Interacting in this forum with colleagues from around the region, I am struck by how our scholarship, though addressing similar concerns and sharing common discourses, is shaped by our location in nation states with very different pasts. Filipino scholars have a domestic intellectual tradition shaped by the experience of successive colonial regimes, coming to terms with them while struggling for reforms, and, ultimately, independence. At the turn of the eighteenth century, for example, Filipino seminarians and priests were already grappling with issues of race and nationality in their struggle for equal treatment with the Spanish friars within the Catholic Church. By the 1880s, intellectuals shaped by the Enlightenment (and thus called ilustrados), such as Jose Rizal and Isabelo de Los Reyes, both based in Spain, were engaging with mainstream debates at that time in history and ethnography, including how the “indigenous” might be retrieved in the creation of a national identity. These late-nineteenth century scholars were also propagandists who campaigned for the establishment of racial equality and liberal governance in the colony and, later, took up varying positions in relation to the revolution against Spain and the intervention of the United States. This pattern — a parallel trajectory of scholarship and politics — would be repeated in the following century.

The process of simultaneously being formed by and contesting the political, social, and cultural hegemony of Spain and the United States, and to a lesser extent Japan, has made most Filipino intellectuals keenly aware of the dilemmas in positing pure forms of the “Western” or the “indigenous”, or the local versus the global. Filipinos, moreover, are not physically “fixed” themselves; their “nation” also travels to the nooks and crannies of the wider world they inhabit. The shifting locations — such as Spain, America, Japan, and Australia — from which they have voiced their political concerns, further complicates the identification of a domestic intellectual tradition. To some extent this pattern applies to my own career. Inspired by this forum's call to meditate on our personal intellectual trajectories as Southeast Asian scholars, I sketch in the pages that follow a narrative of my sojourns in the academic worlds of the Philippines, the United States, and Australia from roughly 1965 to 1995.