GA400: Special Topics in Global Asia
The Revolutionary Tradition in the Philippines

Spring 2024, M 2:30-5:20pm
Simon Fraser University

Course Description:

Speaking of the American South, the historian Robin D. G. Kelley once noted that, despite the popular notion that the region is a backwater for radical organizing, the repressive regimes of the Southern states exist because the South is the most radical place in the United States. A similar observation could be said of the Philippines, a predominantly agricultural nation in Southeast Asia that has been an unwilling host of multiple empires (Spanish, British, American, Japanese) and a series of authoritarian regimes during the 20th and 21st centuries. As a systematically impoverished country long considered as an imperial hinterland, the archipelago boasts a veritable revolutionary tradition that have shaken empires, overthrown dictators, and shaped a global security regime. And today, as a nation defined by its multiple diasporas (especially the migrant workers that sustain North American and global economies), Philippine revolutionary movements can be found around the world, just as the world itself shapes insurrections in the mother country.  

This course examines the revolutionary tradition in the Philippines after the birth of modern capitalism and free-market imperialism in the late 18th century. Beginning with the upheavals during the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) and the British Occupation of Manila (1762-1764), we will chart the development of a racial capitalist regime in the Philippines, as the islands became integrated into the world market through multiple means: steamship routes, the opening of the Suez Canal, and forced agricultural production. Then, we will discuss the origins and the aftermath of the Philippine Revolution (1896-1898) from both elite and nonelite perspectives, and trace the emergence of a transpacific security state during and after the American occupation (1898-1946). Finally, we will evaluate the legacies of Cold War anticommunism, the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos (1965-1986), and the People Power Revolution (1986) in today’s political climate.

This is an intensive reading course. Students will learn how to critically engage scholarly literature produced over the past half-century on revolutionary movements in the Philippines, in conversation with related secondary sources and archival texts. Through literary productions, visual culture, government documents, and multimedia sources, as well as the scholarship that informs their interpretations, students will gain an impression of some of the most exciting conversations in Filipino Studies, and situate seminar discussions within them. The final project will be a literature review essay, developed in consultation with the instructor, in which students survey the scholarship on radical movements in the Philippines and practice making their own scholarly contributions. 

Evaluation:

20%  Participation
35%  Midterm Exam (in-class)
45%  Final Project (3000-4000 words) 

Books (for purchase):

José Rizal, El Filibusterismo. Penguin Classics, 2011. 

Course Schedule

Week 1:
Introduction to Filipino Social History 

Recommended Readings:
Alfred W. McCoy, “The Philippines: Independence Without Decolonization,” in Asia: The Winning of Independence, edited by Robin Jeffrey (1981), 23-70.
Robin D. G. Kelley, “What did Cedric Robinson mean by racial capitalism?” Boston Review, 2017.
Allan E. S. Lumba, “Transpacific Migration, Racial Surplus, and Colonial Settlement,” in Histories of Racial Capitalism, edited by Destin Jenkins and Justin LeRoy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021).

Week 2:
Northern Insurrections and the Foundations of Racial Capitalism in Luzon

Readings:
Fernando Palanco and José S. Arcilla, “Diego Silang’s Revolt: A New Approach,” Philippine Studies 50.4 (2002): 512-537.
Kristie P. Flannery, “Battlefield Diplomacy and Empire-Building in the Indo-Pacific World during the Seven Years’ War,” Itinerario 40.3 (2016): 467-488.
Adrian De Leon, “Rationalizing Race,” in Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023).

Week 3:
The Suez Canal and the Philippine Enlightenment

Readings:
Resil P. Mojares, “Isabelo de los Reyes,” Brains of the Nation: Pedro Paterno, T.H. Pardo de Tavera, Isabelo de los Reyes, and the Production of Modern Knowledge (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2006), excerpts.
Sony Coráñez Bolton, “Cripping the Philippine Enlightenment: Ilustrado Travel Literature, Postcolonial Disability, and the “Normate Imperial Eye/I,” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 2.2 (2016): 138-162.
Julia Lee, “Between intimacy and enmity: Spain and the Philippines post-Suez,” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 17.4 (2016): 305-322.

Week 4:
The Pasyon, Our Lady of Balintawak, and Other Vernacular Insurrections

Readings:
Reynaldo C. Ileto, “Towards a History from Below” and “Light and Brotherhood,” in Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910 (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979).
Deirdre de la Cruz, “First Filipino Apparition,” in Mother Figured: Marian Apparitions and the Making of a Filipino Universal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

Week 5:
José Rizal and the Ilustrado Revolution

Readings:
José Rizal, Noli Me Tangere (1881), excerpts.
Benedict Anderson, “First Filipino,” London Review of Books, 1997.
Vicente Rafael, “The Phantasm of Revenge: On Rizal’s Fili,” in The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

Week 6:
In-class midterm - El Filibusterismo (open book)

Week 7:
The First Philippine Republic and the Spanish-American War

Readings:
Paul Kramer, “Blood Compacts: Spanish Colonialism and the Invention of the Filipino,” and “From Hide to Heart: The Philippine-American War as Race War,” in The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

Week 8:
The American Genocide in the Philippines

Readings:
Vicente Rafael, “The Undead: Notes on Photography in the Philippines, 1898-1912,” in White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).
Oli Charbonneau, “Corrective Violence: On Fear, Massacre, and Punishment,” in Civilizational Imperatives: Americans, Moros, and the Colonial World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020).
Primary documents from the Dean Conant Worcester papers at the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan.

Week 9:
Migrant Insurgency and the Transpacific Security State

Readings:
Carlos Bulosan, “Freedom from Want,” Saturday Evening Post, 1943.
Rick Baldoz, “Transpacific Traffic: Migration, Labor, and Settlement,” in The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898-1946 (New York: New York University Press, 2011).
Moon-Ho Jung, “Conclusion: America is Not in the Heart,” in Menace to Empire: Anticolonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the US Security State (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2022).

Week 10:
Transpacific (Anti)-Communism

Readings:
Moon-Ho Jung, “Collaboration and Revolution,” in Menace to Empire: Anticolonial Solidarities and the Transpacific Origins of the US Security State (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2022).
Patricio Abinales, “Popular Support for the Revolutionary Movement in CPP-NPA: Experiences in a Hacienda in Negros Occidental, 1978-1995,” in The Revolution Falters: The Left in Philippine Politics after 1986 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).
Joy Sales, “Bayan Ko (My Country): The KDP and a Diasporic Vision of Filipino American Activism,” in Filipino American Transnational Activism: Diasporic Politics in the Second Generation, edited by Robin Magalit Rodriguez (Brill Publishers, 2019).

Week 11:
People Power, or the Unfinished Revolution

Readings:
Alfred W. McCoy, “Martial Law Terror,” in Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009).
Adrian De Leon, “A Tale of Two Mountains,” in Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2023).
Bobby Benedicto, “The Place of the Dead, the Time of Dictatorship: Nostalgia, Sovereignty, and the Corpse of Ferdinand Marcos,” Society and Space 39.4 (2021): 722-739.

Week 12:
Conclusion and Final Project Preparation