The Filipino Revolution in an Asian World: Mariano Ponce’s Pan-Asian, Anticolonial Imagination

Abstract

This article examines the pan-Asian imagination of Mariano Ponce, the Filipino revolutionary movement’s ambassador to Japan, in two of his works: “Ang mga Pilipino sa Indo-Tsina” (The Filipinos in Indochina) and Sun Yat Sen: El fundador de la república de Tsina (Sun Yat Sen: The Founder of the Republic of China). I argue that the conjunction of imperialist conquest, capitalist transformation, and intellectual exchange among activists in Southeast and East Asia in the late nineteenth century allowed Ponce to imagine the struggles of Asian peoples against colonial rule as fundamentally interlinked. Through these texts, Ponce expressed a pan-Asian vision underpinned by a generative contradiction between the romance of patriotism and the tragedy of colonial complicity.

KEYWORDS: PAN-ASIANISM • NATIONALISM • POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES •EAST ASIAN STUDIES • SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES