Imperial islands : art, architecture, and visual experience in the US insular empire after 1898 /

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Bibliographic Details
Imprint:Honolulu : University of Hawaiʻi Press, [2022]
Description:x, 316 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm.
Language:English
Series:Perspectives on the global past
Perspectives on the global past.
Subject:
Format: Print Book
URL for this record:http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/12715105
Hidden Bibliographic Details
Other authors / contributors:Hartman, Joseph R., editor.
ISBN:9780824889203
0824889207
9780824890391
9780824890407
9780824890414
Notes:Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary:"When the USS Maine mysteriously exploded in Havana's harbor on February 15, 1898, the United States joined local rebel forces to avenge the Maine and "liberate" Cuba from the Spanish empire. "Remember the Maine! To Hell with Spain!" so went the popular slogan. Little did the Cubans know that the United States was not going to give them freedom-in less than a year the American flag replaced the Spanish flag over the various island colonies of Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Spurred by military successes and dreams of an island empire, the US annexed Hawai'i that same year, even establishing island colonies throughout Micronesia and the Antilles. With the new governmental orders of creating new art, architecture, monuments, and infrastructure from the United States, the island cultures of the Caribbean and Pacific were now caught in a strategic scope of a growing imperial power. These spatial and visual objects created a visible confrontation between local indigenous, African, Asian, Spanish and US imperial expressions. These material and visual histories often go unacknowledged, but serve as uncomplicated "proof" for the visible confrontation between the US and the new island territories. The essays in this volume contribute to an important art-historical, visual cultural, architectural, and materialist critique of a growing body of scholarship on the US Empire and the War of 1898. Imperial Islands seeks to reimagine the history and cultural politics of art, architecture, and visual experience in the US insular context. The authors of this volume propose a new direction of visual culture and spatial experience through nuanced terrains for writing, envisioning, and revising US-American, Caribbean, and Pacific histories. These original essays address the role of art and architecture in expressions of state power; racialized and gendered representations of the United States and its island colonies; and forms of resistance to US cultural presence. Featuring truly interdisciplinary approaches, Imperial Islands offers readers a new way of learning the ongoing significance of vision and experience in the US Empire today, particularly for Caribbean, Latinx, Philipinx, and Pacific Island communities"--
Table of Contents:
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction: How to See an Empire
  • Part I. Bone Machine: Mapping and Murder in America's Insular Empire
  • 1. Map-Mindedness in the Age of Empire: The Role of Maps in Shaping US Imperial Interests in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, 1898-1904
  • 2. Military Cartography and the Terrains of Visibility: The Field Books of Lt. William H. Armstrong, Puerto Rico, 1908-1912
  • 3. With a Skull in Each Hand: Boneyard Photography in the American Empire after 1898
  • 4. Sustained Constraint: Locating Corporeal Control through Archived Images of the Breath in the Philippines after 1898
  • Part II. Making Our Empire Beautiful: Archipelagos of Whiteness after 1898
  • 5. Architecture, Domestic Space, and the Imperial Gaze in the Puerto Rico Chapters of Our Islands and Their People (1899)
  • 6. The Kilohana Art League: The Aesthetics of Annexation, 1894-1913
  • 7. The 1905 Report on Proposed Improvements at Manila by Daniel Burnham: The American Imperium in Textual and Urban Design Form
  • 8. Manufacturing American Imperial Landscapes in the Tropics: Baguio and Balboa
  • Part III. Negotiating Paradise: Design, Environment, and Identity in the Modern Era
  • 9. Havana's Early Modern Hotels: Accommodating Colonialism, Independence, and Imperialism
  • 10. Forest Formats: Photography, Puerto Rico, and the Caribbean Forester
  • 11. Making Islands Beautiful (Again?): Rhetorics of Neoclassicism in the US Insular Empire
  • Part IV. War, Resistance, and Spatial Experience in the Pacific
  • 12. Colonial Concrete: American Architectures of Containment and Marshallese Reinscription of Space as Resistance
  • 13. Images of Empire and Visualizing Resistance in Guam (Guåhan)
  • Selected Bibliography
  • Contributors
  • Index