Imperfect Sacrifice: Brokering the Social Contract in Transimperial Philippines (1896-1941)

The 1898 Spanish-American War provided the historical impetus for the clash of ideologies in the Philippine political imaginary as the archipelago transitioned from a Spanish Catholic to a Protestant Anglo-American empire. I argue that this epistemic collision, defined by the entanglements between the indigenous Tagalog, Spanish Catholic, and Protestant Anglo-American worldviews, manifested beyond the hostilities at the war front to shape a wide array of cultural production, from novels to political essays, to revolutionary political theologies. My dissertation offers a literary-intellectual history of this turbulent transitional period, examining the tension between an older, Catholic Hispano-Philippine envisioning of corporate sovereignty and the Protestant Anglo-American emphasis on individual rights in the transimperial Philippine reimagining of the social contract. The first part of the dissertation provides the overarching theoretical argument for a fundamentally communitarian Hispano-Philippine worldview. The prevailing thesis is that Philippine revolutionary thought is primarily informed by the secular and rationalist discourse of the Northwestern European Enlightenment (i.e., England and France). Against this trend, I offer an alternative intellectual trajectory that foregrounds the influence of political theories from the Spanish Counter-Reformation. Rather than putting a premium on individual rights, I argue that these revolutionaries promulgate a vision of sovereignty that syncretize the Spanish Catholic notion of communal political power with native forms of collectivity. Moreover, I contend that these revolutionaries conceive of the relationship between the individual and the state through the Catholic moral framework of Scholastic virtue ethics, perceiving the individual’s capacity to cultivate virtue within the self as indissolubly linked to the political outcome of the Philippine revolution. I thereby foreground the ways in which these Filipino theoreticians syncretize doctrines of Catholic political thought with indigenous discourses to serve their own revolutionary ends. In Chapter 1, I analyze the works of the two major philosophers of the long Philippine revolution against the two empires: Emilio Jacinto, the brains of the Katipunan secret society that launched the initial 1896 insurrection, and Apolinario Mabini, the theoretician of the Malolos Republic that continued the fight after the disintegration of the original Katipunan. The chapter traces the impact of Scholastic theories developed by such Late-Scholastic theologians as Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suárez from the inception of Spanish-Philippine relations in the sixteenth century to the Hispanic liberalism of the nineteenth century, particularly the 1812 Cortes of Cádiz, in which the Philippines had its first and last representation in the Spanish parliament. Importantly, these Scholastic ideas were upheld throughout Spanish Philippines through the institutional clout of the University of Santo Tomás (est. 1611), the oldest university in Asia and a bastion of Scholasticism right up to Jacinto and Mabini’s student days in the revolutionary nineteenth century. The second part of the dissertation examines the Filipino novels of the Anglo-American twentieth century as the literary afterlives of these nineteenth-century Hispanized revolutionary philosophies. It is precisely in the aftermath of the momentous 1898 upheaval that the novel form flourishes in the islands. The novel, therefore, arguably develops in the Philippine context as a distinctly transimperial form, in the sense of having to navigate two contradictory imperial political-philosophical worldviews. In Chapters 2 and 3, I focus on Tagalog novelist Faustino Aguilar’s deployment of Jacintean revolutionary thought and anglophone writer Maximo Kalaw’s cooptation of Mabinian political theory to analyze how concepts from the Hispanized political theologies change when put in narrative form, and what these changes tell us about the shifting ethics of social belonging in the nascent Philippine state. Chapter 2 argues that Tagalog novelist Faustino Aguilar enlists Jacinto’s Catholic, Hispano-Philippine formulation of corporate sovereignty to counter the aggressive individualism of Anglo-Protestant U.S., even when his novels begin to use language that embody Anglo-American political thought. I call attention to a notable transition from Jacinto’s communitarian language of “bayan”/“barangay” (“one people”/“one boat”) in Aguilar’s novel, Nangalunod Sa Katihan (Drowned in Dry Land, 1909) to a more rights-based conception of sovereignty through the emergence of “karapatan” (“rights”) in Ang Lihim Ng Isang Pulo (The Secret of One Island, 1926). Despite this shift in language, I contend that this emergent notion of rights is still informed by a conception of the Philippine “bayan” as a political collective that functions as a holistic moral unit. “Karapatan” in Aguilar’s works thus reveals itself to be both individual and communal, as it is cultivated within the self but in service of the common good. Chapter 3 reads anglophone writer Maximo Kalaw’s The Filipino Rebel (1930) as a fictional adaptation of the Spanish political theology of Apolinario Mabini. Here, I argue that The Filipino Rebel reimagines Mabini’s communal understanding of “self-sacrifice” through the more individualistic ethics of Anglo-American “self-reliance,” locating political agency in the discrete body of the citizen-subject, instead of the corporate body of the people. Thus, while ostensibly paying homage to the Hispanized Mabini by resuscitating Mabini’s revolutionary principles in its own anti-American crusade, the novel actually co-opts Mabini’s original Spanish-Catholic formulations to promote a more Anglo-Protestant, Americanized view—in effect, advancing the ethico-political tenets of the empire it purportedly resists.

Advisor: Lye, Colleen
Coronado, Raul