Events

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Stefan Huebner, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

In the Philippines from 1872-1912, one sees an early instance of the transition of power that would take place in the region—from the Old World, European imperial powers to the emerging, New World, American global power and the rise of Japan. Indeed, the turn of the twentieth century was a turning point for imperial and Southeast Asian history, with imperial subjugation and incorporation hardening empires and firing local resistance across the entire region. Yet, this transnational and regional historical setting has barely been incorporated into the locally- and Western-orientated historiography of the Philippine Revolution. What impact did the Revolution have in Southeast Asia, and what intellectual threads in the Philippine political discourses connected it to the corollary anti-imperial and positive political imaginings of its Asian neighbors?

The important global moment of the late nineteenth century—with all the changes in technology, sovereignty, human exchange, and ideology that it wrought—is too often apprehended in Asian historiography through a bilateral framework privileging relations with the West. Asian Place, Filipino Nation charts the emplotment of ‘place’ in the proto-national thought and revolutionary organizing of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Filipino thinkers, and how their Pan-Asian political organizing and their constructions of the place of ‘Asia’ and of the spatial registers of race/Malayness connected them to their regional neighbors undertaking the same work. It unearths precisely what ground the Philippine nation has built itself upon intellectually, excavating its neglected cosmopolitan and transnational Asian moorings in particular, in order to reconnect modern Philippine history to that of Southeast and East Asia, from which it has been historiographically separated. It does so with an eye toward Vietnam and contemporaneous scholar-gentry Asianist political thought and organizing. Within these veins, this talk will focus on the Filipinos’ construction of ‘Asia’ and narrative of universal civilization, which they situated within a Social Darwinist framework and employed to explain the current state of material inequality between East and West, and will briefly compare this thinking to that of the corollary Vietnamese scholar-gentry.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz is Research Fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, working on global intellectual history and Southeast Asian cultural-environmental history. She holds a PhD in Southeast Asian and International History from Yale University and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University. Her first book, Asian Place, Filipino Nation: A Global Intellectual History of the Philippine Revolution, 1887-1912 was published by Columbia University Press in 2020. She is Executive Director of the Toynbee Prize Foundation, the premiere organization for global history.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this webinar has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the webinar.