The mission of American occupation has long employed the schoolbook in conjunction with the rifle. Education has served as both a metaphor for beautifying the brutality of US expansion and a structural means by which to enact it. General Richard Pratt's oft-quoted declaration to “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man” is perhaps one of the most prominent examples of the pedagogical aspect of conquest. Malini Johar Schueller's Campaigns of Knowledge traces this method of US empire as it was applied during colonialism in the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century and in the post-World War II occupation of Japan. In doing so, Schueller demonstrates the ongoing use of education to institutionalize the American empire across time, space, and shifting political-economic landscapes.
Just as conquest was organized around conceptions of race and racial difference, so too were the educational endeavors that complemented American empire-building. By applying a comparative lens to understanding American schooling in the Philippines and Japan, Schueller reveals the different ways that racial differences served to create varying forms of otherness within the broad category of Asian. This contributes a nuanced reading of Asian racializations (the plural form being central to Schueller's arguments) in education that further demonstrates the limits of hegemonic model minority tropes. By examining the colonial logic and racial impetus that drove the educational agendas in the two cases, what Scheuller describes as “contrasting projects of Orientalist racial management” (p. 8), Campaigns of Knowledge highlights how shifts in American expressions of Asian racial difference served to maintain—and bind—the effectiveness of education as a mechanism for establishing the US empire in Asia through the twentieth century.
The book's central premise is that American education was used as a democratizing force in the US expansion in Asia and functioned to create subjects who would adhere to the distinct purposes of empire. A succession of interrelated arguments demonstrates that the educational objectives carried out in the Philippines and Japan depended upon particular notions of Orientalist racial difference adapted to fit the respective cases (and needs) of occupation. Scheuller argues that the racial othering of Filipinos “effectively tribalized” them as savages in need of American to education civilize them. The Japanese, on the other hand, were perceived as “bound by Shintoism, emperor worship, obsessive rituals, and fanaticism” and portrayed as “victims of an arcane hyper-Orientalized” culture, thus requiring corrective reeducation (p. 10). Schuller further demonstrates that though these education and reeducation programs were imposed to facilitate the development of proper “pedagogical subjects” (p. 24), the particular pedagogies employed in each context (such as English instruction in the Philippines versus romaji in Japan) also enabled the development of “different forms of collective subjectivities,” such as “collaborative dissent, which often contests hegemony by laying claim to aspects of it” (p. 5). These campaigns of knowledge, therefore, also produced their own battlefields of contestation.
Drawing from English-language primary source materials from the educational programs in the Philippines and Japan, cultural texts such as literature and film, and oral histories with former students of the occupation schooling system in Japan, the book presents its investigation and arguments across seven chapters. The first four chapters detail the program of American schooling and its varied impact in the Philippines, while the last three focus on the implementation, and responses to, US education in occupied Japan. Grounded in a theoretical approach that combines Michel Foucault's notion of “governmentality” (government and rationality) with postcolonial critiques that call for the recognition of colonial difference, and the resulting colonial/racial hierarchies produced within the motivations of governmentality, Scheuller foregrounds the ways that US education was incorporated within notions of democratic development for each nation. Chapters 1, 2, and 5 provide historical overviews of the educational programs—and their intended development of pedagogical subjects—and demonstrate Schueller's analysis of colonial governmentality to highlight the ways that American officials framed their educational objectives within a notion of teaching democracy.
In chapters 3, 4, and 6, Scheuller employs Edward Said's notion of contrapuntal reading to analyze the schooling campaigns, positioning literary works and films that specifically address the US educational campaigns in the Philippines and Japan alongside the primary source documents expressing the American regime's pedagogical intentions. Here, Scheuller incorporates the work of Filipino, Filipino American, Japanese, and Japanese American writers and filmmakers to demonstrate not only the complex ways that American education has been taken up, torn down, and met with ambivalence, but also to highlight the ways that Asian American cultural production is shaped by transnational dynamics of American policy and practices in Asia.
Chapter 7 introduces oral histories that extend the examination of the different effects of American schooling during the occupation of Japan. Interviews with five former students are juxtaposed with the intended goals of the American educational program to produce an investigation of personal experience, the impact of pedagogical practices of colonial governmentality, and the complexities offered through the messy possibilities of memory. Insomuch that the interviews offer “a stark disjunction between remembering occupation schooling as a welcome reprieve from enforced wartime nationalism or as a return to normalcy and therefore unremarkable and reflecting on it with skepticism or ideologically significant elisions and omissions,” Schueller argues that this last chapter demonstrates how “benevolent reeducation has done its job but nevertheless failed to produce docile subjects” (p. 230).
As a scholar in the field of English, Schueller is more explicit about the book's contribution for fields such as Asian American studies, empire studies, literature, and culture studies and less direct about its offerings for fields related specifically to education. However, Campaigns of Knowledge presents an important comparative study of American schooling in the overseas context that would be integral to historians of US education and those interested in the structural development of inequalities through schooling. Connections are highlighted between patterns of American colonial education in the Philippines that are traceable to industrial techniques employed at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, Hampton Institute, and Tuskegee Institute (p. 39), situating the book's examination within a broader American educational context. Additionally, the significance of the Pacific to American empire and education is referenced through mention of Hawai‘i as an early occupied site for cultivating American imperial pedagogical practices that would later be applied in continental and overseas expansion (p. 51). Moreover, Campaigns of Knowledge sheds important light on the understudied racial formation of Asians and Asian Americans through the various projects of US imperial education.
To further explore the differences within the othering of Filipinos and Japanese through American schooling, it would have been interesting for Scheuller to delve more extensively into the ways that religion mediated the various Orientalist approaches to the racial discourses. In the Philippines, the so called “non-Christian tribes” were seen as more savage than their Catholic counterparts due to their distance from Christianity, and, as Schueller notes, the American occupation in Japan was “unequivocally a Christianizing mission” (p. 158). Given this, and the targeted removal of Shintoism in, and through, schools as an important component of American reeducation in Japan (p. 184), it seems there are deep tensions posed by the seeming threat of non-Abrahamic religions within the framework of Orientalism that are worth investigating. Though the Catholic tradition and its influence in the smaller scale Spanish school system in the Philippines was viewed as a scourge by American colonial officials, Catholicism still functioned as a measure of (partial) civility and closeness to modernity. Non-Christian tribes, however, were rendered marginally human and, in Japan, Shintoism was criticized as a sign of ancient feudal entrapment. Exploring Orientalist differences along religious lines would also draw additional connections between the influence of American schooling in World War II incarceration camps and the pedagogical formation of the occupation schools in Japan (p. 164). As the targeting and detainment of Japanese and Japanese Americans during the war was motivated both by racial and religious suspicion, specifically of Shinto and Buddhist practices (over two-thirds of those incarcerated were Shinto and Buddhist), the racialization of Japanese and Japanese Americans in the United States through their affiliation with Eastern religions would have certainly shaped the American racialization of the Japanese, and the related disdain for Shintoism, during the postwar period.
Nonetheless, historians of education interested in the intertwined dynamics of education and American empire would gain much from this work, as it brings into focus dimensions of colonialism, race, gender, and US education in Asia that are often obscured in most historical accounts of American schooling.
