Presented to the ​History Department

De La Salle University - Manila

Term 3​,​ ​A.Y. ​2019-2020

In partial fulfillment
of the course
In ​NATHIST (Nationalism and Revolution)

A Critical Review of Floro Quibuyen’s A Nation Aborted: Rizal, American Hegemony and
Philippine Nationalism

Submitted by:
Luis Bienvenido N. Foronda

Submitted to:
Dr. Jose Rhommel Hernandez, PhD

October 2020
 A Critical Review of Floro Quibuyen’s A Nation Aborted: Rizal, American Hegemony and
Philippine Nationalism
by Luis Bienvenido N. Foronda

Bibliographical Entry:
​Quibuyen, Floro. ​A Nation Aborted: Rizal, American Hegemony and Philippine Nationalism.
Quezon CIty: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2008.

I. Introduction
A. Overview of the Work
Quibuyen’s ​A Nation Aborted ​analyses the writing of Jose Rizal in the light of
different historical figures and a moving historical milieu from the ferment of the
nationalist movement up to the present. The work uses Jose Rizal as the focal point, what
this means is that Quibuyen rereads Jose Rizal’s two novels as they shed light on the
nineteenth century experience of Filipino nationalists within the country and abroad. His
work also examines the different moral viewpoints employed to twist the narrative that
involves the work of Jose Rizal by American colonial authorities. It presents Rizal’s work
as a formidable power that can be used to bend the hearts and minds of the Filipino
people. Quibuyen’s interpretation of Rizal dents his active participation in the revolution
as something that is not only the struggle between petty bourgeois and proletariat as
espoused by Teodoro Agoncillo and Renato Constantino. Instead of discrediting the
ilustrado ​in order for one to think less of Rizal, Quibuyen sets aside an addiction to this
“vulgar Marxism” that tends to dichotomize means so that they do not meet their ends.
Instead he reinstates Rizal’s ideas that saw beyond his time, seeking perhaps that a
revolution would be detrimental for a state and its people. The rereading of Rizal does not
seek to dichotomize between the Propaganda and the Revolution of 1896, rather its hope
lies that its readers wouldn’t take things for granted. Quibuyen reeks of this assertive
disposition that tries to conclude of their meaning as one and the same, cohesively for all
Filipino people, to implore that we need not generalize ideas and characters in our history
books.

B. Physical Description
The work is at usual book length at about 430 pages not including the index. It
contains twelve chapters that can be divided into four parts, each discussing a stage of
Philippine nationalism in its own light. Quibuyen cites using endnotes, not footnotes,
examining primary and secondary sources in his bibliography. Not only does his
bibliography read up on literature published by foreign scholars with respect to a
reference to historical time and its milieu, but it also includes the rereading of sources by
local scholarship and their take on the former shifting the perspective and treatment of the
primary into secondary as well. The work was published twice, both times by Ateneo de
Manila University Press. The first printing was in 1999 whence the second edition is the
one in my possession is the revised edition released in 2008.

C. Bionote of the Author

Foronda | A Critique of Floro Quibuyen’s ​A Nation Aborted 1

 Floro Quibuyen received his undergraduate degree in Philosophy at the
University of the Philippines Diliman.1 He holds his MA Anthropology from the
University of Hawaii Manoa, and his PhD in Political Science from the same university.
Quibuyen was awarded with the East-West Center Study Grant, that as originally a
two-year engagement but was later extended to fund his PhD program. While studying in
the US, Quibuyen spent time directing and producing documentaries as an audio-visual
consultant for Hawaii’s community television. He did this while also teaching three
undergraduate courses at the University of Hawaii. In his twenty five years of teaching,
Floro Quibuyen has taught twenty nine tertiary level courses within the social sciences
and the humanities in the Philippines and abroad. He has served as a special issue editor
for the UP Asian Studies Journal.

