The Aesthetics of Diaspora within Colonial Field of Power: Elite Nationalism, Art and the Love to Die for

This paper explores the conditions of cultural production that enabled the invention of the Philippine nation from afar among literary and artistic diasporan elites in the metropolitan centres of Europe in the late nineteenth century. I draw together Bourdieu's analysis of the creation of the autonomous field of cultural production and Anderson's analysis of the origins of nationalism to demonstrate how affective and aesthetic investments in art and the nation enabled historically one group of people – the ilustrado (elite Filipino nationalist) – to overcome and exchange the estrangement and humiliations of race for national belonging and recognition in colonial fields of power. Doing so critically extends Bourdieu, moving beyond his methodological nationalism to foreground the racial hierarchies embedded in the making of the classed habitus and situate the aesthetics of diaspora within a translocal field of distinction.