Columbia Studies in International and Global History. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. xi, 256 pp. US$35.00, paper. ISBN 9780231192156.
“The Filipinos are great teachers for the other conquered peoples of Asia. They were the founders of the first Asian republic. And it collapsed. A great social experiment.”
– Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Child of All Nations
Asian Place, Filipino Nation surfaces the regional and global elements of the nationalist Propaganda Movement (1887–1895), the Philippine Revolution against Spain (1892–1898), and the Philippine-American War (1899–1907). The book’s main strength is its explanation of why the propagandists and, consequently, revolutionaries, drew upon Malayness and Pan-Asianism as they pressed their case for independence, established a government, and waged war. The book is divided into five chapters, beginning with an overview, a textual analysis of nationalist writings at the turn of the twentieth century, and the resonance of Asianist discourse in political practices during the “long revolution” against Spain and America. The book devotes the penultimate chapter mainly to the case of Mariano Ponce, the Filipino emissary to Japan (1898–1912)—illustrating the political practice of Pan-Asianism, its power and its limits. The book concludes with an analysis of the impact of Japan’s occupation on Pan-Asianism in Southeast Asia and the Philippines. CuUnjieng Aboitiz deftly imparts a sense of contemporaneous national awakening throughout the region by weaving in interactions with other Asian intellectuals, nationalists, and revolutionaries. However, the author takes a position that political collaboration with the Japanese occupation can be understood as compatible with a Pan-Asianist philosophy without addressing its revisionist implications.
CuUnjieng Aboitiz argues that the process of Asian place-making shaped the conceptualization of the Filipino nation and political mobilization for independence. Pan-Asianism was the means of producing affect and material support for the revolution, as well as its product. The author cites Edmund Burke’s concept of place as more than territorial but social too: place is the basis of political society and the ground on which “notions of duty, freedom, and order, [gain] meaning” (35). The construction of an Asian place by Filipino nationalists and their counterparts had several effects, including bolstering their legitimacy by othering the West, bridging their own ethno-linguistic differences, and rallying Asian support for a common anti-imperial cause. The book is particularly successful at tracing the international networks that fostered these intellectual, physical, emotional, and institutional contacts.
This book shows that Filipino nationalists appropriated Malayness, which in an empirical sense encompassed the peoples of such places as Madagascar, the Malaccan Peninsula, the Dutch East Indies, and the like. The nationalists conceived Malayness as a racial category in order to imagine a shared civilizational grandeur. CuUnjieng Aboitiz argues that such tactics of Pan-Asianism were a tool of colonized nationalists as the Filipinos, Vietnamese, Indonesians, and Burmese who—unlike the “uncolonized world” centred on Japan—needed to reconcile the paradox of nationalism’s priorities while appealing to a common Asianness. Japan’s expansionism in the early 1890s foreshadowed the limits of Southeast Asian fantasies for a Japan-led Asian unity, however.
The final chapter seeks to address the fate of Pan-Asianism in the aftermath of World War II but fails to explain the discontinuity between the Asian “place” of the Philippine wars of independence and the Asianist rhetoric of Japanese imperialism. On one hand, CuUnjieng Aboitiz recognizes the inherent contradiction. She examines, for example, the position of youths that the government sponsored to attend an indoctrination program in Japan in 1943, and concludes that they are not the direct legacy of the Asianists of the Philippine revolution, dependent as they were on Japan’s good intentions. On the other hand, she builds a narrative arc about Jose Laurel, president (1943–1945) of the Japanese-sponsored government, that extends thinly throughout the book and culminates in the final chapter. CuUnjieng Aboitiz argues that “Laurel’s program as a collaborator president [was] an expression of his political philosophy, which had developed over the preceding two decades, not only of circumstantial opportunity and the logic of collaboration” (164). Yet empirically, the only major source material cited that predates Japanese occupation is a speech from 1927. Laurel had then espoused ideas of Asiatic solidarity to shake off the “political and economic bondage imposed” by Western imperialism (168). CuUnjieng Aboitiz links this to Laurel’s racialized narrative in 1943 of a just war between East and West (165).
CuUnjieng Aboitiz surmises that Laurel’s early criticism of Western imperialism as materialist and corrupt “allowed Laurel, once president, to rationalize the Japanese empire as something distinct from Western imperialism” (169). She argues that “[t]his imperial vision represented, for Laurel, a potentially new form of empire based on solidarity and autonomy aimed at a more inclusive universal understanding of prosperity” (169). And further contends that Laurel sought to “defend and protect the sanctity of the nation-state as a guard against imperialism, while also engendering fantasies of universalism and Pan-Asian solidarity to secure such particularist national freedoms” (170).
CuUnjieng Aboitiz implies that Laurel’s view of Filipino nationalism is integral to, and compatible with, an Asianism under Japan’s sphere of control. Moreover, CuUnjieng Aboitiz views this as a continuity of the Pan-Asianism that animated the Philippine struggle for independence. It is unclear why she sees discontinuity of Asianist nationalism in the case of the youths, but not in the case of Laurel. As Tim Harper observes of the postwar period, “[f]or all its evocative beginnings, the Japanese ideal of a new Asian order had no direct inheritance. The dire conditions and oppression of the end of the war killed it off” (Tim Harper, “A Long View on the Great Asian War,” in Legacies of World War II in South and East Asia, Singapore: ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, 2007, 12). CuUnjieng Aboitiz abstains from the moral censure in the literature on collaboration (and collaborators) that is often unavoidable. Still, she should have made a frame of interpretation explicit, incorporating rather than eliding the issue of collaboration. Collaboration is central to the interpretation of Laurel’s texts.
The book remains overall an incisive and illuminating depiction of the Philippine revolution’s Asian dimensions. Asian Place, Filipino Nation offers a complement to such works as Megan Thomas’s Orientalists, Propagandists, and Ilustrados (2012) and a compelling counterargument to Vicente Rafael’s The Promise of the Foreign (2005).
Sol Iglesias
National University of Singapore, Singapore