Ricardo Padrón's "The Indies of the Setting Sun"

Ricardo Padrón is an associate professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West, and reported the following:

Page 99 includes the following complete paragraphs (as well as partial paragraphs before and after):

Like the other imperial historians, Oviedo manages the story of the crossing so as to control the implications of this discovery. He does not fictionalize the encounter with the Unfortunate Isles, the way von Sevenborgen does, but he nevertheless imitates the secretary in remaining silent about the suffering of the men, saying nothing about hunger, thirst, sickness, or death along the way, yet making sure to mention the strong, favorable winds that bore the ships across the ocean, with no storms to trouble them along the way. He says nothing about distances or longitudes, leaving the reader with the impression that the South Sea is broad, but providing none of the information that he or she would need to map it. One is left with the same impression one gets from reading von Sevenborgen, that the first European crossing of the Pacific Ocean presented no real difficulty, that it was smooth sailing all the way. Like the other narratives by authors closely connected to the court of Charles V, Oviedo’s account of the crossing is a tale of the successful conquest of the Ocean Sea.

The next two chapters provide a second account of the same events explicitly drawn from Pigafetta. This often happens in the Historia general, creating the impression that we are dealing with a diligent historian who does not want to get in the way of his eyewitness sources, and eagerly provides different versions of events so that the reader can make up his or her own mind about whom or what to believe. In keeping with this practice, Oviedo dutifully notes that the Venetian was an eyewitness to the events he describes and should therefore be believed. Nevertheless, he then goes on to undermine Pigafetta’s authority. The chapter becomes an act of discursive violence, a direct assault on the single source that posed the most difficulty for the imperial account of the Pacific crossing and its imperial cartography of the South Sea.

This passage does a fairly good job of giving the reader a sense of what the book is like. The Indies of the Setting Sun is about Spanish attempts to imagine the Pacific Ocean as a relatively narrow expanse that integrated rather than separated America and Asia, as part of larger effort to claim East and Southeast Asia as a western extension of the Spanish empire in the New World. This passage from page 99 summarizes of a key section of chapter three, which compares the way that different accounts of the Magellan expedition told the story of the first crossing of the Pacific Ocean by Europeans. The reader might be familiar with Antonio Pigafetta, a member of the Magellan expedition who wrote the most complete and extensive eye-witness account of the voyage. In this passage, he or she learns that there were other historians of the expedition as well, among them von Sevenborgen and Oviedo, and that unlike Pigafetta, they were “imperial historians,” that is, writers who exhibited a strong bias in favor of the Spanish empire and its interests. The reader learns that the imperial historians came up with a template for telling the story of the Pacific crossing that supported Spanish efforts to present the Pacific as a large but manageable oceanic expanse across which Spain could effectively project power and that Oviedo not only repeated this template, but did what he could to control the damage to Spain’s interest presented by Pigafetta’s frank and shocking version of the story.

From this passage, the reader learns that the Indies of the Setting Sun is not about exploration and discovery, but about the ways that voyages of exploration were narrated, packaged, and presented to the reading public in the service of various agendas. He or she learns about the influence of ideology in the making of early modern texts that claim to be truthful, even scientific, and perhaps suspects that this is a book about the role of power in the making of geographical and historical knowledge. Not bad for a couple of paragraphs from page 99.

Learn more about The Indies of the Setting Sun at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Christine Leuenberger & Izhak Schnell's "The Politics of Maps"

Christine Leuenberger is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University. She has published various edited volumes and books and her work has also appeared in a number of academic journals, edited volumes and popular news outlets. She was a Fulbright Scholar, a Fulbright Specialist, and an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Science & Technology Policy Fellow (STPF). Leuenberger was the recipient of a National Science Foundation Scholar’s award to investigate the history and sociology of mapping practices in Israel and the Palestinian Territories. She is currently conducting research on issues of migration and borders, and is engaged in peace and educational initiatives in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Izhak Schnell is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Geography and Human Environment at Tel Aviv University and former President of the Israeli Association of Geographers. His works focus on the analysis of social space under globalization and socio-spatial integration and segregation of social groups in globalized realities, interpretations of the meanings of spaces and places including the representations of spaces and places like art and cartographic pieces and the monitoring of urban environments as risks for health and urban parks as restorative environments.