II. Contributions
The division involving the work’s twelve chapters includes careful reading and analysis. This
would be easier if the first time reader of the work would care to merge the prologue and the epilogue for
a clearer and speedy understanding of the work. The first grouping of chapters comprise of Chapter One
through Three. These chapters speak of Jose Rizal from the fundamental historical and theoretical errors
up to the ideological struggles that come with him to this day. This does not perhaps exclude, what
Quibuyen calls a “postcolonial” treatment of the Filipino community by Benedict Anderson that tries to
dichotomize Rizal from being a patriot and a nationalist.
The second grouping involves Chapters Four through Six that reconstructs Jose Rizal’s vision for
the Filipino nation. It can be called as not being an easy task for Filipino scholars since it involves
reclaiming a proper treatment of Rizal from the eyes of foreign scholars. This grouping also calls for a
clear understanding as to why Rizal annotated Antonio de Morga’s ​Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas. ​It
seems that it tries to imply Rizal’s efforts in reclaiming Philippine history from the perspective of the
Spaniards. Trying its best to set aside the racial differences between Europeans and Filipinos as being
either savages or savants. In these chapters, Quibuyen treats the Filipino consciousness as if they were at
par with the European scholars. The last chapter of this subgrouping was impressionistic of German
nationalism that Rizal could have received with his correspondence with Blumentritt. Quibuyen uses this
as a framework to explain efforts towards early Philippine historiography that would be manifold in
explaining the concept of a Filipino homeland.
The last two groupings involve heavy analysis on the Spanish and later, American colonial
empires. The former comprising Chapter Seven through Nine, studies different characters involving
Rizal’s discourse in affirming the character of nationhood with his contemporaries. Shedding light on the
moral issues and critiques of nationalists like Marcelo del Pilar and Isabelo de los Reyes. Some examples
would include that of the frailocracy and the use of folklore to justify a pre colonial nation. Rizal cements
that his research in studying De Morga prompted an intellectual framework for the study of Philippine
history.2 It interrogates Rizal’s view contrary to the view of the Spaniards. Quibuyen integrates the
patterns of narratives and how they have come to affect how Filipinos view Philippine history. It is in this
section that he emancipates the link between redemption and tragedy, cyclical and disruptive views
vis-a-vis the Judeo-Christian ​pasyon as in Ileto.3 Linking the ​pasyon to the Revolution of 1896, Quibuyen

1
Floro Quibuyen (Public Figure). n.d. “About - Floro Quibuyen.” Facebook, n.d., accessed July 3,
​ ttps://m.facebook.com/pg/Floro-Quibuyen-492647997544502/about/​.
2020, h

2
Floro Quibuyen, ​A Nation Aborted: Rizal, American Hegemony and Philippine Nationalism
(Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2008), 200.
3
Ibid., 225.

Foronda | A Critique of Floro Quibuyen’s ​A Nation Aborted 2

points out how the nationalist narrative was formed. He appreciates the value of how the acquiescence of
both minds, Rizal and Bonifacio, were able to make a historic bloc that knots the elite and the masses
together. These would be crucial later on in forging the narrative for an independent nation-state.
Finally, the last three, Chapter Ten, Eleven and the Epilogue speak of how American hegemony
with the spirit of 1896 was able to manipulate the narrative of Jose Rizal as a state-sponsored hero.
Branding, if not, culling the Philippine nationalism in the nineteenth century with a sense of alienation. It
makes one look back at politicians like Claro M. Recto and reappraise if his efforts in promoting Rizal
was indeed an effort that would not make Filipinos forget about this American statecraft. Chapter Eleven
sets the country in the context of Southeast Asia as an outlier in making for itself an image of
self-determination since 1945. It is challenging to wrap one’s head around the conundrum of war. That
even after Uncle Sam’s abandonment called for his return to the Philippines post-war. Again, Quibuyen
marks the ​pasyon as inextricably linked to the Filipino consciousness and Arthur McArthur’s famous
words, “I shall return.”4 As perhaps contested against the popular image of lobbying nationalist who never
depended on Western counterparts, like Artemio Ricarte. Likewise, he cites American brutalism over
Filipino civil society and its relationship in having to put the value of collaboration over colonialism.5
The last chapter is the epilogue, which I chose to include in these groupings since its value carries
over almost all the other chapters. However it also contains Quibuyen’s personal sentiments on Rizal, the
Filipino nation and Philippine civil society. I imagine from some point of retrospection how Quibuyen
called for the Filipino civil society’s reaction to Father Florentino’s summon to the youth in the end of ​El
Filibusterismo. ​Quibuyen compares this invocation to Rizal in his exile in Dapitan. I think it is a point of
departure from the close-minded treatment the youth often has to the two novels linked to Filipino
sentience. It is here that Quibuyen highlights the moral underpinnings in Rizal and how that speaks for the
question: Why would Rizal choose to be exiled to Dapitan? Dapitan was the Spanish backwater with no
roads, schools and hospitals. Even with these challenges Rizal still did what was right. He set up a school
for young boys, an irrigation system and a clinic where he could put his medical practice to use. He
managed to use the meager income that he had from his writings to support the local economy while
contributing as well to international journals abroad with his correspondence. If there is anything the
epilogue would speak better of, it would have been Rizal’s meaning for the homeland (heimat) as
inextricably linked for Filipinos to help their fellow countrymen. Whether it be in a place of ferment or
destitute, this had been Rizal's message, not only for the Filipinos in his time but even to those in ours.

