The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines [Book Review] (original) (raw)
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What follows are excerpts from my book, The Promise of the Foreign, published by Duke Univ. Press. It comprises the second volume of my first book, Contracting Colonialism. Here's the description of the book: In the Promise of the Foreign, Vicente L. Rafael argues that translation was key to the emergence of Filipino nationalism in the nineteenth century. Acts of translation entailed technics from which issued the promise of nationhood. Such a promise consisted of revising the heterogeneous and violent origins of the nation by mediating one’s encounter with things foreign while preserving their strangeness. Rafael examines the workings of the foreign in the Filipinos’ fascination with Castilian, the language of the Spanish colonizers. In Castilian, Filipino nationalists saw the possibility of arriving at a lingua franca with which to overcome linguistic, regional, and class differences. Yet they were also keenly aware of the social limits and political hazards of this linguistic fantasy. Through close readings of nationalist newspapers and novels, the vernacular theater, and accounts of the 1896 anticolonial revolution, Rafael traces the deep ambivalence with which elite nationalists and lower-class Filipinos alike regarded Castilian. The widespread belief in the potency of Castilian meant that colonial subjects came in contact with a recurring foreignness within their own language and society. Rafael shows how they sought to tap into this uncanny power, seeing in it both the promise of nationhood and a menace to its realization. Tracing the genesis of this promise and the ramifications of its betrayal, Rafael sheds light on the paradox of nationhood arising from the possibilities and risks of translation. By repeatedly opening borders to the arrival of something other and new, translation compels the nation to host foreign presences to which it invariably finds itself held hostage. While this condition is perhaps common to other nations, Rafael shows how its unfolding in the Philippine colony would come to be claimed by Filipinos, as would the names of the dead and their ghostly emanations.
The Filipino as a Translation: Some Examples from Hispanic Missionary Texts
From the point of view of historical discourse, it can be said that the Philippines is a country created through translation. The name “Filipinas” itself, given in 1543 in honor of King Philip II of Spain, is an attempt to inscribe this Southeast Asian archipelago within the colonial complexities of creation of meaning and knowledge transfer that in turn are articulated from unequal speaking positions. Political upheavals throughout its recorded history likewise situate the Philippines in a translational locus, where signification is negotiated within an ambit of linguistic multiplicity and an evolving translatorial habitus. For this reason, I seek to analyze how the term “Filipino” historically evolves through the prism of translation. Using exemplars gathered from the missionary-colonial corpus, I shall argue that the signifier is a product of the volatile equivalences of colonial discourse, where the processes of transposition, modulation, selection and occlusion are used in accordance with the prevailing translational skopos. Seen in this light, the term “Filipino” ceases to be a well-defined and homogeneous given, and should be consequently understood as a translation that emanates from the subjectivities of its transcreators.
An earlier version of what would constitute chapter 1 of my book "The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines" (Duke Univ. Press, 2005). Nationalism in the Philippines thus began as a movement among groups uncertain about their identity and anxious about their place in colonial society. They sought not a separate nation-at least not yet-but a claim on the future and a place on the social map. Their initial appeal was not for the abolition of colonial rule but for its reformation in ways that would expand the limits of citizenship and political representation. The first generation of nationalists thus sought not separation but recognition from the motherland. This wish brought with it the imperative to communicate in a language that could be heard and understood by those in authority. Such a language was Castilian.
Translation and Revenge: Castilian and the Origins of Nationalism in the Philippines
The Places of History: Regionalism Revisited in Latin American, ed. by Doris Sommer, 1999
With the exception of ''Translation and Reyenge: Castilian and the Origins of Nationalism in the Philippines," by Vicente L. Rafael, these essays appeared in "The Places of History: Regionalism Revisited in Latin America," a special issue of Modern Language Quarterly 57, no. 2 (June 1996).
Language has always been a key battleground in the nationalist attempts at decolonization, especially in Southeast Asia. In the case of the Philippines, the legacy of American colonial education included the use of English as a medium of instruction. Learning English, however, required that native students suppress their vernacular languages. The classroom thus became the site for a kind of linguistic war, or better yet, the war of translation. The postwar nationalist response has been to denounce the hegemony of English as a morbid symptom of “colonial mentality” whose continued use would doom native culture and kill the emergent Filipino nation. Yet, as I argue in this essay, such a critique rested on the colonial assumptions about the sheer instrumentality of language. Nationalism, like colonialism, was tied to the ideology that translation was a means for the speaker to assert his or her will to dominate speech, whether one's own or that of the other. This view tended to set aside the historical reality whereby non-colonial and non-nationalist practices of translation flourished. Such practices were predicated on the play rather than on the domination of language. I examine how such possibilities emerged both in the resistant soundings of English on the part of native students in the classrooms and in the emergence of Tagalog slang during the 1960s and 1970s in the streets. Formed from the woven fragments of vernacular languages, creole Spanish, and American English, Tagalog slang gives us an alternative understanding of the role of translation in democratizing expression in a postcolonial context.