Spencer Tricker
University of Miami
Spencer Tricker is a Ph.D. Candidate in English at the University of Miami. His dissertation, “Imminent Communities: Transpacific Literary Form and Racialization, 1847-1920,” examines American and East Asian literary contestations of an imperial rhetoric he calls Pacific Imminence. In contrast to Manifest Destiny’s brazen exceptionalism, Pacific imminence framed U.S. Pacific ascendancy as an impending development inaugurating global economic prosperity and cosmopolitan community. A chapter, entitled “‘Five Dusky Phantoms’: Gothic Form and Cosmopolitan Shipwreck in Melville's Moby-Dick,” appears in the Spring 2017 issue of Studies in American Fiction.
My presentation takes a comparative, interdisciplinary approach to the Pacific intersections of black and Filipino communities in the long nineteenth century. Focusing on David Fagen, an African-American soldier in the... [ view full abstract ]
My presentation takes a comparative, interdisciplinary approach to the Pacific intersections of black and Filipino communities in the long nineteenth century. Focusing on David Fagen, an African-American soldier in the Philippine-American War (1899-1903), I begin by illustrating how Afro-Philippine affinity became the subject of popular literary fascination and political concern.
In 1900, Fagen deserted, becoming a “Negro chief of Filipinos,” and fought U.S. forces for nearly two years before he was reportedly killed, in 1901, by a native bounty hunter. In 1905, Rowland Thomas made him the protagonist of a popular short story called “Fagan.” Portraying Fagen as a tragic, nationless figure, Thomas also insinuated the political expediency of a shifting global color line used to play colonized groups against each another. The story closes with an American soldier stating, “I’m not in favior . . . of payin’ gu-gus for killin’ white men, no matter whether they’re white or black.” The story won Thomas a $5,000 prize from Collier’s. Of three judges, the lone dissenter was Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. While Lodge’s dissent suggests imperialist discomfiture with Thomas’s ironic ending, the story’s popularity illustrates white literary culture’s ready commodification of black rebellion.
To demonstrate how people of color are revisiting Fagen’s narrative, I conclude with a discussion of two films from 2013: African-American actor Christopher T. Wood’s short “The Fagen Pitch” and Filipino director Manny Palo’s feature David F. While these efforts have not found wide audiences, they highlight Fagen’s enduring legacy as a relay point of Afro-Philippine alliance.
