Southeast Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer: Patricio N. Abinales, Ohio University
Chair: Vicente Rafael, University of California, San Diego
Discussant: Thongchai Winichakul, University of Wisconsin, Madison
The last decade of the 20th century is also the decade of "centennials" among Filipinos, recalling as it does the nationalist moments of the 1890s. This double panel examines the legacies and implications of the eruption and domestication of nationalism’s force. Alternately and at times simultaneously liberative and oppressive, destructive of old hierarchies and productive of new ones, resistant to and complicitous with regimes of state, sexual and social inequalities, nationalism has been the dominant means for giving form to "Philippine history." Whether as a movement among elites eager to secure their place on the social map, an idiom of class conflict, a disciplinary rhetoric that suppresses differences among left or right wing groups, or as a racially inflected notion with which to define a diasporic population, nationalism works to contest and contain the limits of what we may think of as "Filipino."
The panel examines the contradictory impulses, uneven articulations and power-laden effects of nationalism on the places, practices and peoples. The panelists are a diverse group of scholars whose engagements of nationalism’s questions come from a variety of political and social locations, but who all share a common skepticism regarding the celebratory cant surrounding the centennial memorialization of the Philippine nation-state.
Ambeth R. Ocampo, City College of Manila
State ceremonial reflects the ritual and ceremonial of the Roman Catholic Church. If the Church has religion, the State has nationalism. The Church has an elaborate calendar of solemnities, feasts and memorials, the State has national and local working and non-working holidays. The Church has a pantheon of saints, while the State has a pantheon of heroes. Both Church and State venerate relics.
In 1918 the bones of Andres Bonifacio, Supremo of the Philippine Revolution of 1896, were exhumed in Maragondon, Cavite. They were reverently placed in a wooden box and exposed for veneration in the Maragondon town hall before everything was transported to Manila for national veneration. The bones were also exhibited, together with other relics of the revolution, in the pre-war National Museum, namely: Bonifacio’s armchair, Bonifacio’s bolo, and Bonifacio’s revolver. Everything would have been fine, except that the authenticity of these relics was challenged. Then the bones disappeared and were never seen again. Research into the provenance of the Bonifacio bones revealed that relics, like mirrors, reflect and refract a part of pre-war Philippine life and history. As physical objects these relics, when taken out of their context, have no fixed value or meaning. Relics only take on as much meaning as that given them by people in a community. Relics, regardless of authenticity, are signs and symbols used and abused by the state to foster a particular view of history, to instill a sense of patriotism and nationalism in its citizens.
Vicente Rafael, University of California, San Diego
This paper argues for an understanding of the origins of nationalism in the Philippines from the perspective of a history of translation practices. Focusing on the writings of the first generation of Filipino nationalists in the 1880s and early 90s, I locate the ilustrado fascination with the learning of Castilian and their animosity towards the Spanish friars as two moments in a common obsession with the materialities of communication.
Philippine nationalism did not thus originate with the concern for "identity" but in the transmission of messages across social and linguistic borders. It is in this sense that we can understand nationalism as a practice of translation, here taken to mean the coming into contact with the foreign and its subsequent reformulation into an element of oneself. It is about the discovery of an alien aspect residing within colonial society and its translation into a basis for a future history. Before nationalism can be thought of, then, as a clash between colonizers and colonized, or between elites and non-elites—that is, as the articulation of racial and class conflicts—we might think of it as first of all a linguistic politics arising from the irreducible foreignness of what comes to be recognized as "common" to the nation.
Mia Zamora, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Martyr stories and tropes of sacrifice are fundamental to the conception of Filipino national narratives from the 16th century to the present. The stories of saints’ lives and their martyrdom have rendered the figure of the saint as icon, as public spectacle, and as a fascinating image of patience. Hagiography, and its generic designation in Filipino literary history, must be read as a formative imprint in the constitution of a Filipino national typology.
The "being-as-image" or "picture-writing" that identifies the hagiographic portraits of the saints is appropriated and transformed in the construction of modern Filipino national heroes. This paper examines the relationship between Catholic iconography and its transformation as it becomes the framework by which modern Filipino national heroes and their stories are constructed. Why and how has Dr. Jose Rizal been infused with the lasting mythic power of the national hero? If Rizal is read as martyred saint/national hero, then his story is likewise an account of the libidinal economy of the Filipino nation, as well as a material product of Philippine social symbolization.
Neferti Tadiar, University of California, Santa Cruz
This paper analyzes recent attempts in Philippine history and psychology to disclose and delineate indigenous or popular subjective forms particular to Philippine culture which inform social movements and structures. I am thinking of such works as Reynaldo Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution and its attempt to write a "history from below" and the work of Virgilio Enriquez, whose school of nationalist cultural psychology, Sikolohiyang Pilipino, is an attempt to theorize the particular psychological forms of Filipino culture as evidence by linguistic and social practices. Although very different in method and content, both approaches are responses to the bourgeois and elitist-centric understandings of history and culture which have long dominated the various disciplines of Philippine studies. My paper is an attempt to read and analyze the socio-subjective forms offered by such academic nationalisms in light of the programmes for historical change pursued by the Philippine state and its adversary, the Communist Party of the Philippines. In doing so, I am interrogating the ways in which history is seen and made to transpire through these forms and their implied and predicated histories as a way of refiguring the postmodern perception of the breakdown of the "nation" as a category of transnational production and cultural understanding.