Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Benedict Anderson Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination,
Verso, London/New York, 2005, 255 pp, ISBN: 9781844670376, 14.99.
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Reviews
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Ponce too trained as a doctor in Spain. He was a driving force, together with
his mentor Del Pilar, behind the Barcelona-based journal, La Solidaridad.
From 1897 to 1900, Ponce served as an ambassador for the fledgling
Philippine republic, charged with raising funds and arms (with little success)
in Hong Kong and then in Yokohama. Ponce in many ways stands as an
epilogue to the book, drawing on an expansive and cosmopolitan world of
contacts and connections in his voluminous correspondence, in the service of
a revolution that took the cosmopolitan literati by surprise, led by men less
cosmopolitan and less connected than Rizal or Ponce.
These lives are woven together by many threads, many of them meeting
not in the Philippines but in Europe. For a start, in writing primarily in
Spanish, Rizal, Isabelo and Ponce were already amongst the minute
proportion of the Philippines population literate in that language, and thus
part of a small and closed elite. They also shared more expansive global
connections. They all corresponded with Ferdinand Blumentritt, for
example, who is a quiet but powerful presence in the book; they read and
wrote for the same journals, circulated along the same diasporic networks,
imbibed the same influences, and were not without their personal rivalries
Rizal evidently felt rather superior to the altogether more sympathetic
Isabelo: he was scathing about Isabelos workmanlike productivity.
Reading Under Three Flags, one marvels at the promiscuous blend
of ideas, ideologies and tactics that nourished Filipino nationalism.
Anderson shows, convincingly, that colonized intellectuals from a distant
archipelago could stand at the vanguard of artistic and political modernism
Rizal and Isabelo both innovated at the forefront of their respective fields,
fiction and folklore. Indeed, the best term to describe both of them might be
internationalists. It is a term that has dropped away from scholarly
discussion, displaced by a voluminous writing on transnationalism,
globalism and cosmopolitanism. Yet Anderson shows convincingly how
Rizal, Isabelo and Ponce all operated very much within the evolving worldsystem of nation-states. Isabelo imagined his field of work as that of
international folklore studies, comprising myriad national folklore societies.
For Rizal, it was international literature, comprising the best of national
literatures. Ponce imagined, poignantly, an international society, a concert
of civilized national governments, into which club he sought entry for the
Philippines as a nation amongst others. The whole story fits into what the
historian Selcuk Esenbel has aptly called the international relations of
nationalism, that is, the alternative, ambivalent arena of international
relations that ran parallel to, and constrained by, the inter-state relations
forged by formal treaties and diplomacy.3
The narrative builds around a sense of impending violence and political
eruption. Beginning in the early 1880s, Anderson writes, the preliminary
tremors were being felt of the earthquake that we remember variously
as the Great War or the First World War (p. 3). Fair enough, but for
the argument in the book this is problematic; it is a little too easy.
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Cubans (as well as Puerto Ricans and Dominicans) and Filipinos did not
merely read about each other, but had crucial personal connections and,
up to a point, coordinated their actions the first time in world history
that such transglobal coordination became possible (p. 2).
Yet this is not demonstrated with any conviction. Beyond the general
inspiration that Cuban agitators might have provided to Filipino
nationalists abroad, and despite a number of personal connections which
Anderson uncovers, it is not clear that there was any very substantive
connection between the Cuban and the Filipino revolts of the 1890s.
Moreover, at no point does Anderson show reciprocal influence, from the
Philippines back to Cuba, which undermines his argument about the global
centrality of the Philippines at this moment. Indeed, as T. J. Clark has
written, Anderson also has a hard time getting anarchism within a thousand
miles of Jose Mart .4 The links in Andersons global chain often seem in
danger of coming apart. Remember, too, that when the insurrection finally
came to the Philippines, it came too soon; precisely those Filipinos whom
Anderson locates within the global networks of anarchist and radical
thought, felt unprepared for the Kaputinan revolt, and indeed Rizal paid
with his life for it despite knowing nothing of it.
Reading Under Three Flags as a historian of South and Southeast Asia,
I cannot but note how small a slice of early globalization the book is
concerned with. I wonder if the Philippines, by virtue of its exceptionalism
(which Anderson explains at length) are really the best place to begin a
reconstruction of a world of global connections in the late nineteenth
century. If the world of global anarchist thought, with its journals and its
salons, constitutes one particular instance of early globalization, it is in fact
a relatively marginal one; there were other, perhaps more important,
globalizations afoot.
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Religion has always been a blind spot for Anderson. With the ebbing of
religious belief, he wrote, prematurely, in Imagined Communities, the
suffering which belief in part composed did not disappear . . . What then was
required was a secular transformation of fatality into continuity, contingency into meaning;5 in nationalism lay the new faith. In Under Three
Flags, he writes that in their turn Romanticism, democracy, Idealism,
Marxism, anarchism, even, late in the day, fascism were variously
understood as globe-stretching and nation-linking (p. 1). Surely, though,
no beliefs or practices were more globe-stretching and nation-linking, in
this period, than the universal religions: Islam and Christianity in particular,
but also Buddhism and Hinduism in Asia.
