Vicente L Rafael
Biographic Data
| ID | 94269 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Vicente L Rafael |
| GIVEN NAMES | Vicente L |
| FAMILY NAME | Rafael |
| SIGNATURE | RAFAEL V L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Washington |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9638-6013 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 59 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 535 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 58 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1978 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
Indigeneity and the debts of settler translation
The title of this forum is “Translating Indigenous Languages”. But after reading the essay by Valerie Henitiuk and Marc-Antoine Mahieu (2023), it seemed to me that a more appropriate title might be
The Empire of Fashion
Journal Article The Empire of Fashion Get access Genevieve Alva Clutario. Beauty Regimes: A History of Power and Modern Empire in the Philippines, 1898–1941. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. 352 pp. $28.95 (paperback). Vicente L Rafael Vicente L Rafael [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Diplomatic History, dhad088, https://doi.org/10.1093/dh/dhad088 Published: 10 November 2023
Thinking with an Accent
Thinking with an Accent casts accent as a powerfully coded yet underexplored mode of perception shaping our global cultural economy. Theorizing accent as a mediatized object, an interdisciplinary method, and an embodied practice, this volume invites readers to think with an accent-to practice a dialogical, multisensorial inquiry that can yield transformative modalities of knowledge, action, and care
Thinking with an Accent
Cultural, and Critical Theory panel "Thinking, Making, and Doing with an Accent" (convened by Ragini and Reid Gómez), and the Global Anglophone Forum's "Accents of the Anglophone" panel at the 2023 MLA for welcoming us into their conversations, and for their terrific engagement with our work.As editors, the four of us have forged a tight bond.Co-editing an anthology and writing together, we have learned, is an exercise in trust.But trust, it turn…
Of Peninsulas and Archipelagos
The Electoral Paradox
In understanding the authoritarian character of Rodrigo Duterte's rule followed by the return of the Marcoses to power, it is important to situate both within the context of 'electoral dystopias' in the Philippines: the colonial and postcolonial history of democratic institutions deployed by rulers to produce undemocratic social effects. Elections thus look two ways: they seek to mobilise popular expectations for change even as they become instru…
Sovereign Trickster
Telling Times
Nick Joaquin (1917–2004) is often regarded as the greatest Filipino writer in English, yet he remains largely unknown outside his country. He published widely in all genres and was awarded the National Artist Award, yet he dropped out of high school and spent much of his youth holed up in libraries and walking Manila’s streets. He wrote some of his most powerful stories between the end of US colonial rule and the beginning of the postcolonial era…
The Sovereign Trickster
In our current moment, authoritarian figures loom large. One of them is Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. He seems to embody two notions of sovereignty. One is related to law, the other to norms: on the one hand, the power of taking exception to the former, deciding who will live and who will die; on the other hand, the freedom from the limits of the latter by way of dissipation, irresponsibility, and excess. This article explores the double …
Dominating the Vernacular
Photography and the Biopolitics of Fear
President Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war in the Philippines has exacted an enormous toll in human lives and suffering. This essay looks into one of the earliest and most graphic responses to this war: the work of photojournalists and the plurality of responses to their images. How does photojournalism become a kind of witnessing linked to the work of mourning? How are trauma and grieving braided together in the experience of photographers covering wa…
CFP
CFP: Politics of Language, Multilingualism, and Translation in American StudiesA Special Issue of American Quarterly (September 2021) Vicente L. Rafael and Mary Louise Pratt We are calling for contributions for a special issue on the politics of language, multilingualism, and translation broadly understood in American studies. Our overarching question is what difference does linguistic difference make in our—whoever we are—understanding of what c…
Contracting Colonialism
In Contracting Colonialism, Vicente L. Rafael examines the role of translation and conversion in the establishment of Spanish colonial rule in the Tagalog-speaking regions of the Philippines during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He argues that the Spanish project of converting the Tagalog population to Christianity was inextricably linked to the process of translating Tagalog oral culture into written forms, primarily through…
