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In Mabini's discourse La Revolucion Filipina (LFR), a brown race emerges in the field of modern geopolitics. The work of Mabini is known as a narrative of the dialectical struggle between wisdom and conscience of a protagonist in a revolution against two empires, Spain and America, and an analysis of the various characters involved. In the dialectics of change between the external and internal, Mabini tells a story of the consciousness of a nation. The classical Western conception of natural law is applied to the concrete situation of struggle of the colored slave. Mabini pioneers the critique of American racism and the contradiction of classes within the limits of the political economy of society. Mabini features the dignity and rights of the oppressed working class in the theater of warfare. Mabini's work can be considered a document of the Filipino nation that struggled in order to demonstrate its peculiar virtue: the spirit of freedom of a race that inspires human dignity and just honor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From hindsight, Andres Bonifacio’s “signature” in our historical archive is distinctly legible in his initiative in founding the Katipunan and its praxis in organized revolt. His death by the Emilio Aguinaldo clique revealed the Katipunan’s inadequacy. But it is also productive since hegemony became the new telos of the nationalist impetus. Universal reason and natural rights, the foundation of the national-liberation struggle, were insufficient to forge the popular will and affirm the sovereignty of the nation-people in the face of US imperial power. Ultimately, however, as Apolinario Mabini discerned, the political economy of a feudal/comprador formation defined the limits of ilustrado nationalism. Bonifacio’s example survives in the actuality of irepressible multifaceted subaltern agencies. It renews itself today in the ethnic/indigenous, national-democractic insurgencies flourishing today under global imperial terrorism.

Applying a historical-materialist framework, this exploratory venture to critique Eurocentric cultural studies deploys certain oppositional events/discourses to point out the limitations of the hegemonic discipline. Deconstructing elite bourgeois culture via institutionalizing popular tastes and demystifying idealist rhetoric simply reinforce alienation with a postmodernist hubris. The resurgence of “third-world” resistance with its focus on racial/gender negativity (as in certain democratizing initiatives in the Philippines and among people of color in the metropole) may signal a return to the radical vision of cultural studies. Key to this renewal is the rediscovery of the dialectics of local/ethnic practice and the concrete universal of an anti-capitalist liberation project of subalterns everywhere defying imperialism and the terrorist neoliberal global order.

This hermeneutical critique seeks to articulate the sexual politics submerged in the experiences of selected activists during and after the period of the Marcos dictatorship. In the disasters they suffered, we find revealed the barbaric violence of imperialism and the patriarchalfeudal system. In the quest for the missing child and their own kidnapped self-recognition, the narrative symbolized the damage suffered by whole communities, not just the forcibly disappeared. The plot center-stages the ordeal of oligarchic honor in the crisis that destroyed the rituals of marriage and party discipline. In the process, the fate of individual citizens and the fate of the nation coalesced. Embodied in manifold experiences, the interwoven testimonies of the families involved function as a national allegory in which the traumatic terror of the Martial Law regime becomes a concrete universal for all. Memory/recollection as protagonist becomes a key mediation for the children's predicament, serving as an analogical figure for the disrupted dialectic of the historical project for the people's liberation. It serves as a trope that the contradictions of time and space, body and soul, ethics and geopolitics, will be resolved by the collective effort of organic people's agencies to achieve the goals of national democracy and sovereignty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]