Leuenberger applied the “Page 99 Test” to their new book, The Politics of Maps: Cartographic Constructions of Israel/Palestine, and reported the following:

Page 99 in The Politics of Maps might as well have been the core of our book. At the heart of the Israel-Palestinian conflict is the Green Line – the internationally recognized 1949 Armistice Line between Israel and the West Bank. Adhering to it for delineating Israeli and Palestinian territories is seen as fundamental to the long-favored two-state-solution. Yet the story of the Green Line starts with a badly delineated blue line by the military general Moshe Dayan. He was, according to an eyewitness, not much of a map-reader, when, with a thick blue pencil, he drew a line onto a map. However, “the width of the line of the pencil was nearly 2 millimeters”. At the time, the eyewitness asked, “what are you doing?” pointing out that this line on the ground is 300 meters wide, cutting through villages, separating farmers from their land, and leaving a strip of no-man’s land ill-defined. His objection was dismissed. To this day, the delineation of the Green Line, its meaning in international law, and its consequences for territorial sovereignty, is under dispute.

The story of the Green Line is emblematic of what this book is about. In the 9 chapters we focus on how maps have helped make the Israeli state in 1948, and how in the early 1990s, Palestinians surveyed and mapped the territory allocated to a future State of Palestine. In both cases, maps had geopolitical functions to help build envisioned nation-states, yet they also became weapons in map wars, that are being waged by various stakeholders over whether to delineate the Green Line and how to demarcate contested territories. Such map wars in Israel/Palestine exemplify processes underway in other states across the globe, whether in South Africa or Ukraine, which are engaged in disputes over the territorial integrity of nation-states.

We cannot refer to page 99 without mentioning a book cited there published in 1999 by the sociologist Michael Feige. He was an analyst of Israeli-Palestinian spatial arrangement – a fighter for reason, tolerance and peace – and a jolly fellow who liked his coffee. I last saw him at Ben-Gurion University getting a coffee. I told him at the time that I admire his work. In 2016 he was killed in a terror attack in an upscale café in Tel Aviv. A man who tried to understand and analyze why Israelis and Palestinians found themselves in such an entrenched conflict become its victim.

There are too many victims of this conflict – too many on the Palestinian side, and, while far fewer, also too many on the Israeli side. The conflict is also corrosive for both societies. Badly delineated territories and thoughtless policies that fail to respect the human and spatial rights of two people in the same land come with dire consequences. Thus, we need to analyze the predicaments we are in and find solutions that are sustainable and just to the people who share the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan Valley. And one thing is clear – more maps – such as the Vision for Peace Conceptual Map proposed by the US Administration in 2020 - that do not attend to the realities on the ground are not the solution.

Learn more about The Politics of Maps at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Adrian Brettle's "Colossal Ambitions"

Adrian Brettle is Lecturer and Associate Director of the Political History and Leadership Program in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post-Civil War World, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Colossal Ambitions places the reader in May 1862 and a debate in the Confederacy about the potential building of an ironclad saltwater navy. Discussions in the Confederate Congress, in newspapers and private correspondence covered such topics as the resources needed, the impact the navy’s construction would have on the economy, and the uses these ships would be put to after the war, or even during wartime, if hostilities with the United States dragged on, inconclusively, long enough for the ships to be completed and put to sea. Politicians and businesspeople talked at the micro level about how such a plan would boost local economies around the shipyards. At the same time, these individuals considered the broader implications if such a scheme was realized, from breaking the Union’s blockade to protecting the expansion of Confederate exports and the acquisition of vital supplies from abroad.

