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Imagination and Imagery: Filipino Nationalism in the 19th Century

Vicente L. Rafael
--for Carol Dahl


Benedict Anderson has written perceptively on nationalism as a cultural artifact (11-15). Like all artifacts, it is overdetermined, reducible neither to an ideological effect nor to a pathological symptom of modernity. Instead, ideas of nationhood are informed by paradox and contradiction. For example, Anderson points out that despite their relatively recent invention, nations are thought to be quite archaic and timeless. In the same way that a nation is conceived to be both contingent and natural, it is also regarded as simultaneously universal"--in the modern world, everyone can, should, will "have" a nationality as he or she has a gender"--and particular "such that by definition, "Greek" nationality is sui generis" (14).

To see nationalism as a cultural artifact is to argue against attempts at essentializing it. Anderson claims that nationalism can be better understood as obliquely analogous to such categories as religion and kinship. Membership in a nation draws on the vocabulary of filiation whereby one comes to understand him or herself in relation to ancestors long gone and generations yet to be born. In addressing pasts and futures, nationalism resituates identity with reference to death, one's own as well as others'. Herein lies nationalism's affective appeal, that which makes it possible to sacrifice oneself for the "motherland." It lends to the accident of birth the sense of continuity and converts mortality into something that is meant for as much as it is realized by one. By placing one in a certain relationship to death and generativity, nationalist discourse therefore frames the arbitrariness of existence. "It is the magic of nationalism to turn chance into destiny" (18).

However, while nationalism tends to mine the idioms of kinship and religion, the historical conditions of its emergence undermine the logic and stability of these inherited categories. This is underlined by Anderson when he defines nations as "imagined communities." Built on the rubble of traditional polities, the nation invokes a radically secular subjectivity that sets it apart from its predecessors. Dynastic states presumed power and privilege as functions of the purity of bloodlines guaranteed by a divine order. Colonial states as dynastic states in drag replicate the obsession with hierarchy by reorganizing social and epistemological categories according to a metaphysics of race and progress. By contrast, the nation envisions a more egalitarian community. "Regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship" (16). It thus reveals the mutability of all sorts of hierarchies. Rather than take power for granted as natural and inherited, nationalism asks about "rights" and thereby opens up the problem of representation: Who has the right to speak for whom, and under what circumstances?

To speak of nations as imagined communities is to posit national identities as explicitly fictional, not in the sense of being "false," but in the sense of being constituted in and through a vernacular language. It is for this reason that nations are thought to be inclusive and open-ended, yet limited and bounded (thus the endless irony, as Anderson points out, of the category "naturalized citizen"). The vernacular matrix of national identity is, however, historically determined. Any language, given the right conditions, can serve as a vernacular insofar as it is able to produce the identity of its speakers in ways that feel both constructed and appropriate to them (140). Because they are historical, vernaculars are never pure. They are rather the result of an indeterminate series of usages, translations and mis-translations, and interested codifications. If language localizes identity, to imagine a community in the vernacular would be to represent subjectivities in process: Divided, fragmentary, and changeable. Indeed, it is arguably such explicitly impure and unstable imaginings that lend nationalism its modernity.

The modernity of nationalism can also be seen in the peculiar way that it posits a "community in anonymity." As Anderson points out, belonging to a nation need never entail face-to-face contact with its members. Instead, one's sense of belonging is mediated by a complex set of symbols and events that cohere within the temporal rhythm of clock and calendar. Nationalist consciousness thus presupposes the secularization of time--time as "transverse (and horizontal) marked not by prefiguring and fulfillment but by temporal coincidence" (30) --as one of its conditions of possibility (28-40).

Time as coincidence rather than apocalyptic punctuation was historically made possible by, among other things, the rise of print capitalism which promoted print vernaculars and the emergence of newspapers and novels as the dominant means for delineating and particularizing the social and cultural field of a nation. Unfolding in "empty, homogenous time," novels and newspapers in the vernacular provided a space for the juxtaposition of previously unrelated events, people, and objects. As commodities, their circulation was dependent on the workings of the market while their production relied on the technology of print. In the sense that it was shaped by the exigencies of print-capitalism and print-vernacular, one could think of nationalist (like bourgeois) consciousness as mechanically reproducible. Hence, while the vernacular provided the medium for imagining "continuity-in-discontinuity" where the nation was concerned, the technical and temporal context within which nationalism emerged suggests the presence of another moment in the imagination of nationhood, one that might escape the boundaries set by the vernacular. Rather than result in the consolidation of a particular, autonomous identity, such a moment would posit the possibility of the mechanical proliferation and indeterminate circulation of identities. Not only would it then point to the workings of the imagination in bringing about a sense of community; it might also indicate the risk in such imaginings, including the failure of imagination itself.

I want to suggest not only that nationalism is inherently conflictual, caught between dynastic/colonial modes of apprehension on the one hand and the possibilities of an egalitarian, postcolonial existence on the other, but also that the means for imagining nationhood may at times be at odds with the very nature of the images that are reproduced. I propose this not as a general theory about nationalism but as a conceptual hook for reflecting on the particular historical moment I'm concerned with: the formative period of Filipino nationalism in the late nineteenth century.

