Tom Sykes’ Imagining Manila looks at how Westerners have represented the city of Manila in fiction and literature. Using Edward Said's framework, Sykes shows how Manila was portrayed in Orientalist ways, describing an imagined city as much as an actual one. He coins the word ‘manilaist’ and ‘manilaism’ to describe this behaviour. Manilaism is ‘a trajectory of Anglo-American writing on Manila from roughly the early eighteenth century to the present day, which imagines the city as a textual space founded on a number of (neo-) imperialist, (neo-) colonialist and ethnocentric assumptions’ (p. 4). The image that emerges, Sykes argues, is of a Manila rife with corruption, decadence, poverty, superstition, and authoritarianism. This imagined portrait underpins the imperial project by representing in literary form the inferiority of colonised countries. The book moves in roughly chronological order, with chapters on the Spanish period, the Philippine-American War and US conquest, and through the twentieth century. The book moves off Manila in a couple of chapters, shifting to look at the imagined image of Filipino politician Rodrigo Duterte in one chapter, and the Western visions of Chinese inhabitants of the Philippines in another.
Sykes sees his work as the precursor to a ‘concerted effort’ to change the discourse that privileges one part of the world over another, a linguistic decolonisation of a discussion that might drive a moral reckoning (p. 139). Some of this ‘anti-Manilaism’ writ large already exists, but Sykes sees this as a much larger and longer-standing project. In this, the book is successful, showing how this imaginary Manila consistently used language that reinforced the colonial hierarchy. Manila could be seen as a counterweight to Benedict Anderson's imagined community. The latter served the nationalist interests of decolonisers, while the former served the imperial overlords. The clash between these two representations echoes that of colonisation and decolonisation. People create the image of the community they need to serve their narratives, regardless of whether it is accurate or not. Imagining Manila thus mixes analysis and advocacy, working as a call to arms to attack an imperial framework that does the conceptual work of conquest in the same way that violence does the physical work.
Unfortunately, the book is more successful as a call to arms than as analysis. The need to make an uncomplicated argument for polemical purposes smoothes the complexity of the situation. The book is so focused on putting forward a Saidian/postcolonial argument that it sidesteps evidence that suggests that the reality is more complicated. To take the most obvious example, the demonising of cities is not remotely exclusive to the imperial/colonial narrative. There's a long history of both American and British cities having the same kind of cultural narrative—of decadence, poverty, vice, and crime—told about them. Hogarth's paintings of London are one classic example, where the city is portrayed as dominated by alcoholism and crime. New York gets a similar, if more futuristic treatment, in the John Carpenter science fiction film Escape from New York, where the city has decayed to the point of becoming a prison site. This is not to say that there isn't an imperial aspect in the Western treatment of Manila, but to point out that there is a much larger tendency going on, where societies have frequently regarded urban areas with suspicion and rural areas as sites of virtue and tradition. It would have been useful for Sykes to acknowledge and examine that long tradition and connect the portrayal of Manila in it.
The pattern continues in Sykes’ treatment of Filipino president Rodrigo Duterte. Here he uses Jonathan Miller's Duterte Harry: Fire and Fury in the Philippines to illustrate the Manilaist-style treatment of Duterte. He sidelines, however, the way in which Miller's narrative around Duterte is driven not just by Orientalist invocations but by explicit connections to Western cultural tropes, from the title of the book itself (taking off Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry) to a chapter title that invokes Harvey Weinstein. Miller positioned Duterte as much as a Western figure as he does an alien other, something that Sykes needed to acknowledge and integrate into his analysis. This issue, of how the audience will receive the literary devices, highlights another, larger problem with the book. Sykes has focused largely on the propagation of manilaism and paid less attention to its reception; how the audience receives a narrative is often as critical as how that narrative is created. There is little examination of the way in which these manilaist narratives were received by their audiences, either American or Filipino—and what there is mostly confined to a single chapter near the end that isolates them from the rest. The Duterte example highlights this, as Miller's book was published in 2018 and so it is hard to imagine that Western audiences reading it thought immediately not of ‘Oriental despotism’ (p. 99) but of Donald Trump, a leader with great similarities to Duterte. There are more things going on in the treatment of Duterte (and Manila) than the simple narrative for which Sykes aims. The story Sykes tells is an interesting one, but it is not quite complete.
