Abstract
In listening to nineteenth-century modernity, we hear the recurring motives of modernity’s dual logic in the simultaneous uniformization and fragmentation of economic systems, social institutions, cultural practices, and identity formations across the globe. In describing this process of uniformization, I refer to global historian C.A. Bayly’s discernment of the difference between homogeneity, and the pessimistic vision of a monoculturalisation of the world. Instead, I employ the notion of uniformization to observe the increased commonality in the practices and implementations of technologies and bodily practices across societies and cultures. In understanding the process of uniformization, I want to point to the inter-twining common aspirations for modernity by various societies across the world taking into account that the different interpretations of modernity bring about plural articulations and practices. This concomitant fragmentation of modernity into modernities is echoed in its replication, displacement, and diversification of economic systems, social institutions, cultural practices, and identity formations in various spaces and societies at the local and global level. In the next three chapters, this will further become clear as I investigate the inter-twined forces of nation-building and translocal migrations. Rather than a teleological exposition of a singular red thread, my research follows through junctures of modernity that brought about the increasing entanglement of the global histories of peoples, cultures, and ideas.
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Notes
- 1.
See: Bayly, C. A. The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914, Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, Massachussetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2014).
- 2.
E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 (New York: Vintage Books, 1989).
- 3.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Community: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Revised (Manila: Anvil Publishing, Inc., 1993), 12.
- 4.
Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, Second Edition (New Perspectives on the Past) (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 6.
- 5.
Ibid ., 143.
- 6.
Anthony Smith, National Identity (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 91. Smith points out that the early theories of nationalism—taking into account the works of Rousseau and Herder—were not necessarily invested in the establishment of state. He provides the examples of the Scots, Flemish, and Catalan nationalists whose interests were more in ‘home rule and cultural parity in a multinational state than with outright independence’ (74).
- 7.
Gellner , 1983 , Nations and Nationalism, 48.
- 8.
Ibid.
- 9.
Ibid.
- 10.
Ibid., 48–49.
- 11.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Pasig: Anvil Publishing, Inc., 2003), 68.
- 12.
When Walter Benjamin discussed the idea of the ‘homogenous empty time’ in Illuminations (1968), he was criticising the teleological construction of capitalist history. See: Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968).
In a less pessimistic formulation, Benedict Anderson applies this concept to expound his notion of the national communal temporal simultaneity where various physically separated actors (unaware of each other’s presence) collectively imagine each other’s presence. In: Anderson, 2003 (C. 1983), Imagined Communities, 24–26. I take this notion broader than the time-space of national imagining, but in modernity’s imagining of the global (transpiring simultaneously with the national).
- 13.
See: Karl, Rebecca E. Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2002).
- 14.
Ong brilliantly reminds us that the written form of language and its mass distribution, though taken for granted by the contemporary literate societies, is a technology. See: Walter J. Ong and John Arthur Edmund Hartley, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, 3rd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 1982); M. T. Clanchy, “The Technology of Writing,” in From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066–1307 (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1992).
- 15.
See: meLê yamomo and Basilio E. Villaruz, ‘Manila and the World Dance Space: Nationalism and Globalization in Cold War Philippines and South East Asia,’ in Theatre, Globalization and the Cold War, ed. Christopher B. Balme and Berenika Szymanski-Düll, Transnational Theatre Histories (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 307–323; Sudershan Chawla, Melvin Gurtov, and Alain-Gerard Marsot, Southeast Asia under the New Balance of Power (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1974), 54.
- 16.
See: Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).
- 17.
German historian Friedrich Meinecke’s (problematic) understanding of nationalism as a collective effort of individual neohumanistic, universalistic projects of self-discovery is rooted to the German Enlightenment project. His ideas were heavily influenced by Wilhelm Humboldt’s view that that the more a society became educated, the more national it would become. See: Friedrich Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and the National State, trans. Robert B. Kimber (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970). c. 1907.
These ideas circulated within European intellectual spheres and among the Asia Pacific intelligentsia through the globalisation of print capitalism and through the migration of the middle- and ruling-classes from the region who came to attend universities in Europe.
- 18.
R. Aldous, Musical Constructions of Nationalism: Essays on the History and Ideology of European Musical Culture, 1800–1945., Irish Historical Studies, vol. 33 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2002), 2.
- 19.
See: A nderson, 2003 (C. 1983), Imagined Communities; Benedict Anderson, ‘Chapter 09. Cacique Democracy in the Philippines’, in Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World, Philippine (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2004), 192–226.
