Philippine historiography leans heavily to the West. Catholicism, Hispanization, and American imperialism all tend that way. This imbalance often distracts from the people and events that made the Philippines part of Asia. Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz's Asian Place, Filipino Nation is a valuable counterweight to the “Western-oriented historiography of the Philippine Revolution” (p. 2). The book contextualizes the revolution within its broader Asian context. That alone would make it worthwhile to anyone seeking a fuller understanding of the Philippine past. But Aboitiz does more. Asian Place, Filipino Nation also takes a novel approach to the study of pan-Asianism by examining it from the vantage point of a neglected “periphery.” Aboitiz thereby gives us a new view of the Philippine Revolution while also helping us see how that revolution was a unique manifestation of Asia's turn-of-the-century “revolt against the West.”Footnote ¹

Asian Place, Filipino Nation is divided into five chapters: an introduction, three core chapters focusing on the history of the Philippine Revolution, and a conclusion about the revolution's Asian legacies. In chapter 1, Aboitiz helps readers recognize how and why a disconnect developed between scholarship on the Philippine Revolution and pan-Asianism. The borders of traditional national historiographies have long kept them separate. Pan-Asianism tends to focus on the rise of Japan and on its Northeast Asian neighbors, while studies of the Philippine Revolution tend to focus solely on relations with Spain. The revolution is generally understood as having had two sides. On one side were the elite ilustrados, such as Jose Rizal, who acquired nationalist aspirations through their education in Europe. On the other were local Filipinos, organized by the Katipunan, who advanced revolution on the ground in the Philippines. Whichever side one looks at, the story is confined to the relationship between the Western colonizer and the Southeast Asian colonized. But both pan-Asianism and the Philippine Revolution were larger than traditional national understandings would suggest. By transgressing the boundary between Northeast and Southeast Asia, Aboitiz adds a necessary transregional dimension to our understanding of both.

The three core chapters cover the years 1887–1912. Chapter 2 highlights the importance of Asian elements in the original intellectual foundations of Filipino nationalism. Aboitiz's in-depth reading of the reformist newspaper La Solidaridad shows that ilustrados in Europe first sought to gain rights by constructing a historical memory of Filipino civilization, situating that civilization in a larger Asian context, and emphasizing precolonial connections to Japan.

Chapter 3 charts the transition from reform to revolution and a concurrent pivot away from Europe toward Asia. Aboitiz reminds us that these shifts were at once physical and intellectual. Not only did revolutionary support cells move into Hong Kong and Japan, but participants in the Philippines were also acutely aware of how their actions fit into the trajectory of greater Asia. By juxtaposing the private correspondence of rebels with that of the colonizers, Aboitiz shows that Filipino revolutionaries were emboldened by a feeling of kinship with Japan while their Spanish overseers looked north with fear and anxiety.

Chapter 4 provides a history of the American period through the story of Mariano Ponce, the Philippine Republic's first pan-Asian emissary to Japan. It shows that even though Ponce could not overcome Japan's reluctance to voice official condemnation of the US colonial project, he was nevertheless able to establish informal links between the Philippine Revolution and the larger pan-Asian movement. Notable among these was his relationship with Sun Yat-sen, who spoke of sending troops to support the revolution.

In her conclusion, Aboitiz highlights the significance of her research by recounting the afterlife of the revolution. She follows the roots of pan-Asianism outward into the branches of postwar Philippine Third Worldism and pan-Malayism. In doing so, she maps the persistence of her story onto twenty-first-century Philippine national consciousness. Asian Place, Filipino Nation does not pretend to be a complete account of either the Philippine Revolution or of pan-Asianism, but upon reflection, neither field seems quite complete without it. Pan-Asianism was constructed differently on the “periphery,” where it was uniquely able to survive the fall of the Japanese “core”; the full story of the revolution must also account for the “mutual entanglement” of the colonizer and the colonized in a larger “global field of power and discourse” (p. 149). All told, Aboitiz succeeds marvelously in demonstrating that Filipino revolutionaries were not only creating a nation, they were also carving out a place for that nation in a reemerging Asia.