I

first met Ben Anderson in 1979 when I began my graduate work at Cornell. He invited me to his home for dinner some 20 miles from Ithaca in a town improbably called Freeville—once the location of a juvenile detention facility called the George Junior Republic that had been the model for the Iwahig Penal Colony in the Philippines. Appropriately enough for Ben—a connoisseur of irony—his home used to be the warden's who had to leave town hurriedly because of some scandal.[1] My office was directly above his in an old house that served as the site for the Modern Indonesia Project, more commonly known as 102 West Avenue by its denizens. It was a former fraternity house whose members had been kicked out of campus for some transgression, so we were essentially in frat row. The chairs and tables were scarred and stained with cigarette burns and coffee cups, the doors were cracked, the stairs creaked and the parts of the balustrade at times came off as you held on to them. Faculty, students and visiting professors worked in various offices, often late into the night, meeting during evening seminars and weekly brown bags featuring speakers ranging from diplomats to foreign scholars. In the summers, the frat boys sunbathed on the roofs, held beer balloon wars and played very loud rock and roll around us. The basement was full of boxes of file folders, which I always thought were Ben’s research notes, turning the place into a veritable firetrap. 102 West Ave., in short, was an ideal place to work. It’s ramshackle quality lent to it the feel of a refugee camp: precarious, resistant to domestication, but also ripe with insurgent possibilities. At 102, unexpected connections grew into friendships that led people into paths other than those they thought they had embarked on. Its informal atmosphere allowed for explorations of all sorts that deconstructed and deviated from the disciplinary formations that fixed and fixated many of us. Firmly but gently, Ben—sitting in his office, presiding over seminars, asking questions that always surprised and dis-oriented—served as the tutelary spirit of 102.

One of the things that drew me, and doubtless many others, to Ben was his style of thinking. He readily admitted that he was neither a theorist nor really a political scientist. He shied away from fashionable labels such as post-structuralist or post-colonialist, and the classicist in him, with its love for lexical precision and rhetorical economy, abhorred the theoretical hyper-ventilation and logorrhea that often plagues the American academy. More likely, he would have preferred to be called a historian and a novelist, both of which are closely related to one another.

As a historian-novelist, Ben was drawn to the contingent constellations of people and events, reveling in their surprising and unexpected juxtapositions. All of these generated not only alternative and parallel universes to what had happened; they also opened up doors into worlds that could have happened. In other words, for Ben, thinking entailed recuperating those events and imaginings that had to be repressed in the making of dominant realities.

An important feature to Ben’s historical-novelist approach is the practice of comparison. Indeed, for Ben, comparison was less a method than what he called a “discursive strategy” (see Anderson, 2016: 15-18). It entailed developing a keen awareness of “strangeness and absence,” thereby opening oneself up to what he called, borrowing from Jose Rizal, the “specters of comparison.” The effectiveness of comparisons could be gauged by the “surprise” they produced—or what Benjamin might call shock effects, catching readers “off guard” by their unexpected juxtapositions among different sites or longitudinal arcs within the same site (see Anderson, 2016: 17-18). How did this discourse of comparison prove so generative? Here’s an example: Ben’s opening paragraphs to his review of Soledad Locsin’s translation of the Noli me tangere:

Few countries give the observer a deeper feeling of historical vertigo than the Philippines. Seen from Asia, the armed uprising against Spanish rule of 1896, which triumphed temporarily with the establishment of an independent republic in 1898, makes it the visionary forerunner of all the other anti-colonial movements in the region. Seen from Latin America, it is, with Cuba, the last of the Spanish imperial possessions to have thrown off the yoke, seventy-five years after the rest. Profoundly marked, after three and a half centuries of Spanish rule, by Counter-Reformation Catholicism, it was the only colony in the Empire where the Spanish language never became widely understood. But it was also the only colony in Asia to have had a university in the 19th century. In the 1890s barely 3 percent of the population knew ‘Castilian’, but it was Spanish-readers and writers who managed to turn movements of resistance to colonial rule from hopeless peasant uprisings into a revolution. Today, thanks to American imperialism, and the Philippines’ new self-identification as ‘Asian’, almost no one other than a few scholars understands the language in which the revolutionary heroes communicated among themselves and with the outside world—to say nothing of the written archive of pre-20th-century Philippine history. A virtual lobotomy has taken place (Anderson, 1997: 22).

Comparison in Ben’s hands was meant to provoke the re-thinking of received ideas beyond accepted boundaries. In the passage above, we see how he re-introduces the Philippines to the metropolitan readers of the London Review of Books, then later to middle-class Filipinos and other Southeast Asians, by re-positioning it in terms of vast world historical forces. The sense of vertigo he invokes arises from grasping the country’s history emerging from the great historical tides washing over one corner of the globe to the other. Unexpected chain reactions result in unforeseen cascades of change that resonate and reverberate through the archipelago, rippling in turn to other parts of the world. History emerges here as a phantasmagoria of possibilities—inflecting, de-centering, and displacing one another. Reading Ben, one begins the to feel the Philippines as a tenuous collection of sites ready to come apart and come together in new ways.

This, in my opinion, is the basis for Ben’s genius. By pursuing such comparisons—or better yet, opening himself to being possessed by their returning ghosts—he leads us to see what is often so obvious and, for that reason, remains invisible in front of our own eyes. His greatness as a scholar and as a teacher lay in his ability to poke and probe underneath layers of mystifications and the garbage of half-truths covered over by the habits of intellectual laziness and moral cowardice. At the same time, he was always alert to other possibilities that come through the inverted telescopes of time: the distant connections waiting to be made—Rizal with Maltatuli, Isabelo de los Reyes with Malatesta, Sukarno with Hitler, for example. Out of these improbable and surprising relays of rumors, gossip, jokes, novels, testimonies, newspaper articles, government reports, census surveys—these massive and promiscuous mixing of texts and tales, works and lives—Ben led us, cajoled us, prompted and forced us to see the world differently, to imagine yet again the history of futures yet to come.

His death continues to be deeply mourned by untold others. As his close friend Jim Siegel (2015) wrote:

“An obituary conventionally names the deceased’s ‘contributions’ as if they have been laid to rest, to be revived when necessary. Careful readers of Anderson’s works will find themselves revived, living members of an organization without a form, joined in unimagined solidarity with others unknown to themselves.”

Notes

[1] For a history of the Iwahig Penal colony modeled after the George Junior Republic in Freeville, see Salman (2009: 116-129). The information on Ben’s house comes from a personal e-mail correspondence, 2010.

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References

Anderson B (2016) Frameworks of Comparison. London Review of Books 38(2): 15-18.

Anderson B (1997) First Filipino. London Review of Books 19(20): 22-23.

Salman M (2009) ‘The Prison That Makes Men Free’: The Iwahig Penal Colony and the Simulacra of the American State in the Philippines. In: McCoy AW and Scarano Francisco A (eds) Colonial Crucible Empire in the Making of the Modern American State. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Siegel JT (2015) A Necrology of Ben Anderson. Jakarta Post, December 19.