Speculations on the International Via the Philippine

Abstract

This paper speaks to the condition of the modern by reflecting on its afterlife in the national and the international and its emergence within the colonial. Through examples cited from Philippine art history, the latter is set up as a fundamental moment of the national and the extension beyond it with its perceived others elsewhere in the international system. The other gesture of the paper is to locate this moment of the international within a region delineated as Southeast Asia. Through four polemical texts that have informed the Southeast Asian modern, this effort finally contributes to the conversation on the modern as a transformative process from the nineteenth century through the Cold War under the productively fraught auspice of the international.