Page 99 is a snapshot of a point of time, which reveals how Colossal Ambitions is a work that deconstructs Confederate long-range planning for peace as an independent country over the course of the Civil War virtually on a month by month, certainly season by season, basis. The recent fall of New Orleans to a Union flotilla, as well as military setbacks in Virginia and Tennessee, concentrated the minds of planners both in government and the private sector about military, especially naval vulnerability. While Union hostility and the refusal of European powers to recognize the Confederacy as an independent nation added a sense of isolationism to this unease. Above all, peace seemed remote and the prospects of a fleet therefore the expression of a defiant vision of economic self-sufficiency, territorial expansion, and projection of power abroad that the survival of the Confederacy in a hostile world seemed to demand. The topic of the navy is a leitmotif of the book. Its existence and strength (1864 would be when naval plans recurred with even greater gusto) was needed most when the future world seemed less than ideal for Confederates. The world as it was, rather than what they wished it to be. At the same time, the navy supported objectives in peacetime that were consistently important for Confederates: increased exports arising from growing staple-crop production (especially cotton) in turn contingent on the recovery and then expansion of slavery. However, as the debates on page 99 show, the navy plans add nuance to this picture. The lumber industry (which did indeed flourish in the South after the war) was expected to grow, especially in North Carolina, while shipbuilding would necessitate a degree of industrialization and technical development that would surely be at odds with the preservation of a predominantly agricultural economy based on the labor of enslaved people.

Learn more about Colossal Ambitions at the University of Virginia Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jeremy Withers's "Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles"

Jeremy Withers is Associate Professor of English at Iowa State University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles: Contesting the Road in American Science Fiction, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles consists of part of the introduction to chapter three, a chapter devoted to analyzing how some science fiction texts of the New Wave Era (c. 1960-1975) depicted automobiles and bicycles. This page primarily sketches out some of the important historical background to this era, such as how it was a time when the United States experienced yet another surge in annual road and highway deaths and how it saw the beginnings of a cohesive environmental movement.

At first glance, page 99 feels related to this particular chapter, but not to the book as a whole, given that it makes quite specific historical references to New Wave era figures such as President Lyndon B. Johnson and legislation such as the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Endangered Species Act of 1973. However, this page gestures toward the book’s overall interest in historicizing the science fiction texts on which it focuses. That is, each chapter foregrounds how science fiction has engaged with larger cultural and political events related to transportation, events that shaped these texts during their creation and helped them find readers upon publication. More importantly, page 99 references two related, important points that the overall book makes: that the automobile’s deadly nature frequently alarmed American science fiction writers, as did the unsustainability of cars in their conventional form. Page 99 ends with the line: “More often than not, New Wave writers portray automobiles as murderous, pollution-belching monsters, and look instead to alternatives such as electric cars and human-powered bicycles.” Change “New Wave writers” in that line to “American science fiction writers” and you have a serviceable thesis statement for the entirety of Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles.

Learn more about Futuristic Cars and Space Bicycles at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Matthew Van Meter's "Deep Delta Justice"

Matthew Van Meter, raised a Quaker, has written for The Atlantic, The New Republic, Longreads, The Awl and others. A graduate of Middlebury College and Columbia University, he reports on criminal justice, teaches at College for Creative Studies and works as assistant director of Shakespeare in Prison. He lives in Detroit, Michigan.

Van Meter applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Deep Delta Justice: A Black Teen, His Lawyer, and Their Groundbreaking Battle for Civil Rights in the South, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Deep Delta Justice is the finale of a pivotal courtroom scene--Gary Duncan, the main character, a 19-year-old black shrimper, is on trial for touching a white boy on the shoulder in order to break up a fight. His lawyer, Richard Sobol, has rested his case, and the judge is about to render a verdict.

Page 99 opens with Gary feeling hopeful. Richard, a brilliant lawyer who would go on to become one of the luminaries of his generation, has picked apart the prosecutor's arguments effectively. I write of Gary: "[The] tension that had built up inside him, taut and wound tighter by each new injustice from when he touched the Landry boy until this moment, began to slacken."