III. Critique
In its prologue called ​Rereading Rizal and Revisioning Philippine Nationalism, Quibuyen
extricates a number of existing theories of the revolution from Renato Constantino to Teodoro Agoncillo.
He also cites the importance of Ileto’s ​Pasyon and Revolution, ​as well as other important frameworks like
Herder's cultural nationalism and the ​heimat in order to reclaim one's own history. These frameworks are
wrought together by a central theme of examining salient forms of literature by nineteenth century
Filipino nationalists as primary sources. Likewise, secondary sources are those that interpret and translate
these primary sources into different languages and moral viewpoints. Exempli gratia, Leon Ma.
Guerrero's translation of Jose Rizal's ​Noli Me Tangere ​over that of Austin Coates. This is to say that
interpretation is merely relative to who is reading it. For a foreigner to interpret a Filipino consciousness
is nothing like a Filipino to interpret the same. Exactly the point that Rizal wants to portray in his
annotation of Morga's ​Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas. The narrative perpetuated by Morga did not embody

4
Ibid., 349.

5
Ibid., 374-377.

Foronda | A Critique of Floro Quibuyen’s ​A Nation Aborted 3

the Filipino consciousness. It was through Rizal that this matter was resolved. Using the lens of critical
hermeneutics, Quibuyen fizzles out why Rizal's efforts played largely in the story of Filipino civil society
and its self determination.
If by any consolation, it seems the educated Filipino ​ilustrados ​tried to portray their narratives as
the image of the nation. To say that this would be the indelible mark that would put them on equal footing
with their European administrators. I would say that this is somewhat a challenge for the unread Filipino
masses, much like scholars who view Rizal and his two novels as reeking of bourgeois undertones. As for
the first few chapters, Quibuyen was the discursive practice of most contemporary historians to
dichotomize. The flaw rests within the elite/ilustrado and folk/masses af it creates a content double
environment that will not only categorized but generalize the fundamental conflict within them. Hence the
popular strife of separating the propaganda from the revolutionary movement creates a conflict between
and within the identity of Filipino nationalism itself.6
The same example can be found in Chapter Two that addressed the issue of validity of Agoncillo
and Constantino’s interpretations as well as Rizal’s true position on the reform movement as well as the
revolution. Quibuyen’s resolve points out to an account of Antonio Luna against that of Dr. Pio
Valenzuela used by Benedict Anderson to perpetuate that there was a division between the propagandists
and revolutionaries. He argues that there was no such division, citing Luna, that the “Katipunan is the
Liga Filipina.”7 Here, interpreting history takes a turn for the better, clearing the conundrum that has gone
on for decades! No such dichotomy exists! Henceforth, this must be the consciousness of Filipinos in the
nineteenth century. No wonder Quibuyen likens the Enlightenment and the ​pasyon ​traditions to be
catalysts in the effort for national emancipation. It was through these two spirits that a moral theme set the
foundations for liberalist thought. Its ​sub specie aeternatis, ​some form of redemption that tries for
equality, human rights, identity against injustice and despair.8
Rizal took off from this thought-world that he and his contemporaries must achieve, if not, correct
for the benefit of their countrymen. Blumentritt lauded him for this ecumenical perspective telling him to
write Philippine history, so much so, setting the precedent differently for future generations.9 Through
Rizal’s time in London, annotating Morga’s ​Sucesos, ​he changed the mindset for both Filipinos and
Spaniards. Like Isabelo de los Reyes, whose early work was devotedly seated in anthropology and
history, Rizal dented early Philippine historiography that a nation can be constructed. Radically it did not
bear the racism of the Spanish neither did it construe a nation dependent on a monarch of whose power
emanated from the people.
Rizal’s concept was built on the framework of Johann Gottfried von Herder’s cultural
nationalism. Perhaps inspired by Blumentritt’s impressions of German historiography. Quibuyen cites
that Herder’s arraignment in Philippine historiography should be an aspect of nationalism and revolution
that is still worth studying. Sadly, it would be later that the annotations on the ​Sucesos was largely
ignored and not as popular as Rizal’s two novels. Even the moral issue of rewriting Philippine history
went largely ignored by Rizal’s compatriots, not knowing of its true value.10 I disagree with Quibuyen
when he cites that perhaps the only aspect of nation-building by the propagandists that went unignored by
the Spanish was the criticisms directed at the frailocracy. That would indeed speak true reading the two

