What is the difference between empires and nation-states? The answer appears obvious: one political form rules by enforcing differences among its subjects, while the other maintains the same standards of rule across its polity. Alvita Akiboh, who teaches at Yale University, complicates such reductionist juxtapositions. She has written an empirically saturated and fine-grained history of symbolic integration through material culture in the U.S. colonial empire. Her compelling analysis of the role of flags, stamps, and currency in so-called Americanization programs explores the uses of a national iconographic inventory as an analytical lens into the ubiquitous nature of colonialism, its embedded tensions between conflicting political formats of nation and empire, and its creative appropriations and contestations by the colonized.
Imperial Material consists of five chapters whose spatiotemporal analytical arc spans across Caribbean and Pacific colonies from the nineteenth century to the era of decolonization. The first chapter explores the histories of flag distribution and veneration practices. Her analysis demonstrates the importance of public-private partnerships to the colonial project as she details the distribution efforts of patriotic organizations including the Grand Army of the Republic in the Philippines and Puerto Rico. According to Akiboh, these Americanization efforts visualized the U.S. claim to sovereignty over its newest colonies along established patterns of imperial flag-planting. But these efforts also invigorated a process of self-reflection among Americans about the contours of their deeply fractured polity. Imperialists tried to rally the colonized around a flag that was still very much contested at a time when nation-building was unfinished. Deep divisions along ethno-cultural, racial, gender, political, socioeconomic, and regional lines divided the country. The struggles over immigration, Jim Crow, and Civil War and Reconstruction memory made the flag an unlikely symbol around which to rally a fractured imperial nation.
The imperialist push for flag veneration in overseas colonies also further complicated the upholding of the difference between colonizers and colonized. Offers of symbolic inclusion through a shared national iconography obfuscated the exclusionary practices of politico-legal delineations and distinctions between empire and nation. Those intended integrative effects through the export of a fragile national iconography were designed to contain anticolonial opposition at home and abroad. In chapter two, Akiboh traces those tensions within projects of symbolic integration and the struggle over what she wittily describes as “pocket-sized imperialism” (48). Her analysis of stamps and money not only shifts the analytical focus from private actors to the state as drivers of empire building, but it also reveals how money and stamps, just as flags, reflected an often violently enforced U.S. claims to sovereignty over its overseas colonies. In the Philippines, for example, the U.S. Army’s war against the independence movement was accompanied by a systematic campaign to purge the archipelago of stamps of the Republic of the Philippines.
In chapter three, Akiboh explores flag rivalry in Hawaii, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, the only three colonies that boasted their own flags before the era of U.S. control. In Hawaii, where the author turns to the private world of flag quilting, Akiboh’s analysis excavates creative compositions by Hawaiian women who often integrated both flags in their designs and thus defied simplistic categories of allegiance or resistance. In Puerto Rico and the Philippines, however, imperialists became obsessed with stamping out alternative flags. Especially in America’s largest overseas colony, the flag issue escalated as the United States fought a long and devastating colonial war to suppress local independence movements. From 1907 until 1919, the flag of the Philippine Republic was outlawed and its usage carried severe consequences; only during the post-World War I period of ‘Filipinization’ were side-by-side displays (with greater prominence reserved to the U.S. flag) permitted. While the spread of the U.S. flag had initially served as a symbolic representation of liberty and freedom, the contestation of U.S. rule transformed the flag into a symbol of American power and oppression. In chapter four, Akiboh examines the impact of the Pacific War on mundane signifiers of colonialism in the Philippines and Guam. She rightfully reads this conflict as an inter-imperial war and dissects the uses of material culture in overlapping projects of colonialism by the United States and Japan. But while the Japanese also relied on flags, currency, and stamps as instruments of symbolic imperial integration, their efforts were opposed by many residents in the Philippines and Guam, who transformed the previously contested symbols of U.S. rule into objects of resistance against the empire of Japan. In the final chapter, the author explores how material culture underwrote the politics of symbolic decolonization. Akiboh underlines that the territorial recalibrations after World War II did not end the U.S. empire in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean. Symbolic decolonization in Puerto Rico obfuscated the colonial relationship through new legal formats of governance, and while the Philippines gained independence in 1946 and Hawaii became a state in 1959, the United States further extended its colonial footprint into formerly Japanese colonies. In this process, colonial materiality proved highly adaptable to changing national and international contexts and further sustained an arc of empire into the present.
In sum, this book offers at least three important insights: it provides eloquent, tightly argued, and textured analysis of seemingly mundane colonial materiality; it suggests the malleability and potential volatility of a national iconography appropriated by those beyond the boundaries of the national core; and it underlines the composite polity architecture of the United States as both empire and nation. The export, contestation, and appropriation of national symbols as instruments of imperial integration serve as convincing evidence for the deep interconnections and powerful overlap between both composites. But while symbols of national integration obfuscated the boundaries between both forms of governance for many colonizers and colonized alike, political and legal demarcations ensured the continuity of a fundamentally violent rule based on the maintenance of difference. Akiboh cleverly unpacks those contradictions in the seemingly mundane materiality of U.S. colonialism and thereby highlights the tensions embedded in an imperial nation.
