Monetary Authorities Reviewed in Journal of Asian Studies and Labor: Studies in Working Class History
Some very generous reviews with Monetary Authorities in two different journals. All my gratitude to these esteemed scholars for their patience and genuine engagement with my work.
Rebecca Tinio McKenna review in Labor: Studies in Working Class History. https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-10949103
“Lumba's framing of the colonial Philippines as a long history of decolonization is novel and foregrounds the anxieties and tensions that beset the Spanish and US colonial government. Economic experts fretted over the instabilities triggered by the circulation of forces perceived as foreign to the colony or beyond their control whether in the form of the Mexican coin (in the Spanish colonial period), embodied by Chinese workers and capital, or expressed in workers’ intractability. Economic experts idealized sovereign markets yet also claimed the right to structure markets in ways that advantaged colonialists and preserved the racial and class status quo. Lumba's decolonization framework also helps him avoid an essentializing parable of imperial aggressors versus champions of national independence. Lumba is attentive to the capitalist ordering of the world that Filipino nationalists embraced or, in some instances, may have accepted pragmatically.”
Allison Truitt in Journal of Asian Studies. https://doi.org/10.1215/00219118-10872730
“Lumba does a masterful job in creating a counterdiscourse to capitalism by demonstrating how the decisions over currency and banking were not rational but steeped in racial anxieties. In building this argument, Lumba is resolute in unearthing the substrata of racial capitalism—the fears of the alien Chinese, the disdain for Natives, the primacy of colonial metropole where white Americans resided. We also see the fraught relationship with the Filipino elite, who were drawn into the system as clerks and bureaucrats and whose own decision-making eventually ensured the triumph of “conditional decolonization,” or the political sovereignty of a Filipino monetary authority, rather than unconditional decolonization that might have liberated Filipino national subjects from the structures and strictures of capitalism. This story of monetary authority, Lumba concludes, is essential for understanding why many people in Philippines and the diaspora still hold “aspirations of capitalist security and the violent fantasy of state sovereignty” (154). Lumba reveals how conventional discourses of macroeconomics served as a form of monetary authority to intervene in the Philippines and so perpetuate the US empire.”
