Rice, Mark. "Dean Worcester's Fantasy Islands: Photography, Film, and the Colonial Philippines."(Book review)

• Author: Rodell, Paul A.

Rice, Mark. Dean Worcester's Fantasy Islands: Photography, Film, and the Colonial Philippines. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2014.

In this superb book, Mark Rice applies his specialization in the history of photography in twentieth century America to a detailed examination and analysis of Dean C. Worcester's use of photography in early American colonial Philippines. Rice is not the first to examine Worcester's role in America's Asian experiment in tum-of-the-century imperialism. In the late 1990s, the University of Michigan published a substantial biography of Worcester by Rodney Sullivan that also touched on many of the issues that Rice discusses. Many other authors, such as Paul Kramer, have used this controversial exponent of American expansionism in their studies of American racism and imperialism. Karl Hutterer studied Worcester and the development of anthropological research in the Philippines. Of the previous works that focused on Worcester, Benito Vergara's book Displaying Filipinos is, perhaps, the closest to the present volume. In his study, Vergara explored how Filipinos were portrayed in early...