Guiang, Francisco Jayme Paolo A. 2021. “Nationalism in History Writing: Revisiting Teodoro A. Agoncillo and the Nationalists After Him”, Pingkian: Journal for Emancipatory and Anti-Imperialist Education 6(1): 32-45.
Abstract
This paper revisits nationalist historiography by interrogating the ideas of Teodoro A. Agoncillo who is often regarded as one of the leading postwar nationalist historians. By foregrounding Agoncillo’s early years – his education and the milieu that shaped his consciousness, this paper intends to contextualize and explain his position on nationalism, national consciousness, historical bias, and partisanship which are discussed in some of his important essays. Furthermore, this research also explores how Agoncillo’s ideas may have influenced other nationalist scholars namely, Renato Constantino and Jose Maria Sison. In doing so, the popularity of nationalist history writing in the 1960s to the 1970s could be explained, as in the case of Sison’s Philippine Society and Revolution (1970) and Constantino’s The Philippines: A Past Revisited (1975) which underpinned the needs of a radicalized Philippine society at that time. Though nationalist historiography began even before Agoncillo, this paper underscores that the historian along with other nationalist scholars aforementioned were crucial in developing the nationalist tradition in history writing.
Keywords: nationalist historiography, nationalism, partisanship, historical consciousness, ideology
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