The early Filipino nationalists were a remarkable group. For the most part they were members of an emergent bourgeoisie educated in the universities of the colonial capital of Manila and European cities such as Madrid, Paris, and Berlin. They were well-traveled and multilingual, though Spanish was the preferred lingua franca. And they were all males who self-consciously referred to themselves as ilustrados, literally, "enlightened." From the 1880s to the middle of the 1890s they engaged in campaigns calling for the reform of the economic, political, and educational conditions in the Philippines. Because of the hazards of colonial censorship and threats of imprisonment, the site of their political activities eventually shifted to the more liberal Spanish cities of Madrid and Barcelona.

Known in Philippine historiography as the Propaganda Movement, their political efforts varied widely in scope. Among other things, they organized among Filipino expatriates and Europeans sympathetic to Philippine problems; wrote novels as well as philological, ethnological, and historical studies of the colony; and publicized nationalist causes in the liberal Spanish press and, from 1889-1895, in their own propaganda newspaper, La Solidaridad. Such causes initially had an assimilationist nature: the granting of Spanish citizenship to Filipino colonial subjects by way of equal application of the Spanish civil law to the colony and Filipino representation to the Spanish parliament. But as assimilationist hopes dimmed by the mid-1890s the more prominent leaders of the Propaganda Movement began to favor Philippine independence from Spain. [1]

A crucial feature of the nationalist movement was the ilustrado critique of the Catholic Church, a key institution in the history of Spanish colonialism (Phelan; Rafael). Filipino nationalists were particularly antagonized by the enormous influence of the Spanish friars whom they held as chiefly accountable for the colony's backwardness. They saw the friars as forces of reaction, and with good reason, for they regarded Filipinos as inferior to Spaniards, liberalism and learning as threats to the power of the Church, and the ilustrados themselves as subversives. It would be difficult to overstate the political and symbolic import of the Spanish friars for the Filipino ilustrados. In nationalist writings, they were seen as figures of denial and agents of exclusion, hoarders of wealth and women, purveyors of religious fetishism, and merchants of ritual practices and devotional paraphernalia. [2]

The Jesuit historian John Schumacher rightly notes that without the Spanish clergy, Filipino nationalism would have taken a different course (272-278). The friars occupied a near-totalizing significance in the minds of the ilustrados and came to represent the negative limit in the formation of nationalist consciousness in the late nineteenth century. In this sense we can think of them as mirror images of Filipino nationalists. Indeed, the intensely negative tenor of anti-friar rhetoric among the ilustrados was a way of recognizing the Spanish clergy as the source of their own divided identity. For as the Filipinos repeatedly pointed out, the friars were themselves doubled, split between spiritual and material concerns. Despite their vows of celibacy, they were accused of using the confessional to prey on the gullibility of women and thus monopolize access to their bodies and minds (Rizal, Escritos 55-65; Lopez-Jaena 203-227). As figurative fathers, they were invested with phallic authority yet were often snidely referred to by the ilustrados as "men in skirts" and "soured nurses" (Guerrero 82, 115). Representatives of Catholic monotheism, the friars nonetheless acted like pagan priests (babaylan), encouraging the substitution of faith with the fetishistic regard for an endless array of religious images among the populace. Though mortals, they behaved like gods (diosdiosan); and despite their vows of poverty, they lived lavish lives akin to that of oriental despots.

Spanish fathers were thus seen by the ilustrados as figures not only of denial but also of excess. They were imagined, that is, as going beyond their proper roles and traditional boundaries. Translating between languages and moving between cultures, the Spanish fathers seemed like retrograde versions of the youthful nationalists. The former were thought to monopolize the language of power and the circulation of money and women, thus threatening to cut the latter off from access to their own future. Given the oedipal texture of ilustrado anxieties, it is not surprising to see that the future they imagined and desired took on a specifically feminine shape.

Anderson writes, "amor patriae does not differ ... from other affections, in which there is always an element of fond imagining .... What the eye is to the lover ... language ... is to the patriot. Through that language, encountered at the mother's knee and parted with only at the grave, pasts are restored, fellowships imagined, and futures dreamed" (Imagined Communities 140). In the context of nineteenth-century Philippine nationalism, the association of language with sight and mother with nation is highly suggestive. As we've seen, Spanish fathers figured the negative moment in the production of ilustrado consciousness. Mothers, however, tended to play a far more ambivalent role in nationalist thinking. To the extent that they were imagined to be the source of the vernacular with which to articulate nationhood, real mothers tended to be conflated with figurative mothers, such as "Mother Spain" or "Mother Philippines." Ilustrado sons expressed their relationship to the "motherland" (whether Spain in the early assimilationist phase of nationalist history or the Philippines in the later more separatist period) in familial terms. Equating love of nation with love of mother idealized the former in terms of the latter. Thus could sacrifice and loss appear necessary and reasonable: These were ways for sons to reciprocate the affections of mothers, real or imagined, by acting as their protectors (Rizal, Escritos; Lopez-Jeana).

