1st Edition
American Colonial Spaces in the Philippines Insular Empire
Introduction 1 Insular Territory: War, Democracy, and America’s "First Moment of Global Ambition" 2 Map: U.S. Colonial Science, Geo-Politics, and the Remapping of the Philippines 3 Landscape: The Burnham Plans and American Landscape Imperialism in Manila and Baguio 4 Road: W. Cameron Forbes, Philippine Roadwork, and the Production of Space 5 Coda: Insular Empire
Biography
Scott Kirsch is Professor of Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is author of Proving Grounds: Project Plowshare and the Unrealized Dream of Nuclear Earthmoving and editor, with Colin Flint, of Reconstructing Conflict: Integrating War and Post-War Geographies (Routledge).
The book provides a “spatial vocabulary” that should, in the last instance, help us critique U.S. imperial relations in the past and present to undo them in the near future. It is precisely to the production of American colonial spaces that Scott Kirsch’s book directs our attention. In particular, the author explores the production of spaces of sovereignty, knowledge, aesthetics, and circulation, categories that effectively function as organizational principles for the book. American Colonial Spaces in the Philippines is a fantastic book about the contradictory spatial strategies adopted by U.S. empire in the early twentieth century. Historical geographers and historians of empire will find the material discussed here extremely rich and provocative.
-Joaquín Villanueva, Department of Environment, Geography, and Earth Sciences, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN. The AAG Review of Books https://doi.org/10.1080/2325548X.2023.2277951
