초록

This paper examines how the American Empire integrated and naturalized its colonial “captives,” particularly the Filipinos, as its sovereign subjects through its biopolitical stratagem of colonial education in light of Manifest Destiny in the late nineteenth century. The American Empire has constantly made itself composed of heterogeneous collectives of difference as a mixed assemblage of both national identification and exclusive recognition. This project, therefore, is an inquiry into how the empire came to terms with its own heterogeneous parts as an ontological body that is multiple in itself via relations of interiority, while securing its exterior sovereignty as the naturalized body of American civilization, which were composed of disparate materialities, ideologies, and institutions. It has widely been known that the Western colonial rules co-opted and exploited the egalitarian cause of ethical obligation and religious mission for colonialism. However, this paper is engaged in examining how, in the biopolitical making of an affective empire, the liberal notions of equality, liberty, and natural or human rights was exploited, while having worked as, to cite Douzinas, “ideological fictions emanating from the state and sustaining a society of inequality, oppression, and exploitation.”