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.
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