The love of country was thus far from disinterested inasmuch as it engendered, in the double sense of the term, the idea of the nation. By doing so, nationalist discourse reflected as much as it refracted domestic politics. One way of getting a sense of the complexity of interests informing amor patriae is by taking a look at some of the writings of Jose Rizal (1861-1896), undoubtedly the most prominent and articulate of the ilustrados and the national hero of the Republic of the Philippines. [3]

Writing to his mother from Berlin in 1886, Rizal tells her:

I've continually dreamed of you and sometimes the dream repeats itself in a single night. I would not like to be superstitious ... but I like to believe that you are thinking constantly of me and this makes my mind reproduce what goes on in yours for after all my brain is part of yours and this is not strange because while I am asleep here, you are awake there, etc. etc. [4] .
"You're at the center of my thoughts," Rizal seems to be telling his mother so that her images return to him as if unwilled. Biographers of Rizal have noted the close ties shared by mother and son. The letter above is one example of their intimacy. Yet, Rizal accounts for the involuntary repetition of his dreams by attributing it to his mother's constant thoughts of him. His dreams are the "reproductions" of her waking thoughts, which in turn are invariably about him. His mother thus comes across as a repository for images of himself. Dreaming of her is a way of reproducing those images but in displaced fashion so that they involve not only memories of her but images of her thinking about him as well. The involuntary nature of such imaging suggests the workings of a kind of mechanical memory--one that escapes conscious intentionality--that draws on the labor of the mother's thoughts.

The image of the mother as both the source of memories and a mechanism for the reproduction of images about the self is in fact a recurrent motif in much of Rizal's writings. In an early autobiographical fragment entitled "My First Reminiscence," Rizal talks about his mother as his first teacher of Spanish, painstakingly correcting his pronunciation and grammar. [5]. His mother also translates stories for him from Spanish to Tagalog. The one he recalls in particular involved the story of an old moth telling its offspring not to fly too closely to the flame of a lamp lest it burn its wings. The younger moth nonetheless is attracted to the light and disobeys the older one's counsel. Flying too close to the flame, it plunges to death.

While his mother translates this story for him, Rizal recalls being distracted by the sight of moths flitting around the flame of their kerosene lamp. What is odd is that he fails to listen to the story, yet remembers its lesson:

My mother continued her reading ... (but) the fate of the two insects interested me intensely. The light agitated its golden tongue on one side, a singed moth in one of these movements fell into oil, clapped its wings for some time and then died. That assumed for me the proportion of a great event and as a strange phenomenon that I have always observed in me when something excites me. It seemed to me that the flame and the moths (in the story) were moving far away, very far, and my mother's voice acquired a strange, sepulchral timbre. My mother finished the fable. I was not listening; all my attention, all my thoughts were concentrated on the fate of the moths, young, dead and full of illusions. (Reminiscenses 36- 37)


In this memory, Rizal's mother is less the origin of language than a figure who translates, as well as one who teaches the boy about the hazards of translation. The moral of the mother's fable lies in the passage from Spanish to Tagalog, from listening to obedience. The failure to translate from one to another brings up the possibility of death, figured in the fate of the errant moths. Yet, Rizal learns these lessons not only despite but also because of the fact that he's distracted by the flickering light of the kerosene lamp. Hence, his first memory is split between two images: that of his mother and that of the light from the lamp. Each marks the significance of the other. For just as the light makes it possible for Rizal's mother to translate the story, the story illuminates, as it were, the dangers that the light poses to translation. Indeed, by fastening onto the light, Rizal fails to listen and so disobeys his mother. But disobedience still brings with it the knowledge of death, the very same knowledge that was already implied in the mother's fable.

Rizal's first memory is anything but innocent. Rather, it is about the difference between Spanish and Tagalog, story and experience, obedience and transgression. By bringing to surface two seemingly opposed images--mother and light--it also shows these images to be inherently divided. The mother is both a storyteller intent on imparting a lesson and a kind of machine for translation. The light from the lamp is both a metaphor for knowledge and its attendant risks as well as a mechanism that allows reading to take place. Small wonder, then, that Rizal ends his narrative on a note of ambivalence. On the one hand, he recalls the "sweet lessons" taught to him by his mother standing out amidst the "bitter lessons" learned in adult life. On the other hand, he continues " ... with the heart of a child (to) believe that light is the most beautiful thing ... and that it is worthy for a man to sacrifice his life for it" (Reminiscenses 37).

What are the effects of seeing the nation as either "mother" or "light"? What difference does it make to imagine nationhood either as a gendered metaphor or as an impersonal machine that generates memories of individual and collective images?

To address these questions, I want to turn to an essay Rizal wrote shortly after arriving in Europe. It is appropriately enough entitled "El Amor Patrio," "The Love of Country." Published in 1882 when Rizal was barely twenty-one years old, this essay established Rizal's notoriety among both Filipinos and Spanish colonial officials. [6] Much of the imagery and logic of Rizal's later writings are foreshadowed in this essay. And because Rizal's style of imagining nationhood was regarded as exemplary among his contemporaries and future nationalists, the essay is worth following at some length.

