| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Vicente L. Rafael. The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2005. Pp. xviii, 231. $22.95.
This book is a further development of themes and issues first explored by Vicente L. Rafael in Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (1993). Rafael's earlier work was one of the first in colonial studies to draw attention to the problem of translation, and as such has influenced subsequent scholarship. Rather than seventeenth-century Spanish friars deploying translation as a method of conversion, here we see nineteenth-century Filipino nationalists using Castilian Spanish as a communicative technique in a secular project to transform the Spanish Empire.	1
In the foreground of the book is a dense analysis of Filipino nationalist writers. Under discussion are articles in the newspaper La solidaridad, José Protasio Rizal's El filibusterismo (1891) and Noli me tangere (1887), and Francisco Balthazar's Florante at Laura (1838); there is also an intriguing chapter on popular theater or comedia. From these sources, Rafael tracks the transformations of Castilian and native vernaculars such as Tagalog into languages of liberation. The process was not simply confined to a literate elite. Popular theater had long circulated images of Europe and, more importantly for Rafael, elements of Castilian to a broad public. Nationalist rhetoric couched in Castilian language could, therefore, find purchase in a mass audience.	. . .

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