The notion of the seriality of ideas propagated through print capitalism is central to Anderson’s argument of the universal spread of nationalism. In ‘Nationalism, Identity, and the Logic of Seriality’ (2004), he expounds on this theme and further expands the notion to two categories: (1)Unbound seriality ‘which has its origins in the print market, especially in newspapers, and in the representations of popular performance, is exemplified by such open-to-the-world plurals as nationalists, anarchists, bureaucrats, and workers. It is, for example, the seriality that makes the United Nations a normal, wholly unparadoxical institution’ (29); and (2) Bound seriality, ‘which has its origins in governmentality, especially in such institutions as the census and elections, is exemplified by finite series like Asian-Americans, beurs, and Tutsis. It is the seriality that makes a United Ethnicities or a United Identities unthinkable’ (Ibid.).
- 20.
See: Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and the National State; And erson, 2003 (C. 1983), Imagined Communities; Celia Applegate, ‘How German Is It? Nationalism and the Idea of Serious Music in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Nineteenth-Century Music 21, no. 3 (1998): 288.
- 21.
Hobsbawm , The Age of Empire, 1875–1914.
- 22.
See for example: R. D. Meadows, ‘Engineering Exile: Social Networks and the French Atlantic Community, 1789–1809’, French Historical Studies 23, no. 1 (2000): 67–102; Luke Clossey, ‘Merchants, Migrants, Missionaries, and Globalization in the Early-Modern Pacific’, Journal of Global History 1, no. 1 (March 13, 2006): 41; C.A. Bayly, “‘Archaic’ and ‘Modern’ Globalization in the Eurasian and African Arena, C. 1750–1850,” in Globalisation in World History, ed. Anthony G. Hopkins (London: Pimlico, 2006), 47–71; Gary B Magee and Andrew S. Thompson, Empire and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British World, C. 1850–1914, Britain and the World, vol. 3 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Verity Burgmann, ‘Chapter 16. Striking Back against Empire: Working-Class Responses to Globalization’, in The Postcolonial and the Global, ed. Revathi Krishnaswamy and John C. Hawley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 238–251; Vinayak Chaturvedi, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire, Pacific Affairs, vol. 82 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2009); J. Hyslop, ‘Steamship Empire: Asian, African and British Sailors in the Merchant Marine c.1880—1945’, Journal of Asian and African Studies 44, no. 1 (February 1, 2009): 49–67; C. A. Bayly, ‘Knowing the Country: Empire and Information in India’, Modern Asian Studies 27, no. 1 (November 28, 1993): 3; E. J. (Eric) Hobsbawm, ‘Chapter 5. Workers of the World’, in The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 112–141; Allen Chun, Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, ed. Aihwa Ong and Donald M. Nonini, American Journal of Sociology, vol. 103 (New York: Routledge, 1998).
- 23.
Anthony D King, ‘The Times and Spaces of Modernity (or Who Needs Postmodernism?)’, in Global Modernities, ed. Mike Featherstone et al. (London: Sage Publications Ltd., 1995), 121–122.
- 24.
I argue that such processes were already in practice in the earlier stages of globalisation. But such urban modernisation experiments feedback was not just implemented at the colonial city and imperial metropolis level. Anthropologist and Asian scholar Aihwa Ong argues that contemporary Asian cities are involved in the ‘art of being global’. Aihwa Ong, Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, Studies in Urban and Social Change (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 12 (My italics).
- 25.
Ibid.
- 26.
Ryan Bishop, John Phillips, and Wei-wei Yeo, ‘Chapter 01. Perpetuating Cities: Excepting Globalization and the Southeast Asia Supplement’, in Postcolonial Urbanism: Southeast Asian Cities and Global Processes, ed. Ryan Bishop, John Phillips, and Wei-Wei Yeo (New York/London: Routledge, 2003), 23.
- 27.
‘…una joven anémica envuelta en un vestido de los buenos tiempos de su abuela’ (my translation). From: José Rizal, Noli me tángere: novela tagala (Berlin: Berliner Buchdruckerei-Actien-Gesellschaft, 1887), 43.
- 28.
As reflected in archival documents, these musicians were referred to as Manila musicians (though most of them came from outside Manila) in the same general way that natives of the Philippines prior to its nationhood were referred to as Manila men. In this sense, the historical course of the transnational Filipino musicians can be mapped within a more longer-arching trajectory within the different stages of global history.
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———. 2003. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 68. Pasig: Anvil Publishing, Inc.
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yamomo, m. (2018). Entr’acte: Sound Junctures of Global Modernity. In: Theatre and Music in Manila and the Asia Pacific, 1869-1946. Transnational Theatre Histories. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69176-3_5
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