Rizal begins by invoking the timeless universality of nationhood. "From the cultured Europeans" to the enslaved Africans, from the ancient to the modern peoples of the world:

... all have had and have an idol (idolo)--beautiful, brilliant, sublime, but implacable, fierce and demanding--whom they have called Motherland (Patria) ... she is in the thoughts of everyone, and like the light enclosed in clear crystal, she goes forth in the most vivid splendor." (Prosa 12)


Nationhood is seen to be transhistorical. This is why the motherland can be regarded as both idol and light, an image that unifies opposed terms and the means for producing such images. For the patriot, however, the ideality of the patria comes through in direct relationship to her absence. The motherland is "ever more idolized in proportion to one's ... distance from her" (Prosa 13). One imagines the patria only in missing her. And missing her is, in turn, indissociable from recalling one's first memories of childhood:

... there in our country are our first memories (recuerdos) of childhood, a happy ode, known only in childhood, from whose traces spring forth the flower of innocence and happiness; because there slumbers a whole past and future to be hoped; because in her forests and in her meadows, on every tree, on every blade, on every flower, you see engraved (grabado) the memory of a being you love, as her breath in perfumed breeze, her song in the murmur of the fountains, her smile in the rainbow of the sky, or her sighs in the confused moans of the night wind. (Prosa 13)


Here, the love one feels for the patria is conveyed by what we might call a rhetoric of mourning. Mourning implies a process of working through, then setting apart one's memories of a lost object or person from one's experience of them while still alive. In doing so one is able to reconcile oneself to the fact of loss. Such a reconciliation is accomplished through the idealization of the person or object. Put another way, mourning succeeds when what one remembers is an image of what was lost, no longer the lost object itself. [7] Mourning thus entails the reproduction of stereotypical images of the lost object. In such a context, memory attaches itself not to direct experience but to its mediated versions.

The distance between the patriot and the patria enables the former to establish the latter as an image of loss as well as the space for locating loss as such. Worth noting is the specific way by which such imaging takes place. The "memory of a being you love" is said by Rizal to be "engraved" (grabado) on the motherland's body. The engraving of these images on the patria, like the imprinting of a vernacular in a novel or newspaper, brings to mind the mechanical process of standardizaton and reproduction of a vernacular that precipitates nationalist consciousness. Hence, the sense of loss that occasions the imagination of nationhood is localized by a certain style and process of imaging. As in Rizal's dream about his mother, the patriot misses the motherland and so constitutes her absence as that which brings about the presence of a self who remembers others who remember him:

It is because you see there with the eyes of your imagination under the tranquil roof of your old home, a family who remembers you and awaits you ... whatever her name ... we love her always, as the child loves his mother ... (Prosa 13)

Nationalism as a kind of mourning is built on remembering as a reciprocal act. This is why the recollection of the patria is thought by Rizal as a form of return, both in the sense of giving and a journeying back. The circulation of memory between patriot and motherland binds together the living with the dead, culture with nature, innocence with mortality. Hence to the question, "Why is it that people are compelled to return to their country? Rizal responds, "Is it gratitude; is it affection for everything that reminds us of something of the first days of our own life, the land where our ancestors are sleeping ...?" (Prosa 14)

It is almost as if an indecipherable violence underwrites--or at least subtends--the clarity and availability of the motherland's body to the patriot's memory traces. The land described above is one that resists all attempts at human and divine inscription. Instead, it is thought to be the site of a series of actions freed from intentions, of images that exceed the localizing pull of the vernacular. Depersonalized and degendered, it becomes sheer automaticity, "the avalanche or the cascade, matters of perpetual motion and endless menace." The nation can therefore be imagined as that which threatens the very workings of the imagination. It is perhaps this possibility that seizes Rizal when he speaks about the patria not only as the storehouse of fond memories but also as the source of a certain disease:

Probably these beauties or tender remembrances fortify the bond that unties us to the land of our birth, engendering sweet feelings of well-being when we are in our country, or profound melancholia when we are far away from it, the origin of a cruel disease called nostalgia. Oh! never sadden the stranger who arrives at our shores; do not awaken in him vivid memories of his country, of the comfort (delicias) of his home, because then unfortunately, you will evoke in him this disease, a tenacious phantom (tenaz fantasma) that will not abandon him until he sees his native soil or the borders of his tomb. (Prosa 14)


The love of country brings with it both pleasure and dread. In imagining a community, one also risks contracting nostalgia, a "disease" provoked by the emergence of unbounded images. Such images threaten to run rampant like phantoms, simultaneously inhabiting the realm of the living and the dead, moving between the boundaries of absence and presence. They thus signal the failure of mourning. To be gripped by nostalgia is to see loss converted neither to memory nor reciprocity. Instead, loss comes across as the unsublatable experience of being haunted. Hence, while the nation can be thought of as an absence reconstituted in the vernacular of mourning, it could also exist, as in the highly charged passage above, as a ghostly presence. In the latter case, the nation suggests intimacy as it escapes localization. As a phantom, it is neither mother nor machine but a restless image which remains eccentric and heterogeneous to native imaginings.

