The Aesthetics of Diaspora in Colonial Fields of Power: Elite Nationalism, Art and the Love to Die for

Abstract

This paper explores the conditions of cultural production that enabled the invention of the Philippine nation from afar among literary and artistic diasporan elites in the metropolitan centres of Europe in the late nineteenth century. I draw together Bourdieu's analysis of the creation of the autonomous field of cultural production and Anderson's analysis of the origins of nationalism to demonstrate how affective and aesthetic investments in art and the nation enabled historically one group of people – the ilustrado (elite Filipino nationalist) – to overcome and exchange the estrangement and humiliations of race for national belonging and recognition in colonial fields of power. Doing so critically extends Bourdieu, moving beyond his methodological nationalism to foreground the racial hierarchies embedded in the making of the classed habitus and situate the aesthetics of diaspora within a translocal field of distinction.

Keywords:

• Aesthetic theory
• Benedict Anderson
• Pierre Bourdieu
• colonialism
• diaspora
• Filipinos
• nationalism
• race
• Jose Rizal
• methodological nationalism

Acknowledgments

This paper is inspired by Pnina Werbner who not only encouraged me to encounter anew the remarkable achievements of the early diasporic Filipino nationalist but also provided critical insight and support that enabled its crafting. It is also indirectly a product of our shared AHRC ‘Footsteps’ project on sociality, caring and the religious imagination among contemporary diasporan Filipinos (grant AH/E508790/1/APPID: 123592). I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions.

Notes

The connections between La Loba Negra and El Filibusterismo (the second of Rizal's novels) are highly contested; that is, the former work, attributed to and published under the name of Father Burgos in 1938, actually inverts, Schumacher (1991: 44ff) contends, the historical order of relations, where La Loba Negra actually comes after and draws on El Filibusterismo rather than the other way around.

Bourdieu (1996: 339ff), the analyst of the historical genesis of the artistic illusio, makes clear that he is not seeking to unmask the thinly veiled disguise of power in order to replace it with something else. Rather, understanding the social conditions that makes possible investment in (illusio) intellectual autonomy is necessary so that it may be renewed and extended in the face of reactionary forces of neo-liberalism.