Abstract

Jose Rizal, a nineteenth century Philippine propagandist, lived as he died: dedicated to creating a national identity through anti friar propaganda, he would be executed by a firing squad at the age of 29 for sedition against Spain's colonial empire. In his short life, he earned degrees in medicine and philosophy from the University of Madrid, worked as an ophthalmologist at leading clinics in Paris, Germany, and Hong Kong, and served as a Master Mason, he also became the first Asian scientist invited to join the prestigious medical society of Dr. Rudolph Virchow in Berlin, presented lectures on Tagalog ethnography and orthography, and discovered organic materials now named after him in nineteenth century journals; despite his scientific interests, he is best known for writing the first Filipino novels, Noli me tangere and El Filibusterismo, for his prolific propaganda penned in five different languages , and for his assiduous commitment to unifying his country through an aesthetic revolution. ;Since Rizal's death in 1898, his spirit has been internationally reified by statues, street signs, and plaques; his anti-colonial work has circulated in the US Congress, spurred the revolutionary impetus of the Katipunans , and inspired the frontline soldiers in Surabaya, where Indonesians fought the famous battle against British and Dutch forces on November 10, 1945; in the last century, his reputation has undergone successive changes as a beloved familial figure, a hagiographic martyr, an elite bourgeois hero, and an American poster boy sponsored by U.S. President Taft; in the 1960's, he was often recognized as the 'first Asian liberal' by international academics and politicians alike; most recently, after Benedict's Anderson's renown scholarship, Rizal serves as the spokesperson for a subaltern, "imagined community." ;With these wide-ranging epithets in mind, I seek to contribute a new understanding of Rizal as both a political and literary figure whose 'embodied' theory of nationalism not only controverts Anderson's communal model, but also reflects the genesis of a subaltern 'Romanticism' that renegotiates and transfigures Kant's theory of enlightenment, aesthetics, and publicity into practices effective for the political objectives of a late 19 th Century colonial subject