Skip to content

Booksellers & Trade Customers: Sign up for online bulk buying at trade.atlanticbooks.com for wholesale discounts

Booksellers: Create Account on our B2B Portal for wholesale discounts

The Filipino Primitive: Accumulation and Resistance in the American Museum

by Sarita Echavez See
Save 17% Save 17%
Current price ₹3,748.00
Original price ₹4,498.00
Original price ₹4,498.00
Original price ₹4,498.00
(-17%)
₹3,748.00
Current price ₹3,748.00

Imported Edition - Ships in 18-21 Days

Free Shipping in India on orders above Rs. 500

Request Bulk Quantity Quote
+91
Book cover type: Paperback
  • ISBN13: 9781479825059
  • Binding: Paperback
  • Subject: N/A
  • Publisher: New York University Press
  • Publisher Imprint: New York University Press
  • Publication Date:
  • Pages: 272
  • Original Price: GBP 25.99
  • Language: English
  • Edition: N/A
  • Item Weight: 363 grams
  • BISAC Subject(s): Art & Politics

How museums' visual culture contributes to knowledge accumulation

Sarita See argues that collections of stolen artifacts form the foundation of American knowledge production. Nowhere can we appreciate more easily the triple forces of knowledge accumulation--capitalist, colonial, and racial--than in the imperial museum, where the objects of accumulation remain materially, visibly preserved. The Filipino Primitive takes Karl Marx's concept of "primitive accumulation," usually conceived of as an economic process for the acquisition of land and the extraction of labor, and argues that we also must understand it as a project of knowledge accumulation.


Taking us through the Philippine collections at the University of Michigan Natural History Museum and the Frank Murphy Memorial Museum, also in Michigan, See reveals these exhibits as both allegory and real case of the primitive accumulation that subtends imperial American knowledge, just as the extraction of Filipino labor contributes to American capitalist colonialism. With this understanding of the Filipino foundations of the American drive toward power and knowledge, we can appreciate the value of Filipino American cultural producers like Carlos Bulosan, Stephanie Syjuco, and Ma-Yi Theater Company who have created incisive parodies of this accumulative epistemology, even as they articulate powerful alternative, anti-accumulative social ecologies.

See, Sarita Echavez: - Sarita Echavez See is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California Riverside and she is the co-founder of the Center for Art and Thought. She is the author of The Decolonized Eye: Filipino American Art and Performance (2009).

Trusted for over 49 years

Family Owned Company

Secure Payment

All Major Credit Cards/Debit Cards/UPI & More Accepted

New & Authentic Products

India's Largest Distributor

Need Support?

Whatsapp Us