linked the U.S. and Japanese empires and the colonized Philippines.Geographically, my study focuses on Davao Province in southeastern Mindanao. During the U.S. colonial period, Davao developed into a colonial hub of commercial agriculture and home to the biggest Japanese settler community in the Philippines and Southeast Asia before World War II. Mindanao, including Davao, was also home to local Moro and Lumad communities—peoples the U.S. colonial government deemed “non-Christians” and subjugated under Christian Filipinos. To the U.S. empire, the island was a “frontier,” an unsettled land to be developed and civilized. Japanese migration in Davao both enabled and was enabled by the U.S. settler colonial project that promoted the exploitation of natural resources and the conquest of the Lumad and Moro communities (whom I call “tribal” communities, instead of non-Christians) by Americans and Christian Filipinos. The Japanese settler communities, however, also conflicted with the colonial administration over law, land, and frontier development. Pivotal to the shifting dynamics of collaboration and contestation among the three countries and multiple communities were Filipino women. They did not always draw attention from administrators, capitalists, or community leaders, therefore records about both tribal and Christian Filipinas are limited and fragmentary. However, even this fragmentary evidence reveals that tribal peoples, Japanese, other mobile, trans-imperial subjects, and Filipino women were all entangled agents in the interlinked history of U.S. and Japanese imperialisms and Christian Filipino nationalism. My inquiry into intimacies— a wide range of interactions and relationships among the diverse populations surrounding labor, land, violence, sex, marriage, and education— elucidates the complicities, as well as conflicts, among the two empires and the colony. “Intimately Intertwined” offers an alternative way to write, learn, and imagine a history of the U.S. and Japanese empires and the Philippines, by excavating stories of Filipino women and marginalized communities. It analyzes and ultimately refuses the patriarchal powers and Euro-American white centrism that neglects the experiences and perspectives of those people and divides the histories of the three countries. By employing a multi-lingual, multi-sited, and multi-scale approach, I show that the two empires were intimately intertwined by the lives, labors, and intimacies of Filipino women, Japanese settlers, and other diverse residents in Davao. This project will contribute to scholarship on women’s history, imperialism/colonialism, diaspora, indigeneity, race and mixed race, capitalism, and anti-colonial nationalism in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond.

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