Asian Place, Filipino Nation: A Global Intellectual History of the Philippine Revolution, 1887–1912

Columbia Studies in International and Global History

by Nicole Cuunjieng Aboitiz

The Philippine Revolution of 1896-1905, which began against Spain and continued against the United States, took place in the context of imperial subjugation and local resistance across Southeast Asia. Yet scholarship on the revolution and the turn of the twentieth century in Asia more broadly has largely approached this pivotal moment in terms of relations with the West, at the expense of understanding the East-East and Global South connections that knit together the region's experience.

Asian Place, Filipino Nation reconnects the Philippine Revolution to the histories of Southeast and East Asia through an innovative consideration of its transnational political setting and regional intellectual foundations. Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz charts turn-of-the-twentieth-century Filipino thinkers' and revolutionaries' Asianist political organizing and proto-national thought, scrutinizing how their constructions of the place of Asia connected them to their regional neighbors. She details their material and affective engagement with Pan-Asianism, tracing how colonized peoples in the "periphery" of this imagined Asia--focusing on Filipinos, but with comparison to the Vietnamese--reformulated a political and intellectual project that envisioned anticolonial Asian solidarity with the Asian "center" of Japan. CuUnjieng Aboitiz argues that the revolutionary First Philippine Republic's harnessing of transnational networks of support, activism, and association represents the crucial first instance of Pan-Asianists lending material aid toward anticolonial revolution against a Western power. Uncovering the Pan-Asianism of the periphery and its critical role in shaping modern Asia, Asian Place, Filipino Nation offers a vital new perspective on the Philippine Revolution's global context and content.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

272 pages, Hardcover

First published June 16, 2020

Reviews

[grace choi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was a recommendation from my Professor who thought it would be a good addition to my paper on Filipino Nationalism, and I am so happy that she recommended it to me, because this book was ever thought-provoking and refreshing. Even as a student of international relations, the West-East relations has prominently been a subject of focus and we often forget the importance of Asia and its role in fostering new modernities in the world. The connections the author draws between the Philippine's Nationalist Movement, the Philippine-American War and the Pan-Asianism movement, is an interesting and new perspective and goes to show how the broader world was changing in the late 19th to early 20th century. The efforts taken on my Filipino nationalists and emissaries prior to, during, and after the Philippine-American War to spread and bolster Pan-Asian ideas such as brotherhood and the Malay race, as well as their own nationalist cause, was inspiring and I hope to read more about Pan-Asianism in the future.

[Kristoffer · Rating 5 out of 5]

I highly recommend this book! Aboitiz was successful in her attempt to identify links in ideas and associations to map out the overall influence and impact of the Philippine Revolution in East and Southeast Asia and beyond, from the time it erupted until the turn of the 20th century. While I already knew that Mariano Ponce, a close friend of Rizal, was also friends with Sun Yat-sen, it was most surprising to see the Revolution’s impact extend to Vietnam, and Thailand.

[Elaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

An enlightening account of how Filipinos used nationalism and Pan-Asianism as tools against imperialism and colonialism at the turn of the 20th century. I learned quite a bit from this.

It was interesting to see how the "founding fathers" of the Philippines defined racial associations, the echoes of which we still see today. If you're a Filipino, you have probably noticed how often we try to say, "We're like X people," or "We're like Y people," or "We're the same as Z." Sometimes it feels like it's never enough to just say, "Hey, we're Filipino." But it turns out there's historical grounding to that rhetoric. The Illustrados desperately tried to associate Filipinos to the Japanese and to the Malays, often times even saying that the Japanese are part of the Malay race, or that the Malays (of which Filipinos are part of) are actually the same race as the Japanese. They did this because in the late 19th century, the Japanese were seen as the most powerful Asian race, and the Malays under British rule were also doing much better than the Filipinos under Spanish rule. These two peoples also had rich histories and cultures that were universally acknowledged at that time, unlike Filipino culture and history, which the Spanish refused to recognize and continued to malign.

