Speaker: Professor Reynaldo Clemeña Ileto
Date: April 21, Thursday, 16:00-17:30
Venue: Rm. 332 (Middle-Sized Room), Inamori Foundation Hall
ABSTRACT:
Teodoro Agoncillo’s classic monograph, The Revolt of the Masses: The Story of Andres Bonifacio and the Katipunan was written in 1948 but published only in 1956. In this talk, I try to draw out the book’s connection with the cultural campaign during the Japanese occupation, the political turmoil that followed “Liberation” and the granting of independence, and the Cold War and its manifestation in the Huk rebellion and its suppression. The book’s timely appearance is linked to the importance placed by national leaders and political activists on “unfinished revolution” as a primary trope in electoral campaigns, nation-building projects, and mass mobilization in the 1950s. Significantly, the book was published on the same year that a heated public debate was raging over a Senate bill to require the reading of Rizal’s novel’s in all schools. The talk winds up with personal reflections on the influence of Revolt of the Masses in the making of Pasyon and Revolution, and the reasons why I am taking a second look at Revolt today.
REYNALDO CLEMEÑA ILETO is Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore. He authored Magindanao, 1860-1888: The Career of Datu Uto of Buayan (1971, 2007); Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910 (1979, 2011); and Filipinos and their Revolution: Event, Discourse, and Historiography (1998). He also wrote “Religion and Anticolonial Movements” for the Cambridge History of Southeast Asia (1992) and Knowing America’s Colony, A Hundred Years from the Philippine War (1999). He has been Associate Professor at the University of the Philippines, Tañada Chair Professor at De La Salle University, Burns Chair Professor at the University of Hawaii, Reader at James Cook University and Australian National University, and Research Scholar at CSEAS, Kyoto University and ILCAA, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. His works have earned him the Benda Prize, Ohira Prize, Philippine National Book Award, Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize, and Grant Goodman Prize.