ALI books

• Wesling, Meg Empire's Proxy: American Literature and U.S. Imperialism in the Philippines
  
  (available from NYU Press, Spring 2010).
  
  American literature as a field of study took shape at the end of the nineteenth century, expanding as a result of the U.S. imperialist agenda in the Philippines. Twined together, the concurrent imperial expansion in the Philippines and the expansion of literary humanism in the U.S. demonstrate their influence on and interconnectedness with each other. Empire's Proxy examines these co-incident histories in order to ask how the initial formations of the field of American literary study responded to the ideological, political, and material practices of the United States' extraterritorial expansion after the Spanish-American War. Drawing on historical records, governmental documents from the War Department and the Bureau of Insular Affairs, curriculum guides, memoirs of American teachers in the Philippines, and 19th century literature, Wesling not only links empire with education as many others have done, but she also postulates a new theory that the rearticulation of literary studies through the imperial hold in the Philippines served to actually define and strengthen the field.