Reviving the Subaltern, Reimagining the Nostalgia: Reconstructed Mentalities of the Moros in Early American Colonization

Hawkins, Michael C. Making Moros: Imperial Historicism and American Military Rule in the Philippines’ Muslim South. DeKalb, Ill., Northern Illinois University Press, 2013.

Abstract

Michael Hawkins’s Making Moros (2013) is one of the first attempts to write a subaltern history of Mindanao Moros by using colonial documents and newspapers published during the American occupation in Muslim Mindanao. The book also offers fresh perspectives discussing various taxonomies of sorts, contested identities forcefully imposed by the Americans on the Moros to fit their self-imposed colonial mission, and the nostalgia that the colonization process left the minds of the colonized. This book responds to the dominant Mindanao historical literature focusing on political history of the people and place, largely discussing the military implications of the Americans on the island.