The mobility that took Rizal to Barcelona, Paris and London took
thousands of Javanese, Sumatran, Burmese and Punjabi Muslims to the
Hejaz, to Cairo, and to other points across the Muslim world. If we think of
diasporas much older than the diaspora of Filipino literati that Anderson
describes, it becomes clear that there are other periodizations of early
globalization. As Engseng Ho points out in his recent brilliant work on the
Hadrami diaspora, for 500 years the diasporic space of the Indian Ocean
was held together by a skein of common references, books in religion,
language and law; by scholars whose itineraries and generations span the
space . . . and by intellectual genealogies of teachers licensing students to
teach those texts.6 As early as 1603, Ho writes, Abd al-Qadir al-Aydaruss
The Travelling Light Unveiled indicates the linkages across space and time
made possible by diasporic networks: his chronicle lists deaths of jurists,
scholars and saints, stories of flood, fire, rain, lightning, earthquakes,
eclipses, comets. The juxtaposition of these accounts on the flat pages,
Ho notes, give the book the feel of a newspaper pace print capitalism
where events separated geographically jostle each other in parallel
columns, sharing the space of a common time.7
It may only have been in the second half of the nineteenth century that
Filipino intellectuals were able to participate in a global exchange of ideas,
but this was emphatically not the case for, say, Egyptians, Indians or
Hadramis. The steamship revolution only accelerated the mobility across the
Indian Ocean that Hadramis, for instance, had long practised. Thus
Anderson might have taken more account than he does of the work of
historians who trace a much deeper genealogy of globalization, using the
notion of archaic globalization to argue that Andersons early globalization of the later nineteenth century already had deep roots in particular
cultural regions.8
Yet the intellectual and cultural world of Eurasian Islam, too, benefited
from the technological transformations of early globalization lauded by
Anderson. The Universal Postal Union in 1876, Anderson argues, vastly
accelerated the reliable movement of letters, magazines, newspapers,
photographs, and books around the world (p. 4). The circulation of the
kinds of journals Anderson writes about was probably small in comparison
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to the flourishing Arabic language press that stretched from Cairo to Java,
via entrepots like Singapore. At the very time Jose Rizal was in Paris, Jamal
ad-din al-Afghani and Mohammed Abduh began, in Paris, their anticolonial journal of modernist Islam, al-Urwa al-wuthqa indeed, al-Afghani
was even better travelled than Rizal, and tried to exploit the interstices of the
international state system (without huge success), invoking Russian support
for an anti-colonial revolt in South Asia.9 As Michael Laffan has shown,
by the 1890s Cairo was the centre of an empire of print, with journals
like al-Muayyad and Rashid Ridas al-Manar circulating throughout the
Muslim world, to the outer reaches of the Dutch East Indies.10 The
circulation of these journals demonstrates the development of an increasingly
global Muslim reading public. Their articles, too, drew on a vast range of
ideas and ideologies exegesis of the Koran, law, social reform, political
economy, public and private hygiene, marriage practices and international
affairs.11
By privileging connections that were channelled through Europe, through
the shadowy political worlds of Barcelona and Paris, Anderson overlooks a
whole other world of inter-Asian connections, until Under Three Flags
suddenly takes us to Hong Kong towards the end. To get at that other
world, it is impossible to avoid the intellectual networks of global Islam.12
Ever generous to his readers, Anderson almost invites us to imagine our
own endings to this book, as his storys conclusion is over the tired
novelists horizon (p. 5). I can imagine four such, and he hints at them all.
The most sympathetic, for a believer in the kinds of politics that Rizal
and Isabelo espoused, is the notion that the insurrection in the Philippines
was a powder keg for Asian revolution. This is what I sense Anderson means
when he speaks of the Philippines world historical significance in these
years. His brief reference to Rebecca Karls work on the political
imagination of Chinese radicals suggests he would like us to see the
Philippine revolution as a starting point for Asias revolutions of the
twentieth century. Karl argues that the conceptual connections Chinese
intellectuals made to the Philippine events from 1899 to 1903 helped Chinese
intellectuals recognize revolution as a modern mode of being in the
contemporary world.13 The Indian press, too, commented upon and read
lessons into events in the Philippines. Taken together with the Japanese
victory over Russia in 1905, and the beginnings of the Swadeshi movement
in India, the Philippine revolution can be seen as transforming the
conditions of possibility for anti-colonial revolt across the continent,
culminating in the Chinese revolution of 1911, and beyond.
Certainly, the Philippine revolution caused much anxiety on the part of
colonial administrations elsewhere in Asia. Few have captured this as well as
the great Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer in the final volume of
the Buru Quartet, House of Glass. The protagonist, Jacques Pangemannan, a
native political spy for the colonial state, sifts through the archives of the
Dutch Administration trying to find out more about Rizal and the Philippine
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revolution, lest its lessons be ignored in the Indies.14 The long-term impact
on the political imagination elsewhere in Asia is difficult to gauge, but
Anderson does us a service by suggesting this as an area for further
research.
