Decolonial history reading list
While creating ‘franexplainshistory’, I looked back at my Master’s coursework and started compiling articles, books, and resources I found most interesting and useful. This isn’t an authoritative list, it’s heavily based on my dissertation research on American Empire in the Philippines and I haven’t revisited it much since 2021! I also want to start adding fiction to this list.
If you have any suggestions for content, please let me know and I’ll add it here.
The list is organised by theme, alphabetical by author.
American Empire
Belkin, Aaron. Bring Me Men: Military Masculinity and the Benign Facade of American Empire. London: Hurst & Company, 2012.
Brody, David. (2010). Visualising American Empire: Orientalism and Imperialism in the Philippines. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Coloma, Roland Sintos. “‘Destiny Has Thrown the Negro and the Filipino Under the Tutelage of America’: Race and Curriculum in the Age of Empire.” Curriculum Inquiry 39, no. 4 (2009): 495-519.
Coloma. “White Gazes, Brown Breasts: Imperial Feminism and Disciplining Desires and Bodies in Colonial Encounters.” Paedagogica Historica 48, no. 2 (2012): 243–61.
Go, Julian. Patterns of Empire: The British and American Empires, 1688 to the Present. NY: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Go, Julian. Policing Empires: Militarization, Race, and the Imperial Boomerang in Britain and the US. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023.
Hasian, Marouf. “The Philippine–American War and the American Debates about the Necessity and Legality of the ‘Water Cure,’ 1901–1903.” Journal of International and Intercultural Communication 5, no. 2 (2012): 106–23.
Hoganson, Kristin L. Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars. New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press, 1998.
Immerwahr, Daniel. How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019.
Kaplan, Amy. Cultures of United States Imperialism, edited by Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.
Immerwahr, Daniel. "The Greater United States: Territory and Empire in U.S. History." Diplomatic History 40, no. 3 (2016): 373-91.
Kramer, Paul A. Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, & the Philippines. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
McCoy, Alfred. “Policing the Imperial Periphery: The Philippine-American War and the Origins of U.S. Global Surveillance.” Surveillance & Society 13, no. 1 (2014): 4–26.
Miller, Bonnie M. “The Image-Makers Arsenal in an Age of War and Empire, 1898–1899: A Cartoon Essay, Featuring the Work of Charles Bartholomew (of the Minneapolis Journal) and Albert Wilbur Steele (of the Denver Post).” Journal of American Studies 45, no. 1 (2011): 53–75.
Maxwell, Anne. Colonial Photography and Exhibitions: Representations of the "Native" and the Making of European Identities. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1999.
Mendoza, Victor Román. Metroimperial Intimacies: Fantasy, Racial-Sexual Governance, and the Philippines in U.S. Imperialism, 1899-1913. Perverse Modernities Series, edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015.
Miller, Stuart Creighton. Benevolent Assimilation: the American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899-1903. New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press, 1984.
Rothermere American Institute (Oxford University): America and Race: Bibliography for UK History Undergraduates
Stoler, Ann Laura. Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, edited by Ann Laura Stoler. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006.
Vergara, Benito M. Displaying Filipinos: Photography and Colonialism in Early 20th Century Philippines. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1995.
Critical studies in migration, gender and queer studies, critical race theory
Aguilar Jr., Filomeno V. (2015). Is the Filipino Diaspora a Diaspora? Critical Asian Studies (47)3. 440-461.
Choy, Catherine Ceniza. Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History. Duke University Press, 2006.
David, E. (2015). Sexual Fields of Empire: On the Ethnosexual Frontiers of Global Outsourcing. Radical History Review 123. 115-143.
David, E. (2018). Transgender Archipelagos. TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly (5)3. 332-354.
Diaz, R. (2015). The Limits of Bakla and Gay: Feminist Readings of My Husband’s Lover, Vice Ganda, and Charice Pempengco. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society (40)3. 721-745.
Fajardo, K. B. (2008). Transportation: Translating Filipino and Filipino American Tomboy Masculinities through Global Migration and Seafaring. GLQ (14)2–3. 403-424.
McKay, Deirdre. An Archipelago of Care: Filipino Migrants and Global Networks. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016.
Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar. Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work. Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2003.
Rafael, V. L. (2000). White Love and Other Events in Filipino History. Durham and London: Duke University Press
Raval, PJ (Director). (2018). Call Her Ganda [Documentary]. USA: Unraval Pictures.
Philippine history, studies, theory
Aboitiz, Nicole CuUnjieng. Asian Place, Filipino Nation: a Global Intellectual History of the Philippine Revolution, 1887-1912. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2020.
Fast, Jonathan & Francisco, Luzviminda (1974). Philippine historiography and the de-mystification of imperialism: A review essay. Journal of Contemporary Asia (4)3. 344-358.
Hau, Caroline. Necessary Fictions: Philippine Literature and the Nation, 1946-1980. Quezon City: Ateneo De Manila University Press, 2000.
Hau, Caroline (2014). Privileging Roots and Routes: Filipino Intellectuals and the Contest over Epistemic Power and Authority. Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints (62). 29-65. 10.1353/phs.2014.0000.
Weekley, Kathleen (2006). The National or the Social? Problems of Nation-Building in Post-World War II. Third World Quarterly (27)1. 85-100.
Spanish Empire
Amano, Noel, Greg Bankoff, David Max Findley, Grace Barretto-Tesoro, and Patrick Roberts. “Archaeological and Historical Insights into the Ecological Impacts of Pre-Colonial and Colonial Introductions into the Philippine Archipelago.” The Holocene, 2020, 095968362094115. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959683620941152.
Cervantes, Fernando. The Devil in the New World: The Impact of Diabolism in New Spain. New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press, 2005.
Mawson, Stephanie (2016). Philippine Indios in the Service of Empire: Indigenous Soldiers and Contingent Loyalty, 1600–1700. Ethnohistory (63)2. 381-413.