Hawkins, Michael C. Semi-Civilized: The Moro Village at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition.

• Author: Rodell, Paul A.

Hawkins, Michael C. Semi-Civilized: The Moro Village at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020.

The 1904 St. Louis Exposition is notorious in Philippine studies for its display of Filipinos as uncultivated savages that required "benevolent" American imperialism to save them from their depravity. As a result, the exposition is frequently held up as an unmitigated example of the nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxon racist justification for the American colonial venture. That assessment may be harsh, but it is not far wrong. Michael C. Hawkins, however, offers a more nuanced view of the exposition using the example of the Moro Village. Unlike the other indigenous groups on display, the Anglo-Saxon colonizers had something of a romantic view of the Muslim warriors of the southern Philippines akin to how Americans saw themselves as descendants of the rugged men and women who settled the great American West. Though flawed and fanciful, this perception moved the fair's organizers and...