Topic：Enduring Empire: U.S. Statecraft and Race-Making in the Philippines
Speaker：Katrina QUISUMBING KING （Assistant Professor of the Department of Sociology, Northwestern University）
Host： Pei-Chia LAN （Distinguished Professor of the Department of Sociology, National Taiwan University）
Time：12:30-14:00, Fri. Dec. 5, 2025
Venue：Room 319, Department of Sociology, NTU
Abstract：：
In 1898 the United States became a formal overseas empire and claimed sovereignty over the Philippine islands, justifying its rule in explicitly racial terms. Less than fifty years later, in 1946, Philippine independence was recognized by the United States, even as it continued to exert influence over the domestic and foreign affairs of the newly decolonized Republic. Despite some differences, U.S. control remained racial and imperial. In this talk, I show how U.S. federal state actors translated their ideas of race into state structures. Through innovating constitutional law, bureaucratic administration, and legislation, state actors built a durable and flexible system of racial-imperial rule that not only lasted beyond the period of formal empire but continues to this day. I trace debates among U.S. presidents, federal legislators, administrators, and court justices about what kind of state the United States should be, the place of nonwhite people in the polity, and the best way to maintain U.S. white hegemony. in charting how state actors' positions—some nativist, isolationist, and protectionist and others expansionist, interventionist, and imperialist—evolved, I identify key moments when they cemented racial ideas into law and reshaped the terms of U.S. racial-imperial formation.
Registration：https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSczDr4bKr9I_gG0s1TuQcKj0CDtt2Oa9-z65OW44GNoO5d9pw/viewform?usp=dialog