In Rizal, therefore, the compulsion to return to the motherland takes on an added complexity. Not only is it an expression of love and gratitude, a memorialization of innocence sanctifying mortality; it can also be the result of sporadic haunting which drives the patriot to "his native soil or the boundaries of his tomb." Laying to rest these ghostly images unleashed by the "disease" of nostalgia brings up the question of death and hence the possibility that for Rizal remains unthinkable. Towards the latter portion of his essay, Rizal draws back from conjuring further apparitions of the nation and instead returns to those familiar and "pious sentiments" (piadoso sentimiento). As we have seen, such sentiments hinge on reciprocity and mourning:

Some have sacrificed for her their youth, their pleasures, others have dedicated to her the splendors of their genius; others shed their blood; all have died, bequeathing to their motherland an immense fortune: liberty and glory. And what has she done for them? She mourns them, and proudly presents them to the world, to posterity and to her children to serve as examples.
(Prosa 16-17)

Once more, the nation is gendered and domesticated within the circle of sacrifice and the idealization of loss that binds the child-patriot to its motherland. By doing so, the patriot not only expresses his love but also reverses the relationship of dependency between mother and child. He posits his future authority over her, imagining himself and others like him as potential patrons, "bequeathing" to the patria the legacy of freedom. In this way, the motherland inherits from her sons an "immense fortune"--a surplus of symbolic wealth with which to nurture future sons. Offspring and lover, the patriot is now also father to the nation. It is thus wholly without irony that Filipinos have regarded Rizal as the "father" of Philippine nationalism and that one of his biographers has referred to him as the "first Filipino."

The dialectic of filiation, however, doesn't always work in the way I've described above. This is because the familial discourse for engendering nationhood runs up against the conditions of mechanical reproduction--those conditions stressed by Anderson which allow for this vernacularization of images. In Rizal, such images draw their power from their inherent instability. Maternal and mechanical images can slide into as much as stand against one another. And the entire process of sorting out such images could, at certain moments, enter into a crisis of imaging when the "disease" of nostalgia hits the patriot, unleashing the proliferation of ghostly images. To return to the motherland thus incurs the risk of being stranded in a zone of images that drift away from the text of nationalist imagination. It is to face the possibility of seeing the products of one's work assume an existence unmoored to and unrecognizable from one's original intentions. Rizal's attempt to reimagine community in terms of mourning and reciprocity not only allows him to repress such ghostly images but it also enables him to posit a patriarchal basis for nationhood. Yet such a move is provisional. In the history of Philippine nationalism, the ghosts would keep coming back.

The tension between imagination and imagery is dispersed over the field of nationalist writings (e.g., Rafael, Noli 110-140). However, it recurs in a somewhat puzzling way in a medium related to but distinct from print vernacular--that of photography. Whereas nationalist texts articulate national identity with reference to the absent figure of the motherland, photographs bring forth the image of the nation with reference to the absent bodies of patriots. Yet, texts and photographs differ in their ways of imaging. Whereas one involves the setting forth and working through of the contradictions and divisions of national identity, the other entails rendering such contradictions obvious, that is, visible and therefore tangential to conceptualization. In what follows, I offer a preliminary discussion of the curious role of photography in nationalist discourse.

I want to begin by once again turning to Rizal. Rizal's letters and diaries give us a sense of how commonplace photographs had become among late nineteenth century Filipino bourgeoisie. [8] Rizal routinely mentions the exchange of photographs as tokens of affection among friends and family. Rizal himself kept at least two large photo albums and regularly had his portraits taken in Europe for the benefit of his family and acquaintances. [9]

Pictures were gifts by which the recipient could remember the giver in his or her absence. In this sense, they supplemented the work of mourning, providing one with a memory trace of the other. "My father and my mother should have their pictures taken and sent to me," Rizal writes from Madrid in 1883. "At least in that way I shall always have their figures before me and (they) would not be erased from my memory" (One Hundred 67). Rizal's older brother informs Rizal in another letter, "I picked up in Manila your five photographs and have delivered each one to its owner" (Letters 97). Rizal's mother, Dona Teodora, writes to her son, "We had our group picture taken to send to you so that you will not get sad. We talked about your great desire to see our pictures" (Letters 134). Rizal to his fellow ilustrado, Mariano Ponce, from London: "At present I cannot send you my photograph because I have none; the only one I have was taken sometime ago and I wish to present you with a new one" (Reminiscenses 301); and to a German friend in Berlin: "I take the liberty of sending you now my picture and I beg you to send me yours" (Miscellaneous 91). Leonor Rivera, Rizal's cousin and one-time fiancee, writes an inscription on the back of her photograph: "To my unforgettable and most beloved lover, this photograph is dedicated. Your devoted Leonor" (Epistolario 50-51). And Rizal in his Madrid diary of January 1883 writes of refusing another ilustrado's request to show his collection of photographs "because these were gifts and had dedications, "while a couple of weeks later he "merrily" engages two sisters in conversation over the same picture (Reminiscenses 88-89, 91). And years later while exiled in Dapitan, he writes to his sister somewhat impatiently, "You have not sent me my album of pictures" (One Hundred 487).

