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  • Gazing at the Stars
  • Sunil S. Amrith (bio)
Benedict Anderson Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination, Verso, London/New York, 2005, 255 pp, ISBN: 9781844670376, £14.99.

Under Three Flags is an engaging, provocative history of the political imagination of Philippine nationalism and its intersection with late nineteenth-century anarchism. It is an effort by one of the pioneering historians of nationalism to resituate his subject in the history of 'early globalization'. Its focus is the 'gravitational field' (p. 1) of political ideas and political relations that brought into interaction all manner of political projects in the late nineteenth century, linking insurrectionary nationalisms across the globe. It reads like a loosely plotted political thriller, and this is probably the effect its author intended.

Anderson renarrates the history of Filipino nationalism, situating its development in the global circulation of ideas, inspirations, technologies and peoples that accelerated so rapidly from the 1870s. The emphasis, in his earlier Imagined Communities, on the 'modular' nature of the nation-state form is tempered here by a more sophisticated view of borrowings and appropriations, and by a greater willingness to consider the continuing importance of non-nationalist forms of political identification.1 Nationalisms, all nationalisms, appear here as mutually constituted, moving away from Anderson's earlier notion that newer nationalisms simply replicated the models of older ones.

At the heart of the book are three remarkable Filipinos, intellectuals and polyglot cosmopolitans all. Isabelo de los Reyes (1864–1938) was a folklorist and journalist, the author of El folk-lore Filipino (1887) and the champion of folklore as a 'new science' for the Philippines. As an ethnologist, Isabelo 'openly deployed the work of contemporary European ethnologists and folklorists, combined with his own local research, to undermine the intellectual credibility of colonial authorities, both clerical and lay' (pp. 5–6). Himself from the Ilocano ethnic group, Isabelo adopted a sensitively ambiguous stance in his description of Ilocano culture, writing as both an insider and an outsider. Notably, and unlike most of his contemporaries, Isabelo used folklore to highlight 'the abyss between all of these people [lowland Catholics, both colonizers and colonized] and those whom we [End Page 227] would today call "Tribal minorities" . . . facing a future of – possibly violent – assimilation, even extermination' (p. 17).

Isabelo vanishes from Anderson's narrative after a compelling early appearance. He reappears at the end of the book, when we are told that, after a period of detention in the notorious Montjuich fortress, Isabelo returned to the Philippines in 1901, carrying in his bags 'the first texts of Marx and the leading anarchist thinkers, perhaps even of Darwin, to enter the Philippines' (p. 226). Soon he established a 'Barcelona-style, free-wheeling central' – Union Obrera Democratica – which erupted in a series of strikes which alarmed the Philippines' new American masters.

José Rizal (1861–96) is much better known. The 'father of the Philippine nation', he is celebrated on street names, statues and postage stamps, his life narrated in school textbooks to this day.2 Rizal was 'a mestizo, partly indio, partly Chinese, and partly Spanish' (p. 132); he departed Manila in 1882 for Europe, where he spent the next ten years, roving between Spain, where he studied ophthalmology, France, Germany, and England. As he flourished as a writer, Rizal 'borrowed alchemically from key figures of the French, Dutch, and Spanish literary avant-gardes to write what is probably the first incendiary anti-colonial novel written by a colonial subject outside Europe' (p. 6).

Anderson has already used Rizal's first novel, Noli me tangere (1887) in Imagined Communities as an instance of the centrality of the novel in creating a national reading public. In 1893, Rizal published El Filibusterismo, to which Anderson here devotes much attention. By all accounts it is an odd novel, the plot revolving around the vanished hero of Noli me tangere returning from the dead to plot to blow up the cream of Manila society, using a pomegranate-shaped chandelier stuffed with nitroglycerine. As Anderson points out, the novel displayed the scope of Rizal's global imagination: 'the book is littered with casual references to Egypt, Poland, Peru, Germany, Russia, Cuba, Persia, the Carolines, Ceylon, the...

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