At first, the judge seems to go Gary's way. But suddenly he changes course and announces a guilty verdict. The page ends with Gary's sense of betrayal and the pain of maturing into his "place" in Jim Crow society: "Gary felt himself fall through the floor even as he mechanically stood tall to comply with [the judge's] request. He was short of breath, as if his body were constricted by thick lines or pressed under weights. His family was behind him, and he turned slightly to look back at his mother. She was weeping, and the sight of her face fractured something behind his ribs. 'I know what this is,' he thought. Gary saw how people could just take and do things to you, and he understood that his family had known that truth for a long time and protected him. He felt naive, and he felt foolish. 'I know what this is,' he repeated to himself as he turned back to the judge."

Page 99 is uncannily representative of the entirety of Deep Delta Justice to me in several specific ways.

First, in terms of technique, it is the culmination of a dramatic scene that was sourced using the tools of a journalist and historian, then recounted using the tools of a novelist: emphasis on character development, storytelling through dialogue and accumulation of details, and "interiority" (the inner lives of characters). I work hard to earn these scenes; page 99 reflects dozens of hours of reporting and research--all hopefully invisible to the reader!

Second, in terms of my process, page 99 showcases two of the things that bring me the most joy as a reporter and writer. I got my start in writing through theatre, and I love the process of taking hundreds (or thousands!) of pages of trial transcript and editing them down to a scene's worth of snappy, propulsive dialogue. And the interiority--Gary's emotional world--was acquired by allowing him to tell me about this incredibly painful experience over and over again over the course of several years. The deep truth of it--that this was the moment when Gary first understood the traumatic reality of being black in America--only became clear to me on the tenth or twentieth telling.

Third, and most importantly, page 99 is poignant for me in terms of my duty as a storyteller who lives in a society that values me and my words far more than it has ever valued Gary Duncan or his words. Both as a reporter and someone who works with incarcerated people, I am constantly reminded of how little I have done to earn my outsize megaphone. But I have that megaphone, and it is my responsibility to use it to use it well. Telling Gary's story from his perspective does not absolve me of my participation in the system that oppresses him, but it is what I know how to do, and failing to tell that story would be a waste of the power I have inherited. So, rereading page 99, I am struck by how many of these words are Gary's. I am reminded of how, when I first read that passage aloud to him, he looked up at me with tears in his eyes and said, "Yes. That's just how it was." He could not have said anything that would make me feel better.

Learn more about Deep Delta Justice.

--Marshal Zeringue

Virginia Wright Wexman's "Hollywood's Artists"

Virginia Wright Wexman is professor emerita of English and art history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her books include Creating the Couple: Love, Marriage, and Hollywood Performance (1993) and A History of Film (seventh edition, 2010).

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Hollywood's Artists: The Directors Guild of America and the Construction of Authorship, and reported the following:

Hollywood’s Artists: The Directors Guild of America and the Construction of Authorship examines the way in which the DGA has helped to shape the belief that directors are the singular authors responsible for the artistry of Hollywood movies. Page 99 is part of a chapter that elucidates a corollary of this thesis by exploring the way in which the DGA’s mission was elaborated during the years in which the House UnAmerican Activities Committee directed its gaze on Hollywood. During a famous meeting in 1950 that had been sparked by a proposal to have every DGA member sign an oath of loyalty to the US government, Guild members asserted their claim to be the kind of artists who were also manly patriots.

Taken as a whole, Hollywood’s Artists traces the way in which the DGA has placed its creative rights mission at the center of its agenda in order to further the ambitions of its members to make themselves into artists. Throughout its history, the Guild has gained ever-greater creative control over production and credits, building on trends within the film industry and in the larger culture to achieve its goals. The group faced special challenges to this mission when television and newer media platforms posed different models of authorship. Another challenge emerged when the Guild attempted to assert ownership rights for directors as they exist in continental Europe, a project that was destined for failure in the USA.