What is interesting about these passages is how flat and unremarkable they are. Among Filipinos, photographs seemed to elicit, at most, formulaic inscriptions of affection, passing remarks, and marginal notes in letters and diaries rather than sustained disquisitions on their aesthetic value or political significance as had been the case among nineteenth-century European and American writers on photography. This is perhaps one reason that a history of photography in the Philippines is yet to be written. Photographs have seemed so obvious to those who took and exchanged them that they have become barely visible to historians of Philippine nationalism. The photographs of ilustrados persist as perhaps the most concrete evidence of their existence; yet they also seem to be the most troublesome of documents. While they permit the tracing and enumeration of their details, photographic images discourage the generalization of their meanings. Silent and elusive, they also appear unchanging. Meant for private consumption, these photographs nevertheless attracted public interest because of the history of their referents. How, then, to understand images of bodies that seem to demand as they evade historical interpretation?

When I started thinking about photography and nationalism, I thought it might be possible to find a link between pictorial and textual images-- that perhaps one could be made to illuminate the other. It is possible to do so, but only to a point. Take, for example, the photograph of Rizal with two other ilustrado propagandists in Madrid, Marcelo H. del Pilar and Mariano Ponce (Figure 1). One could think of this photograph as part of a larger attempt at nationalist self-fashioning. By posing in European clothes, Pilar and Ponce appear tendentiously out of context. Their photographed bodies take visible exception to Spanish racial stereotypes such as were current in the latter nineteenth century. These stereotypes amounted to the infantilization of native Filipinos. The women were regarded as gullible and excessively accommodating to foreigners, while the men were said to be "lacking even the beard which is the sign of virility in a race .... 'Bodies without clothes, brains without ideas ... an inanimate heap of human entities.'" [10] By contrast, the photograph in Figure 1 shows the seriousness of expression on the ilustrados' faces that makes one think of collected interiors in command of their exterior representations, of rational minds holding together bodies in studied repose. The photograph specifies with remarkable precision the boundaries of those bodies, fixing their limits and proportions in ways that other forms of representation would be unable to do.

We might also read a similar process of self-fashioning at work in another photograph of Rizal, this time with the Filipino painter Juan Luna and ilustrado Valentin Ventura posing in Paris in between their fencing exercises (Figure 2). While attending the Paris Exposition of 1889, Rizal and his fellow Filipinos saw a Wild West show featuring native American Indians performing various skills on horseback. Impressed not only by their daring but also at the enthusiastic applause they received from the crowd, the Filipinos decided to form a mutual-aid association and call it Los Indios Bravos. Rizal himself had suggested the name, thinking to subvert the racist designation indio used by the Spaniards to refer to native Filipinos (Schumacher 213-214; Guerrero 120). Referring to themselves as "brave Indians" coincided with their interest in fencing, gymnastics, martial arts, and weightlifting--again, ways of marking their bodies apart from colonial categories. Posing with their swords planted firmly between their legs, the Indios Bravos display a masculine alternative to what they conceived to be the menacingly androgynous and corrupt regime of the Spanish friars. That image of masculine solidarity is further suggested by the barely visible figure of a woman--Paz Pardo de Tavera, the wife of Luna--situated in the background, at the margins of the frame, as if to signal the sexual hierarchy that patriotism reinstitutes. Considered along with the first photograph, this picture has the effect of remapping the body of the colonized subject in ways that peel away from the grid of colonial assumptions.

Both photographs reproduce alternative identities in the precise manner by which they trace the physical differences between Filipinos and Spaniards even as they evoke the translation and transvaluation of clothing and sensibility from one to the other. These pictures and others like them could be understood as continuing the project of articulating a nationalist identity predicated on demarcating the boundaries of the imagined body--whether that of the motherland's or of the patriot's. Exchanged and circulated among friends and family, such photographs were ways of intimating a community built on the absence of their members. It would therefore seem appropriate to read these photographs historically and politically as images that promote a radical estrangement between colonizer and colonized that would in time become the basis for Philippine independence.

Such readings do not exhaust the contents of these and other pictures. Again, it is worth recalling that Filipinos did not write about photography as such or about particular photographs except to register their receipt and delivery. There is therefore no textual evidence upon which we can verify our readings of these pictures, just as there is no definitive context into which we can enclose the photographic images that would make them the product of the intentions of their referent. There is instead an irreducible there-ness to these images that remains unaltered from the particular moment they were taken. While they exist as residues of prior imaginings, both public and private, they also resist conversion to other images, allowing only for their mechanical duplication. Captions and commentaries may alter their significance within the discursive field of colonialism and nationalism, but they do not alter their appearance. In this sense, photographs are prototypical of mechanically reproducible imagery. They lead a life linked to, yet radically attenuated from, the objects they represent. They are the "afterlife" of these objects, but only in the sense of being their dematerialized repetition rather than their material transformation. Such images forge bonds of intimacy without yielding their autonomy. Photographs of patriots thus seem both appropriate and anomalous. Whereas nationalist writings imagined a new community through a vernacular history of love and the reconciliatory labor of sacrifice, photographs of nationalists hover over their texts, instantly imaging, with no more work than the click of the shutter, identities that can circulate and reproduce but which cannot translate.