Hiroshima
The bombing of Hiroshima was one of the pivotal events of the twentieth century, yet this controversial question remains unresolved. At the time, General Dwight Eisenhower, General Douglas MacArthur, and chief of staff Admiral William Leahy all agreed that an atomic attack on Japanese cities was unnecessary. All of them believed that Japan had already been beaten and that the war would soon end. Was the bomb dropped to end the war more quickly? O…
Colonial Contractions
The origins of the Philippine nation-state can be traced to the overlapping histories of three empires that swept onto its shores: the Spanish, the North American, and the Japanese. This history makes the Philippines a kind of imperial artifact. Like all nation-states, it is an ineluctable part of a global order governed by a set of shifting power relationships. Such shifts have included not just regime change but also social revolution. The mode…
Subversive Lives
History and translation
The purpose of this conversation is to reflect on the inter/trans-disciplinary potential of translation as an object of historical research. This dialogue will be based on our respective experience in doing historical research on translation; in the case of Rundle from within translation studies and in the case of Rafael from within history. These divisions between disciplinary fields are necessarily foregrounded, given that the purpose of this c…
Motherless Tongues
In Motherless Tongues, Vicente L. Rafael examines the vexed relationship between language and history gleaned from the workings of translation in the Philippines, the United States, and beyond. Moving across a range of colonial and postcolonial settings, he demonstrates translation's agency in the making and understanding of events. These include nationalist efforts to vernacularize politics, U.S. projects to weaponize languages in wartime, and a…
Contingency and Comparison
Mutant Tongues
The War of Translation
This paper examines the role of language in nationalist attempts at decolonization. In the case of the Philippines, American colonial education imposed English as the sole medium of instruction. Native students were required to suppress their vernacular languages so that the classroom became the site for a kind of linguistic war, or better yet, the war of translation. Nationalists have routinely denounced the continued use of English as a morbid …
White Love and Other Events in Filipino History
Contracting Colonialism and the Long 1970s
How is it that a book published over twenty-five years ago dealing with a distant historical moment, consisting of a series of close readings of equally obscure texts that few scholars of even the same period bother to read and informed by a style of thinking largely foreign to nationalist ideas, continues to be read and referenced not only in the Philippines but in other parts of the world? This article seeks to answer this question by placing t…
Mis-education, Translation, and the Barkada of Languages
This paper re-visits the classic piece by Renato Constantino, “The Mis-education of the Filipino” (1959/1966), inquiring into the colonial basis of his anti-colonial critique of American English. It explores the affinity between his view of language and those of American colonial officials, especially around the relationship between English and the vernacular languages. Both conceived of that relationship in terms of a war of and on translation. …
The Contingencies of Area Studies in the United States
This essay offers a set of reflections on the of area studies in the post-Cold War era in the United States. Setting aside for the moment the institutional aspects of this crisis , it delves instead into the contingent and accidental ways by which practitioners of area studies in the U.S. encounter that which is foreign and distant, then subsequently seek to consolidate this encounter as an integral part of an intellectual and politico-ethical tr…
White Love and Other Events in Filipino History
The Cell Phone and the Crowd
Research Article| September 01 2003 The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Contemporary Philippines Vicente L. Rafael Vicente L. Rafael Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (2003) 15 (3): 399-425. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-3-399 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Vicente L. Rafael; The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic P…
The Cultures of Area Studies in the United States
Contracting Colonialism
In Contracting Colonialism, Vicente L. Rafael examines the role of translation and conversion in the establishment of Spanish colonial rule in the Tagalog-speaking regions of the Philippines during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He argues that the Spanish project of converting the Tagalog population to Christianity was inextricably linked to the process of translating Tagalog oral culture into written forms, primarily through…
