In March of 1906, US military forces killed 1000 men, women and children during an assault on a Moro stronghold at Bud Dajo in the southern Philippines. The Massacre of Bud Dajo rightfully belongs in the same category of historical atrocities as Wounded Knee in 1890 or the better-known My Lai Massacre of 1968. In terms of the numbers of victims, it is arguably the biggest massacre of its kind in American history. Yet while Wounded Knee and My Lai have become emblematic of American atrocities during the ‘Indian Wars’ and Vietnam War, respectively, Bud Dajo has faded into obscurity. At most, it is given a footnote in accounts of the American Empire, and outside of the Philippines itself, it has left no mark on popular memory. This presentation discusses the massacre, examines the evidence and addresses the methodological challenges of recovering silenced voices and perspectives of colonial violence.
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Speaker and Chair Biographies:
Kim A. Wagner is Professor of Global and Imperial History in the School of History, Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of several books on imperialism, resistance and colonial violence, including The Skull of Alum Bheg and Amritsar 1919. His latest book, Massacre in the Clouds: An American Atrocity and the Erasure of History, was published by PublicAffairs in May 2024.
Prof. John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Professor Sidel received his BA and MA from Yale University and his PhD from Cornell University. He is the author of Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (1999), Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Trajectories (2000), Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (2006), The Islamist Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment (2007), Thinking and Working Politically in Development: Coalitions for Change in the Philippines (2020, with Jaime Faustino) and Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia (2021).