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:Learn more about Asian Place, Filipino Nation at the Columbia University Press website.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.
--Marshal Zeringue
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