We can see the peculiar nature of photographic images in the portraits of Rizal. Shortly before and long after Rizal's death by firing squad on charges of fomenting the Philippine Revolution of 1896, Rizal's pictures took on an iconic value among many Filipinos. One in particular taken in Madrid in 1890 became widely reproduced (Figure 3). Numerous smaller copies were circulated with the outbreak of the revolution carrying the following legend on the reverse:

Doctor Jose Rizal! Shot in Manila, 30 December 1896. Tyranny snatched you away from us! ... But what she will never do is to erase you from the hearts of your countrymen. When the Philippines is able to decide its own destiny, she will know how to erect an altar to your memory in the temple of immortality and to put your name in letters of gold in the eternal pages of history. For now, you must satisfy yourself with the ardent worship (culto fervoroso) that each Filipino devotes to you from the depths of their souls. (Retana, illus. 13, n. pag.)


Yet, there is also a sense in which the process of imaging the nation through Rizal's photographs differed from that of imaging it through his writings. Precisely because of their conflictual nature, Rizal's writings leave something hidden and potentially unknown. For this reason, one can engage them dialectically in terms of the ways they enact the history of nationalist imagination. Or one can treat them, as most biographers of Rizal have done often with the sponsorship of the Philippine state, as sacred texts whose meaning has always been prefigured and whose significance current history confirms.

Rizal's photographs, however, expose Rizal as an image on a flat surface that is seen rather than read. Unlike his writings, Rizal's photographic images do not entail the expenditure of work over time that would lend itself to the metaphorics of sacrifice and loss. Instead, they are reproduced automatically so that their dissemination becomes difficult if not impossible to control. Consequently, Rizal's images could cross boundaries of class, gender, and language to become a national symbol by the turn of the century despite, indeed, the fact that they remained autonomous and unassimilated. His photographs served as the basis for the Rizal monument built in Manila in 1912 (under the auspices of the U.S. colonial state) and similar other monuments that have since been erected in virtually all Philippine towns. These, along with nearly all representations of Rizal, show him in the European clothes that he wore in his pictures so that he appears consistently out of place in a tropical setting. Just as interesting is the fact that such an anomaly has remained largely uncommented upon by Filipinos.

The oddness of his images lies in this: They project him as the "father" of the nation but in ways that lead eventually to the flattening of his legacy. Since Rizal's death, his photographic likeness has adorned everything from stamps to currency notes, matchboxes to amulets, bookcovers to postcards. Like "tenacious phantoms," his images have clung to the national consciousness (Guerrero 421-22). However, unlike the uncontrollable imaging induced by nostalgia for the motherland, Rizal's images do not seem to produce anxiety or even pathos. That is, they mark the boundaries of an imagined community but do so without effort. Again, this has to do with the way such images drastically abbreviate the work of memory and imagination. Rizal's photographs conjure up the nation by circumventing the history of its imaging. They seem familiar to the extent that they remain alien--so alien as to become unremarkable. They thus suggest something of the extra-linguistic nature of photographic images: Existing on the border of colonial and national history, they recall the difference between imagination and imagery, between a "community in anonymity" and the anonymity that haunts community.

Postscript

What do I, an immigrant Filipino living in the U.S.A. at the end of the twentieth century see in these photographs of the "first Filipinos" taken in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century? Precious little that would, without the mediation of their words, link me with them as part of a community in the making. But it's precisely the tenuousness of that communication that returns me again and again to their images, suggesting to me the contours of my desire (for interpretation, for identification) as much as the sheer distance between their past and mine.

Thus do such photographs seem to suggest instances in the formation of identity which escape the vernacularizing pull of nationalist discourse. As such, they also point to another place where the link between language and power is attenuated, a space between the personal and the political, not yet (or ever?) within the reach of theory and translation.

Notes

1. Some of the ilustrados had joined the revolution against Spain by 1897, while others rejected armed struggle altogether. Nonetheless, most of the ilustrados sought to control the short-lived Philippine Republic in Malolos in 1898, but when war against the United States broke out in 1899, some of them fought while others collaborated with the U.S. With the war's end in 1902, nearly all of the ilustrados and their descendants eagerly participated in the expanded American colonial bureaucracy. And when Japanese forces occupied the Philippines between 1942 and 1945, most of the second -generation ilustrados collaborated with the Occupation government in varying degrees of willingness. With independence in 1946, they faced a peasant-led, Communist-supported uprising known as the Huk Revolt, and with massive aid from the United States quashed the revolt and consolidated their hold over the economy and politics of the new republic. Indeed, the ancestors of former president Ferdinand Marcos and current president Corazon Aquino were both part of the ilustrado tradition. For a concise but incisive overview of ilustrado history, see Benedict Anderson, "Cacique Democracy and the Philippines: Origins and Dreams," New Left Review 169 (1988): 3-31. The most comprehensive account of the early stages of ilustrado nationalism can be found in John Schumacher, S.J., The Propaganda Movement (Manila: Solidaridad Publishing House, 1973). See also Renato Constatino, The Philippines: A Past Revisited (Manila: By the author, 1975). Back to main text

2. For some of the more representative anti-friar polemics, see Graciano Lopez-Jaena, "Fray Botod," in Discursos y articulos varios (Barcelona: Imprenta Iberia de Francisco Fossas, 1891) 203-227; the pamphlets of Marcelo H. del Pilar, La soberania monacal and La frailocracia; and in many of the writings of Jose Rizal, especially the two novels, Noli me tangere (Berlin: 1887) and El Filibusterismo (Ghent: 1891). See also Schumacher, Propaganda Movement 271-277. Back to main text

