"Self-Reliance, Self-Sacrifice": Translating Ethics across Empires in Maximo M. Kalaw's The Filipino Rebel (1930)

This essay examines the translation of nineteenth-century Filipino revolutionary Apolinario Mabini's Spanish political theology into Maximo M. Kalaw's early twentieth-century English novel, The Filipino Rebel (1930). It argues that the confrontation between the character of Don Pedro and the novel's fictionalized Mabini reveals the tension between an older, Hispano-Philippine revolutionary liberalism founded on a Spanish Catholic notion of collective political power and the emerging Anglo-American liberalism predicated on individual rights. Approaching the novel's politics as an act of transimperial translation, I analyze the epistemic shift in the Philippine imaginary provoked by the abrupt changeover between the Spanish and US Empires, metonymically represented in the text as the conflicting ethical principles of American self-reliance and Hispano-Philippine self-sacrifice. In advancing a new understanding of the sacrificial ethic that is predicated on dissent instead of harmony, the Americanized Don Pedro privatizes what the Hispanicized Mabini had understood to be a fundamentally communal operation, positing the individual as the real source of political agency instead of the corporate body of the people. Thus, while ostensibly mobilizing Mabinian rhetoric in his own anti-American crusade, Don Pedro ends up co-opting Mabini's original Spanish Catholic formulations to promote a more individualistic, Anglo-American political ethic.