Learn more about Hollywood's Artists at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Andrew R. Hom's "International Relations and the Problem of Time"

Andrew Hom is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Edinburgh and an Associate Editor of the journal, International Relations. He is the co-editor of Moral Victories: The Ethics of Winning Wars (2017) and Time, Temporality, and Global Politics (2016).

Hom applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, International Relations and the Problem of Time, and reported the following:

Had I known I would have the opportunity to take the page 99 test for International Relations and the Problem of Time, I would have made sure that something dramatic happened on that page, as when scientists invented the Doomsday Clock – the ticking symbol of dread – to reckon with the nuclear revolution and other forms of apocalypse (it is 100 seconds to midnight, by the way). Or at least that someone would deliver a memorable quote – like ancient references to “Time the Destroyer”, or when a Minister in the UK Parliament accused the Conservative government of “using time as a weapon” in debates about foreign policy.

Alas, while earlier and later portions of the book cover such episodes, page 99 is invested in the less striking but equally important work of carefully building up conceptual tools to help us see just why and how time matters in world politics. It discusses mechanistic, historical, and structural-rationalist explanations in the study of International Relations (IR), comparing them based on how (and how much) they filter experience into a manageable amount of evidence or data; how they “cleave” or establish the bookends of the explanatory sequence; and how they turn surprising or discordant moments into those turning points, tragic flaws, and twists of fate that lead political processes in puzzling directions. This discussion comes near the end of chapter three, which introduces temporal concepts from narrative theory to IR.

Hold on a second (you may object), history – ok, but mechanisms, structures, and rationality don’t sound very much like “timey wimey” issues?

Yet these ways of explaining political phenomena are central to IR, which would be unrecognizable without references to history, the “structure of international anarchy”, assumptions about rational state behaviour, or accounts of how certain inputs mechanically produce reliable outpus. And one of the main goals of the book is to show that while many discussions may not appear temporal, and most scholars have not concerned themselves with time, IR concepts and modes of knowledge depend very much on hidden ideas about time. Following on from this, the book also shows just how IR theories and methods perpetuate particular ways of imagining and relating to time.

To accomplish this, Part One of the book develops a novel account of time as not just having political consequences but as a social and political phenomenon all the way down. Departing from other philosophical and theoretical treatments, which tend to assume some metaphysical or natural content to time, my book argues that all concepts of time and temporal symbols refer to underlying timing practices. Here timing means not just ‘when’ something happens but to much larger and more creative efforts to stitch together social relations and complex processes so that life unfolds in one way rather than others, and produces this outcome instead of that. References to time and temporality, then, refer not to objective features of the universe but to human efforts to time – a basic, pervasive, and widely overlooked aspect of social and political life.

Because it begins from such a different starting point, Part One also defends timing theory against prominent alternatives, before developing more precise analytical tools (as on page 99) to help us identify and unpack IR’s temporal foundations. Part Two then demonstrates this and discusses the consequences for how we think about world politics, covering disciplinary history, philosophies of social science, quantitative methods, studies of international institutions, and critical theory. It concludes by arguing that once we fully grasp the importance of timing and time for international politics, IR looks very different from conventional wisdoms about quantitative-qualitative, theory-narrative, general-particular, empirical-interpretive, or scientific-critical divides.

Learn more about International Relations and the Problem of Time at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

LaFleur Stephens-Dougan's "Race to the Bottom"

LaFleur Stephens-Dougan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at Princeton University. Her research interests include public opinion, racial attitudes and voting behavior.

Stephens-Dougan applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Race to the Bottom: How Racial Appeals Work in American Politics, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Race to the Bottom: How Racial Appeals Work In American Politics, discusses the results of an survey experiment that was fielded on a nationally representative sample of 515 White respondents. Participants in the experiment were randomly assigned to read about a Black Democratic politician who had recently given a speech that encouraged people to get out and vote. There were three versions of the article, a deracialized version, an implicitly racial version, and an explicitly racial version. The aim here was to see whether some White voters would evaluate a Black candidate who did not mention race (deracialized message) more positively than a virtually identical Black Democratic candidate who did mention race, either implicitly or explicitly.

