Revolutionary Spirit

Like his great contemporaries Sun Yat-sen and Mohandas K. Gandhi, the Philippine patriot and polymath JOSE RIZAL (1861-1896) helped write the history of freedom in Asia. His two subversive novels and an immortal last poem helped inspire the first nationalist revolution on the continent and led to the founding of the first Asian republic. But what was Rizal’s impact on the nationalist awakening in Southeast Asia? REVOLUTIONARY SPIRIT argues that by infusing a revolutionary spirit into the struggle to create a Philippine nation in the late 19th century, Rizal ended up invigorating Indonesian nationalism and Malaysian scholarship, regional political discourse and world literature, in the 20th—and remains must reading in the 21st.