The writings of a small group of scholars known as the ilustrados are often credited for providing intellectual grounding for the Philippine Revolution of 1896. Megan C. Thomas shows that the ilustrados’ anticolonial project of defining and constructing the “Filipino” involved Orientalist and racialist discourses that are usually ascribed to colonial projects, not anticolonial ones. According to Thomas, the work of the ilustrados uncovers the surprisingly blurry boundary between nationalist and colonialist thought.

By any measure, there was an extraordinary flowering of scholarly writing about the peoples and history of the Philippines in the decade or so preceding the revolution. In reexamining the works of the scholars José Rizal, Pardo de Tavera, Isabelo de los Reyes, Pedro Paterno, Pedro Serrano Laktaw, and Mariano Ponce, Thomas situates their writings in a broader account of intellectual ideas and politics migrating and transmuting across borders. She reveals how the ilustrados both drew from and refashioned the tools and concepts of Orientalist scholarship from Europe.

Interrogating the terms “nationalist” and “nationalism,” whose definitions are usually constructed in the present and then applied to the past, Thomas offers new models for studying nationalist thought in the colonial world.

Megan C. Thomas is associate professor of politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

"Rigorously researched and lucidly written, Orientalists, Propagandists, and Ilustrados breaks new ground in the study of the 19th century Philippines. In particular, the book stands out in its careful attention to texts produced by the intellectuals at the center of its story. Importantly, Megan C. Thomas frames—and powerfully defamiliarizes—canonical works and authors by placing them alongside lesser-known texts, a move that is not only recuperative and inclusive, but transformative." —Paul A. Kramer, author of The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines

"Megan C. Thomas’s attention to the dissonances between writers of the late nineteenth century is as important as her observation of the emergent nationalism that was their legacy." —Rosalind Carmel Morris, Columbia University