A more local version of Rizals after-life reads rather differently. Here,
too, the story of the Philippine revolution is appropriated into a universal
narrative, but a very different one; one for which Anderson has little time.
Reynaldo Ileto has argued that although Rizal was definitely a product of
the colonial order who, through modern education, heralded the birth of
modern Southeast Asian nationalism, the signs he scattered about, his
gestures, works, his absences even, and finally, the mode of his death,
generated meanings linked to other largely hidden narratives of the
Philippine past. Ileto suggests that Rizals death was widely read as an
enactment of a pasyon story, one of the religiously inspired, metrical
romances that nourished the political and religious imagination of most
Filipinos. Rizals crucifixion, represented the expression of modern anticolonial sentiments in the Christian idiom of self-sacrifice and salvation.
As Ileto puts it, it was the peoples familiarity with the narrative of Christ
that gave meaning to a life-and-death struggle for independence a struggle
imagined as a single redemptive event.15
A far cry, this, from Rizal as a beacon of secular revolution with an
anarchist tinge.
The third ending I would like to write for Andersons epic is
straightforwardly tragic: the brief revolution giving way to a new
American imperium, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Filipino
lives. The American empire in the Pacific quickly acquired a taste for blood.
Pax Americana ushered in a new, hygienic colonial modernity, imposed
from the laboratory and in the market place as much as from the barrel of a
gun. Filipinos participation in modernity, on this view, would come not
from their contribution to world culture or world literature, but in
learning well the lessons of their masters.16
But in some sense the revolution ended even before it was crushed by the
big stick of Theodore Roosevelt. In this context, I turn to Mariano Ponces
correspondence: his plaintive justification, from Hong Kong and
Yokohama, of the Philippine states legitimacy suggests, rather tragically,
the powerful discipline exerted by the nation-state form itself.17 Writing to a
Japanese journalist in 1899, Ponce wished to give him
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the civilized life, now accept our Government and allow us to organize
civilly their villages.
We have there elements for all branches of science, industry, art, etc. The
electric plant has been established by Filipino engineers. The telegraphic
line also by Filipino telegraphists. The Post and Telegraph stamps I send
you enclosed have been engraved by Filipino lithographists. Fine arts: we
have artists known in Europe and America, as Juan Luna and Felix
Resurreccion Hidalgo . . .18
Downloaded from hwj.oxfordjournals.org at Imperial College London on November 11, 2010
And yet despite this, he wrote in another letter, we are now fighting against
a strong prejudice against our capacity for a self-government.19 Ponces
letter suggests quite how powerful had become the global norms to which
any new state had to conform: those who failed to conform would invite
intervention by the club of nation-state for violating its rules, as the
Philippines would soon find. The degree to which Ponce had internalized the
expectations attendant on any state, in an international state system, is a
good indication of why any anarchist inspiration nourishing Asian
nationalisms quickly vanished everywhere and without exception upon
the acquisition of state power.
The last ending that I imagine for Andersons unfinished novel lies much
further in the future. It lies in a throwaway phrase in the discussion of
Isabelo de los Reyes, in which Anderson writes that it was Isabelos
conception of the Philippines offering something, parallel and equal to that
of any other pais, to humanity, that would much later make the United
Nations both possible and plausible (p. 15). This is interesting in itself, for
providing an alternative genealogy of the development of the UN, so often
derived purely from Western ideas about the rights of man. But it is
interesting, too, for another reason.
One gnawing question that arises from the flourishing of work on the
trans-national origins of nationalism is how it took so long for these, now
seemingly obvious, connections to emerge in historical scholarship. A simple
answer, that national histories served the needs of national states in the
world-historical period of their dominance, is indisputable. But there is also
a straight line we might draw between Isabelo de los Reyes folklore studies
and the kind of structural anthropology that informed the newly-formed
United Nations Educational Social and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)
as it sought to lend legitimacy to the study of world history and the
preservation of world heritage. It is a project Isabelo would have
recognized; indeed it was his own project, to document and preserve the
cultural heritage of the Philippines in all of its diversity.
Writing his Race et Histoire for UNESCO in 1952, Claude Levi-Strauss
made an argument in favour of diversity as a value in itself:20 this has clear
roots in the (French as well as British) colonial fascination with the alterity
of colonized societies, with cataloguing the strange and the alien, but also
Anderson shows us with the work of indigenous ethnologists. Like Isabelo
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de los Reyes, Levi-Strauss, writing in the post-war moment, was critical of the
assumption of racial superiority inherent in the colonial civilizing mission.
Yet nations/cultures were, on this view, culturally pure, distinct, easily
separable and here is the post-colonial perspective coming in absolutely
equal.
What ended up being naturalized by a whole host of intellectual and
pedagogical moves from that post-war age, is a perspective that Anderson
sets out elegantly in the opening pages of Under Three Flags21:
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doi:10.1093/hwj/dbn030