against reification – Kenneth Cardenas

Commentary on Scott Kirsch’s American Colonial Spaces in the Philippines: Insular Empire

At the 2025 AAG Meeting in Detroit, I was part of an author meets readers panel for Scott Kirsch’s American Colonial Spaces in the Philippines: Insular Empire.

The panel was organized by Christian C. Lentz, Michael Hawkins, and Joseph Palis, and included commentary from Kristian Saguin, Mona Domosh, Don Mitchell, and myself.

A version of our comments was published in September 2025 for the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography. What follows is my original unabridged commentary.

Let me begin by making a distinction between the violence and injustice of American imperialism on one hand, and its sophistication, coherence, and success on the other. Though at perpetual risk of erasure, the evidence for the former in the Philippines is plentiful. But this is not necessarily evidence of a total, nor monolithic, nor coherent project.

To resist the erasure of American imperialism, and to understand its ongoing legacies, it is important not to ascribe to it more power than it could actually muster. We could instead name its weaknesses and contradictions, through finer-grained close studies, and show just how vain, incomplete, and unsuccessful its schemes are. And what better way to do this than to study Great Men and their Grand Designs, at the height of their hubris?

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For political imagination, and for varieties of possibility

Open file no. 50, began 24 October 2023

Sa sandaling matutunan mo ang managinip nang lubusang gising,
na ibalanse ang kamalayan hindi sa talim ng pangangatwiran
ngunit sa dobleng katig ng katwiran at panaginip;
sa sandaling matutunan mo ito,
mabibitawan mo lamang ito sa oras na mabitawan mo
kung paano magisip.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Ang Salita Para Sa Daigdig Ay Gubat

Ang tunay na radikal ay ang gawing abot-kamay ang pag-asa,
hindi ang patunayan ang pagka-gipit.

Raymond Williams

As I wrap up my dissertation, and as I take part in conversations about energy transitions, alternative transnational economies and solidarities, and climate crisis responses other than war, I have found myself turning and returning to two premises.

These arose as I came to my own understanding of how accumulation and class power had developed in the Philippines over five centuries of capitalist and colonial encounter.

I am finding, again and again, that many analytical categories that had developed in response to realities found elsewhere have very limited usefulness here.

This incongruency between concepts and realities is hinted at by the recurrent (evergreen?) mode of production debates within Philippine critical thought: is the Philippines a capitalist society, or is it semi-feudal, semi-colonial?

Maybe it is both and neither: the debate continues because both descriptions help explain some features of the systems we wish to describe and resist. Yet neither does justice to life as it arises within, alongside, and outside these systems.

If you and I agree, then we need to trace the reasons behind the poor conceptual fit.

These two premises also arose out of wanting to make hope possible, not despair convincing. I want to react to the rigid radicalism and damage-based research that I keep running into—and keep reproducing, myself.

If the whole point of ‘theory’ is ‘seeing’, I would much rather now learn ways of seeing that open up rather than foreclose political imagination. Instead of learning how to see lack, I would rather learn how to see varieties of possibility—especially in landscapes dismissed as wastelands.

If you and I agree, then we need to find a way to take part in conversations in a way that brings these abilities out—even among the most inflexible critical theory bores in our worlds.

Some rough, ongoing thoughts, under constant revision, shared here so we can pick up where we left off:

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Tag: against reification

Empire as insular, unsophisticated, incoherent

Two premises