6
Ibid., 15-16.

7
Ibid., 51-56.

8
Ibid., 109.

9
Ibid., 140.

10
Ibid., 191-193.

Foronda | A Critique of Floro Quibuyen’s ​A Nation Aborted 4

novels but the world does not stop there. Rizal had far more other works and so did other propagandists.11
There is a need to reevaluate how one should see the different faces of the Revolution and the Spirit of
1896. Perhaps, it is not only through the eyes of the learned but the illiterate and inarticulate masses who
had nothing to say for themselves as well.
The grand narrative of Philippine history was well undr away after it had been at odds with Jose
Rizal’s two novels and the annotations of the ​Sucesos. ​It would be quick to realize that this is the same
narrative that binds Rizal and Bonifacio together as well as the concepts of Enlightenment and the ​pasyon.
In the absence of category, the trope of Filipino nationhood was endorsed in the character of Elias and
Padre Florentino in ​El Filibusterismo.12 ​This homogenous and clandestine ‘historic bloc’ according to
Quibuyen was supposed to be successful following the declaration of independence in 1898. Yet he points
out that because of some decisions made nefariously by Aguinaldo allowed American control in the
country as the Philippines was being sold off by Span to the United States at the turn of the century.13
Quibuyen’s chapter on the ​Revolution That Never Was ​echoes Garcia-Cano’s dissertation that argued the
American (mis)use of Spanish documents to pitt their own plans for the Filipinos. Misleading them by
categorizing this historic bloc into a dichotomy of propagandists and revolutionaries. The former
connoted with good and the latter with evil. This act criminalized revolutionaries who did not surrender to
American administrators branding them as dangerous and seditious. Indeed, this is where
pro-Americanism brands the coloniser as the liberator.
Quibuyen cites some examples of the celebration of Rizal Day being repressed and later used by
the Americans to perpetuate Rizal’s pacified tendencies. The narrative of tragedy and redemption allowed
the Americans to use Rizal as a state sponsored hero. Rizal, of course, revolted against Spain through his
writings but this is purely a category perpetuated to disrupt social movements in the Spirit of the 1896. It
branded those involved in any kind of revolution as being uncivilized, little did Filipinos know that the
education system that was widely and popularly promoted protected the Americans from any kind of
malfeasance. It was tenacious of Filipinos to repay them with revolt, completely removing Rizal and
Bonifacio’s connection together in the Spirit of 1896.14 I would laud Quibuyen to note the ability of
American-educated Filipino scholars on the dangers of categorization: poststructuralist, hegemonic and
postcolonial because it involves a shared moral bias in divining a subject from its parts.15 It blurs the
picture by overly obsessing in one aspect and paying less attention in the next. He says that this is a
function of power without any sense of harmony and balance.
Finally, if the student of history musn’t categorize the Spirit of 1896, what must he do? What can
he learn from (re)reading Rizal and his works? Quibuyen looks to Rizal’s final days, particularly his exile
in Dapitan. Evoking Clio to take over and setting some light on the backwater of the country at the time.
To really understand Rizal’s moral mission for nation building he involves some retrospection of the
positive characters in his two novels, in Tasio, Elias and Padre Florentino. Quibuyen hints that perhaps
Rizal was referring to some form of a Filipino civil society. One that proceeds prior to the deposition of
an “unjust regime or the attainment of political independence.”16 Rizal built a school, a clinic, and an

11
Ibid., 214-215.

12
Ibid., 243-252.

13
Ibid., 259-260.

14
Ibid., 319.

15
Ibid., 342.

16
Ibid., 386-387.

Foronda | A Critique of Floro Quibuyen’s ​A Nation Aborted 5

irrigation in Dapitan where there was none. He did this not for the benefit of himself but for his
fellowmen. Was he looking for some form of praise? Maybe yes, maybe no, but no one is truly certain.
Like that of the ​pasyon ​that calls for redemption, this is what Rizal truly wanted to leave as a mark for his
people. The hero, I believe, is someone who is not unafraid, it is the one who is scared to death and still
continues to do what is right. Jose Rizal, even if he was not the state-sponsored hero, would have wanted
for ordinary Filipinos to do the same.

Bibliography
Secondary Sources
Books
​Quibuyen, Floro. ​A Nation Aborted: Rizal, American Hegemony and Philippine Nationalism.
Quezon CIty: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2008.

Foronda | A Critique of Floro Quibuyen’s ​A Nation Aborted 6