3. The standard biographies of Rizal include W. E. Retana, Vidas y escritos del Dr. Jose Rizal (Madrid: Victoriano Suarez, 1907); Carlos Quirino, The Great Malayan (Manila: Philippine Educational Company, 1940); Rafael Palma, Biografia de Rizal (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1949); and Guerrero, The First Filipino. Back to main text

4. One Hundred Letters of Jose Rizal to his Parents, Brothers, Sisters and Relatives (Manila: Philippine Historical Society, 1959) 312. Rizal's mother, Dona Teodora Alonso y Quintos (1825-1911) was born to a family of principales--the Filipino colonial elite. Rizal describes her as "a woman of more than average education," having been schooled at the convent- run Colegio de Santa Rosa in Manila at a time when literacy among men, much less than women, was rather low in the colony. The son's relationship with his mother was such that when her eyesight began to deteriorate in the early 1880s, Rizal decided to study ophthalmology in order to cure her. In his novels and journalistic writings, Rizal often alludes to his mother's influence on his political education. Curiously and for reasons that remain unclear to me, Rizal rarely ever spoke of, much less communicated with, his father, Don Francisco Mercado. See Guerrero, The First Filipino 18, 30-32. Back to main text

5. I have been unable to find the Spanish original of this text. I have instead used the English translation (by Encarnacion Alzona) found in Reminiscenses and Travel of Jose Rizal (Manila: National Historical Institute, 1977) 35-37. Back to main text

6. The Spanish text is found in Prosa por Jose Rizal (Manila: National Centennial Commission, 1961) 12-17. Back to main text

7. The classic formulation of mourning is found in Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia," General Psychological Theory, translated by Joan Riviere (New York: Collier Books, 1963) 164-180. See also the useful explication under "Work of Mourning" in J. Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973) 485-486. Back to main text

8. The earliest mention of photography in the Philippines occurs in 1841 when a Spanish official named Sinibaldo de Mas began to photograph members of the Spanish community to supplement his income. Stereoscopic photos of a Philippine tribal group, the Tinguianes, taken about 1860 by an unknown French traveller are the earliest known surviving photographs in the archipelago. By the latter 1860s, several photo studios had been established in the capital city of Manila as well as in a few provincial capitals where Filipino principales had their portraits taken. The information above, schematic as it is, comes from the catalogue written by John Silva for the exhibition he curated, "Colonial Philippines: Photographs, 1860-1910," at the Lowie Museum of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, May 9-July 11, 1987. As I indicate in the text below, a history of photography in the Philippines is yet to be written.Back to main text

9. Two of Rizal's photo albums can be found at the Rizaliana section of the Lopez Memorial Museum in Manila.Back to main text

10. This passage comes from one of the best-known racist tracts of the latter nineteenth century, "Ellos y nosotros," by Pablo Feced (a.k.a. Quioquiap), cited in Schumacher, Propaganda Movement, 56.Back to main text

References

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: New Left Books, 1983.
---. "Cacique Democracy and the Philippines: Origins and Dreams." New Left Review 169 (1988): 3-31.
Constantino, Renato. The Philippines: A Past Revisited. Manila: By the author, 1975.
Freud, Sigmund. "Mourning and Melancholia." General Psychological Theory. New York: Collier Books, 1963.
Guerrero, Leon. The First Filipino: A Biography of Jose Rizal. Manila: National Historical Commission, 1974.
Lopez-Jaena, Graciano. "Fray Botod." Discursos y articulos varios. Barcelona: Imprenta Iberia de Francisco, 1891. 203-227.
Palma, Rafael. Biografia de Rizal. Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1949.
Phelan, John. The Hispanization of the Philippines: Spanish Aims and Filipino Responses, 1565-1700. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1959.
Quirino, Carlos. The Great Malayan. Manila: Philippine Educational Company, 1940.
Rafael, Vincente L. Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Converse in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.
---. "Language, Identity and Gender in Rizal's Noli." Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs (RIMA) 18 (1984): 110-140.
Retana, W. E. Vidas y escritos del Dr. Jose Rizal. Madrid: Victoriano Suarez, 1907.
Rizal, Jos*. Epistolario Rizalino. Ed. Teodoro M. Kalaw. Vol. 4, 1892-1896. Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1936.
---. Letters Between Rizal and Family Members. Vol. II, Book 1, 1876-1896. Manila: National Heroes Commission, 1964.
---. Miscellaneous Correspondence. Vol. II, Book 4, 1877-1896. Manila: National Heroes Commission, 1963.
---. One Hundred Letters of Jose Rizal to his Parents, Brothers, Sisters and Relatives. Manila: Philippine Historical Society, 1959.
---. Prosa por Jose Rizal. Manila: National Centennial Commission, 1961.
---. Reminiscenses and Travel of Jose Rizal. Trans. Encarnacion Alzona. Manila: National Historical Institute, 1977.
---. "Sa Mga Kababayang Dalaga sa Malolos." Escritos Politicos y Historicos de Jose Rizal. Manila: National Centennial Commissions, 1961. 55-65.
Schumacher, John, S. J. The Propaganda Movement. Manila: Solidaridad Publishing House, 1973.



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