There is a long line of research that suggests that Black candidates should avoid the topic of race to allay the fears of White voters. This strategy, which is referred to as “deracialization,” presumes that if a Black politician is talking about race, then they are assuming a posture of racial liberalism that will turn off White voters. Less explored, is whether Black politicians are advantaged when they indicate that they are not “too liberal” on matters of race, by invoking negative stereotypes about other Black people—a strategy that I refer to as “racial distancing.”

The page 99 test works for Race to the Bottom because this page illuminates the central argument of the book, which is that racially moderate and racially conservative White Americans have a preference for politicians who distance themselves from the interests of Black people. The discussion on page 99 indicates that White voters in the sample were more likely to vote for the Black Democratic candidate in either the implicit or explicit versions of the article, relative to the Black Democratic candidate with the deracialized message. They also rated the racialized versions of the speech more positively. In other words, a message from a Black Democratic candidate that emphasized unity and universalism was actually less popular than messages that invoked stereotypes of Blacks as complaining and not taking personal responsibility. Since most White Americans are moderate to conservative on matters of race, this has troubling normative implications for the representation of Black interests in the American political system.

Visit LaFleur Stephens-Dougan's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nicolas Bommarito's "Seeing Clearly"

Nicolas Bommarito is an Assistant Professor of philosophy at University at Buffalo. Before that, he was a Bersoff Fellow in the philosophy department at NYU. He has also studied at Brown University, Tibet University, and University of Michigan. His research focuses on questions in virtue ethics, moral psychology, and Buddhist philosophy.

Bommarito applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Seeing Clearly: A Buddhist Guide to Life, and reported the following:

The Page 99 Test is a wonderful illustration of an important Buddhist idea. Page 99 of my book Seeing Clearly is about the Buddhist idea of the Two Truths. The basic idea is that some things are true within a system of conventions or assumptions, while others are true full stop. So it’s true within our conventional mythology that Santa wears a red suit since we've all agreed that is how the story goes. But it’s not ultimately true since there is no Santa (sorry, Virginia!) and so no suit at all.

Page 99 talks about a particular view of the Two Truths that sees them as identical, different aspects of the same reality. They are different aspects of the same thing the way a lemon is both yellow and sour. It then talks about the practical importance of thinking about the conventions and assumptions in place when we listen to what others say. This means reflecting on whether it would be wise in that situation to work within those conventions or break out of them. Do you insist that Santa does not have a red suit or sit back and have fun participating in the Christmas dinner conversation?

Buddhists who talk about the Two Truths often do so because they say that everything is empty. By that they mean empty of an independent essence. This means that everything depends on everything else to be what it is. The Page 99 Test itself is actually a wonderful illustration of this. To really explain what is happening on page 99, you have to explain what happened before and what happens after in the book. Understanding the significance of the page means understanding its place in the rest of the book.

Think about a melody you like. If you just take a single note from the middle of that melody on its own and ask, “Is this a good note?” it’s hard to say. This is because the note’s significance depends on the notes that come before and after and the timing of those notes. The same is true of page 99 or any other page of a book – trying to figure out what it says and how good it is means reflecting on what came before and what follows.

Reflecting on the relational nature of things is a central part of what the Page 99 Test forces you to do and it’s also of central importance in the Buddhist idea of emptiness. It might seem like you can pick out a single musical note or a page of a book and evaluate it as an isolated, stand-alone thing, but you can’t. In the same way, it can be tempting to think of events, people, and even ourselves in ways that abstract away from all of the relations and conditions that make these things what they are. For many Buddhists this view of things as independent and isolated things is the fundamental mistake that causes misery in life. The rest of my book is about how Buddhists take on the task of fixing that mistake, particular ideas and techniques they use to see clearly how the world really is and so become more compassionate and understanding.

