Imperial historicism and American military rule in the Philippines' Muslim South

Drawing upon years of research in various archives, libraries, and other locations throughout the Philippines and the United States, this dissertation examines a formidable period of collaborative colonial identity formation and the primacy of imperial historicism as colonial discourse in the Philippines' Muslim South. Imperial historicism, as it is used in this work, refers to the pervasive philosophical notion that all non-modern peoples could be contextualized within a progressive, sequential historical narrative culminating in modernity. In this sense, the American colonial project in Mindanao and Sulu was an epistemological exercise in deductive and relative temporal positioning of Filipino Muslims along this chronology, and the formulation of developmental policies to hasten their evolution. For their part, Filipino Muslims both resisted and embraced these attempts as they collaborated with Americans to create "Moros" as modern subjects. This work attempts to ground the abstract discourse of imperial historicism with historical evidences and episodes gleaned from various archives. Colonial fairs and carnivals, mock Moro invasions, choreographed piratical attacks, Muslim markets, symbolic conquests, and quests for primitive rebirth all relate a gripping story of the Filipino Muslims' transition into "modernity" and the American imperial philosophy that shaped it.