Race as Praxis in the Philippines at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

This article takes as its point of departure the disparity between the empirical poverty of race and its survival, even growth, as a way of understanding history and politics or more specifically, history as politics and politics as history in the Philippines during the nineteenth century. What interested me primarily was how race as a form of praxis is too often and easily ascribed to a discredited science that came into vogue during the nineteenth century. While race rhetoric certainly drew its authority from scientific positivism, its spokespeople also invoked the fields of law, philosophy, and religion. Yet for most people, race was not a question to be resolved by scientific investigation, but a weapon in a war or conflict between unequal opponents. Not surprisingly, questions around the existence or impossibility of a Filipino race were most fully debated and developed in a time of war the 1896 Philippine Revolution, and the 1899 Philippine-American War, which began just after the outbreak of war between the U. S. and Spain in 1898. My article charts the genealogy of these debates, and the relationship of race to the narration of anti-imperial movements and alternative cosmopolitanism.