Emotional Filipinos

In the first half of the twentieth century, the United States attempted to build a colony in the Philippines in its own image-one fraught with racist notions of what it means to be civilized, developed, and worthy of self-rule. These imported notions of race and modernity left a profound imprint on the nation. More recently, we have seen a menacing rise of Islamic "e;terrorism,"e; political polarization, populism, xenophobia, and isolationism. Conventional wisdom has attributed this rise to a "e;failed state"e; or economic insecurity and cultural backlash. In this book, however, George Radics explains this forgotten part of U.S. history with emotions as a driving force behind social action. The Philippines is currently experiencing the longest-running Muslim-Christian conflict in the modern world and an increasingly anti-Western populist government. By unpacking the role of emotions from the American colonial period to the present, Emotional Filipinos blurs the line between American colonizer and Muslim-Filipino "e;terrorist,"e; highlighting the lasting effects of America's footprint in Southeast Asia. Radics humanizes this fraught history and reveals unexplored connections between past and present.