Visit Nic Bommarito's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz's "Asian Place, Filipino Nation"

Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz is a research fellow at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, and is executive director of the Toynbee Prize Foundation. She holds a PhD in Southeast Asian and international history from Yale University.

CuUnjieng Aboitiz applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Asian Place, Filipino Nation: A Global Intellectual History of the Philippine Revolution, 1887-1912, and reported the following:

From page 99:

Phan Bội Châu did not believe in a racial hierarchy. He saw in Social Darwinism not an essentialist trap but a positive theory that explained a nation’s strength as the result of its historical development, thereby opening to any nation the opportunity to advance by developing itself... To Châu, a nation’s survival depended upon its struggle. This struggle needed not be borne alone. Kōtoku Shūsui and other Japanese thinkers as well as Liu Shipei—a Chinese intellectual with whom Châu was in contact—all drew upon Peter Kropotkin’s Social Darwinist theories of intra-species behavior. Kropotkin emphasized ‘mutual help’ among members of a species and argued for it as crucial to the species’ survival in nature’s harsh living conditions. For the Filipinos, Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese intellectuals who had internalized Social Darwinism as an explanation of the difference among nations (rather than as inequality existing within a single nation, as it was originally theorized in Europe), Kropotkin’s argument served to bridge Social Darwinism and Pan-Asianism. Phan Bội Châu wrote further in ‘Letter from Abroad Written in Blood’: ‘In this age when strong powers are competing against each other and the world is engaged in a struggle for survival, we would be a loser unless we absorb civilization from abroad, acquire sympathy from a strong neighbour, and pit our small nation against a big enemy.’

My book is a global intellectual history of the Philippine Revolution, and deals centrally with the emplotment of place in the political thought and actions of the Philippine ilustrados (educated elite) and revolutionaries as they constructed the idea of the Philippine nation. To understand this history I examined the Filipinos’ constructions of ‘place,’ ‘Asia,’ the Malay race, and civilization. While my book centers on the Philippines, it has an eye toward Vietnam throughout. It examines East-East or intra-Global South relations and exchange within a period of history that is too often apprehended through bilateral accounts privileging relations between the West and an Asian country. It is in this light that the contemporaneous Vietnamese engagement with Pan-Asianism and Social Darwinism becomes relevant. It is also through the Vietnamese and Philippine histories taken together that I recover and distinguish the Pan-Asianism of the colonized “periphery” as distinct from that of the “center” of Northeast Asia. I incorporate the “periphery” into our understanding of Pan-Asianism and focus on its affective and material dimensions, which the traditional intellectual and Northeast Asia-centric scholarship tends to miss.

The diverse islands of Filipinas* are riven with ethno-linguistic variety and the contours of what would become the Philippine nation-state were in no way presumed. It seemed to me that a thorough investigation of the geographies of political affinity and constructions of place at work in the history of the revolution remained sorely missing. What is Southeast Asia? For that matter, what is Asia? Existing at the “periphery” of both, the Philippines is a singularly rich site to explore such questions. Beyond merely the Philippines, I wondered, how do anti-colonial and proto-nationalist constructions of ‘place’ relate theoretically and genealogically to empire and its claims to space? Further, how did they relate to the multivalent discourses on race?

Indeed, observers around the globe at the turn of the twentieth century—from Spain, to India, and Japan—were convinced that they were on the precipice of a coming race war. Social Darwinist frameworks only worked to naturalize that idea of international racial struggle, and, as a result, could portray Asian racial solidarity as both necessary and existential to the anti-colonial nationalist struggles then brewing and ablaze in the region.

*I use the contemporary name of the Spanish colony when discussing the archipelago prior to the idea of the Filipino nation and when discussing the colony as distinct from the imagination of that nation.

Learn more about Asian Place, Filipino Nation at the Columbia University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue