A Book Review of "The Promise of the Foreign"

Abstract

The book "The Promise of the Foreign" is without doubt well-written and contributes to our understanding of the fundamental assumptions informing nationalist discourse, as well as the contradictions and complex realities at work in Philippine society. However, the book is arguably silent on how such translation can also be radicalized into an ethical technology or strategic pedagogy such that the foreign within various socio-political sites of analysis like the natives, masses, the Chinese are not just regarded as contaminations between the Philippines and the outside but rather as ambiguities that create the conditions of possibility of the nation-state and its efficacy as a symbolic and political force in everyday life.