In celebration of its 59th anniversary, the Asian Center, University of the Philippines Diliman will host a lecture by Benedict Anderson on Monday, 10 November 2014, 2:30 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. at the GT-Toyota Asian Cultural Center Auditorium, University of the Philippines Diliman.
Anderson will discuss “The Age of Globalization: Anarchism and the Anticolonial Imagination,” the 2013 revised and updated version of “Under Three Flags,” which was first published by Verso Books in 2005. Read the lecture abstract below.
Serving as discussant is George Aseniero, a Rizal scholar and author of “From Cádiz to La Liga: The Spanish Context of Rizal’s Political Thought,” published in Asian Studies: Journal of Critical Perspectives on Asia (Volume 49:1 2013), where he examined Rizal’s political thought in relation to Spanish liberalism and French anarchism/mutualism.
Cosponsoring the event are the UP Third World Studies Center, the UP Department of Political Science, and the UP Department of English and Comparative Literature.
Benedict Richard O’Gorman Anderson is Professor Emeritus of International Studies, Government and Asian Studies at Cornell University. He is best known for his book, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, which was first published in 1983 but has since undergone countless editions. It is a path-breaking and highly innovative work that has supplied one of the most popular and oft-quoted concepts in the academe and beyond. His other books include The Spectre of Comparisons (1998) and The Fate of Rural Hell: Asceticism and Desire in Buddhist Thailand (2012).
Dr. Aseniero was previously with the United Nations University (UNU), first in Geneva and then in Tokyo. He was in charge of UNU research projects on development headed by Johan Galtung, regional studies for Latin America headed by Pablo Gonzalez Casanova, and the project on Africa headed by Samir Amin. As UNU researcher, he also worked with the Max Planck Institut in Starnberg, Germany. He pursued postgraduate studies at the University of Uppsala and doctorate at the University of Geneva. Now an independent researcher/writer, he continues his research on world-system studies focused on East/Southeast Asia and is writing a book on Rizal’s political thought.
Seats are limited and are available on a first-come, first-served basis. For more information, please contact Janus or Kat at 981.8500 local 3586 or email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. A vicinity map of the Asian Center may be downloaded here.
Lecture Abstract
The Age of Globalization’s focus (is) on the final decades of the nineteenth century. The near simultaneity of the last nationalist insurrection in the New World (Cuba, 1895) and the first in Asia (the Philippines, 1896) was no serendipity. Cubans and Filipinos did not merely read about each other, but had crucial personal connections and, coordinated their actions – the first time in world history that such transglobal coordination became possible. But the coordination was mediated through “representatives,” above all in Paris, and secondarily in Hong Kong, London and New York. Both Filipinos and Cubans found, to different degrees, their most reliable allies among French, Spanish, Italian, Belgian and British anarchists – each for their own, often non-nationalist reasons. The book attempts to map the gravitational force of anarchism between militant nationalism on opposite sides of the planet. Following the collapse of the First International, and Marx’s death in 1883, anarchism, in its characteristically variegated forms, was the dominant element in the self-consciously internationalist radical Left. – Liberally excerpted from the book’s “Introduction”