It was also really interesting to see how this formulation of race actually started/reinforced the prejudice against tribal ethnic groups and the Muslim groups in the Philippines. Apart from del Pilar who saw every ethnic group in the Philippines as the same race, most of the Illustrados insisted that the Christianized ethnic groups (often referred simply as the "Tagalogs" although included in this are the Cebuanos, Kapampangans, etc.) are actually biologically different than the non-Christianized groups. It's quite disheartening to see the people that your history books call heroes perpetuate really damaging ideas in their own desperation for freedom and autonomy. In fact, other than del Pilar, I was kind of disillusioned by the Illustrados here. Turns out many of them didn't event want independence from Spain, but rather, simply better treatment and representation in Spanish government. Basically they wanted the Philippines to be part of Spain.

Another thing I learned is how closely the rebelling Filipinos worked with Japan in their attempt to gain independence from Spain, and then subsequently from the US. A lot of Japanese turned out to be sympathetic, not only to the Filipino cause, but also to attempts of independence of other colonized people. I didn't realize how closely rebels of different colonized nations actually worked with each other, enhancing their own theories and finding homes in exile in each others' territories. Sadly the Japanese sympathy didn't work out well in practice, as Southeast Asia saw in WW2.

Finally I came away with a more complicated view of nationalism after reading this book. Nationalism is synonymous with bigotry nowadays, but just a century ago, it was a tool that so many colonized peoples had to use to prove to the imperial powers that they deserved freedom and autonomy. It's disheartening that it's now being weaponized by nations who still have so much imperial ambitions. Countries who are still recovering from colonial rule are getting discouraged from using it. But it was also not a perfect tool for the self-actualization of the colonized world, and maybe we need to rethink how we define polities.

I docked one star (and honestly, I was thinking of docking more than that) for the lack of readability of this book. It is filled with so much scholarly jargon. I am surprised I managed to glean as much as I did. It's not lay-person friendly at all. I think the author is in clear conversation with other historians, and this book is not meant for someone who's casually interested in Philippine history. I ended up skimming much of the last couple of chapters, because they focused on analyzing very specific verbiage of very specific letters of very specific people, and tried to generalize these to support the author's thesis. I feel like the first two chapters were the most informative.

[Bea · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an eye-opening and deeply researched book on Philippine history in the larger regional Asian context. I found the chapter on the Malay race and Pan-Asianism as the most interesting.

[Jason Friedlander · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting new book of scholarship about the pan-Asian connections between Filipino intellectuals and their neighbors from the 1880s to the 1910s. Having been reading a lot of books on Philippine history over the last few years it’s surprising to find genuinely new scholarship about it, so this is definitely a welcome addition to the current literature.

However, there’s unfortunately not really much here that I personally found substantive. I feel like there was more potential for Aboitiz to dig much deeper into the topic of pan-Malay connections, for example, but I found a lot of it quite surface level, or perhaps spending too much time in the wrong places like minor speeches and letters. The complicated Japanese-Filipino intellectual relationship was also very interesting to dive into but it didn’t feel fully explored either. A book of these topics deserves much longer consideration than barely 200 pages. Maybe it’s because there isn’t much substance to find in the documents we have access to, but I wouldn’t really know.

Overall I still think this was a good read but I was left feeling a bit underwhelmed given its premise and misleadingly broad title. Hopefully this sparks more study about this period and that it ends up more like a first step than the sole book about it.

[Alexandra Romualdez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Important Book!

This book was a wonderful window into a different perspective on Philippine history, and the revolution. The Pan-Asian perspective rarely, if at all, is discussed in popular history and culture, as many are quick to focus solely on the Westernization of the Philippines. It is a refreshing and important reminder to view the Philippines within its wider geographical and even cultural contexts. Philippine history did not start and stop with the colonizations, there have always been rich and vast Asian influences and relationships that played important roles in the Philippines' history and the shaping of her culture and national identity, particularly in relation to the revolution but also in pre-colonial history, and after that. This book is a deep and thorough investigation of all these. Written in engaging prose, and with a simultaneous sharpness and sensitivity. Highly recommend this to anyone interested in the Philippines, world history, and Asian history. I look forward to more from this writer.