ARI Working Paper Series

In the 1920s, as the Philippines and India intensified their nationalist attempts at independence from the U.S. and British empires, an American woman journalist, Katherine Mayo, would publish two books—The Isles of Fear (1925) and Mother India (1927)—hostile to the peoples’ struggles by foregrounding the notion of race as proof why independence must not be granted to either population. In the guise of a “public health report,” the two books relied on earlier scientific publications to stress the contagions and maladies and, thus, the imminent threat to the Anglo-Saxon world should the two colonies be granted autonomy.

While the scholarship on Mayo’s writings has necessarily yoked the two books together, The Isles of Fear has remained in the former’s exegetic shadow. This paper takes up on the lead to intervene in the literature by focusing extensively on The Isles of Fear. It offers a discourse analysis that charts the thematic grids of the US public health regime in the Philippines in the early 1900s. Specifically, this paper examines how the trope of “the diseased Filipino body” and its variant form, as embodied in the caciques, were deployed to nullify the cause of the Philippine independence movement. It is hoped that by clarifying how these elements bear on each other, a better understanding of Mayo’s declared “domestic” motivation—that of raising the awareness of the American public—could be inserted back into the larger imperial project that was meant to include a similar write up on China and Japan with the overall goal of advocating Westernization as the antidote to the Oriental’s “ignoble” living.

Full text is not available, this working paper is withdrawn, as it has now been published as part of a published volume in the SSRN Electronic Journal (December 2010).