Your Grief Is Our Gossip
Research Article| May 01 1997 "Your Grief Is Our Gossip": Overseas Filipinos and Other Spectral Presences Vicente L. Rafael Vicente L. Rafael Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1997) 9 (2): 267-291. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9-2-267 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permission…
Discrepant Histories
Taglish, or the Phantom Power of the Lingua Franca
Other| January 01 1995 Taglish, or the Phantom Power of the Lingua Franca Vicente L. Rafael Vicente L. Rafael Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1995) 8 (1): 101–126. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-8-1-101 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Vicente L. Rafael; Taglish, or the Phantom Power of the Lingua Franca. Public Culture 1 January 1995; 8 …
Maritime Asia, 1500-1800
The Sovereign Trickster
In our current moment, authoritarian figures loom large. One of them is Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte. He seems to embody two notions of sovereignty. One is related to law, the other to norms: on the one hand, the power of taking exception to the former, deciding who will live and who will die; on the other hand, the freedom from the limits of the latter by way of dissipation, irresponsibility, and excess. This article explores the double …
Patronage and Pornography
In the aftermath of the February 1986 'revolution' that forced Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos out of the Philippines, the government of Corazon Aquino turned the presidential palace, Malacañang, into a museum and in doing so meant to put the Marcoses legacy of excess on display. A guidebook on the presidential palace describes one instance of that excessiveness, in which the doors leading to the Grand Staircase are said to have 'depict[ed] the Phili…
Nationalism, Imagery, and the Filipino Intelligentsia in the Nineteenth Century
Colonial Domesticity
Confession, Conversion, and Reciprocity in Early Tagalog Colonial Society
If one were a Tagalog convert to Christianity in the seventeenth or early eighteenth century, one would have probably been compelled to go to confession at least once a year. Confronting the Spanish priest, one would be subjected to his anxious probing in the vernacular as he proceeded through a checklist of possible transgressions against each of the Ten Commandments. Such checklists in the local language, calledconfessionarios, were common thro…
Inventing a Hero
Thinking with an Accent
Cultural, and Critical Theory panel "Thinking, Making, and Doing with an Accent" (convened by Ragini and Reid Gómez), and the Global Anglophone Forum's "Accents of the Anglophone" panel at the 2023 MLA for welcoming us into their conversations, and for their terrific engagement with our work.As editors, the four of us have forged a tight bond.Co-editing an anthology and writing together, we have learned, is an exercise in trust.But trust, it turn…
Motherless Tongues
In Motherless Tongues, Vicente L. Rafael examines the vexed relationship between language and history gleaned from the workings of translation in the Philippines, the United States, and beyond. Moving across a range of colonial and postcolonial settings, he demonstrates translation's agency in the making and understanding of events. These include nationalist efforts to vernacularize politics, U.S. projects to weaponize languages in wartime, and a…
White Love and Other Events in Filipino History
White Love and Other Events in Filipino History, a collection of essays most of which are revisions of previously published materials, is “an episodic rather than epic account” of Philippine cultural history. Because twentieth century Philippine history has been intimately connected with the United States, the book is included in the publisher's American Encounters/Global Interactions series. Organized chronologically, the first three essays exam…
Targeting Translation
Much has been written about the vicissitudes of counterinsurgency as a crucial complement to counterterrorism in the US occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan since 2005. Such a strategy necessarily depends on the mastery of local languages by way of translation. This essay focuses on the military’s attempt to convert language, both its own and those of others, into a weapon of counterinsurgency. It delves into such tactics as the training of soldier…
Thinking with an Accent
Thinking with an Accent casts accent as a powerfully coded yet underexplored mode of perception shaping our global cultural economy. Theorizing accent as a mediatized object, an interdisciplinary method, and an embodied practice, this volume invites readers to think with an accent-to practice a dialogical, multisensorial inquiry that can yield transformative modalities of knowledge, action, and care
The Promise of the Foreign
In The Promise of the Foreign, Vicente L. Rafael argues that translation was key to the emergence of Filipino nationalism in the nineteenth century. Acts of translation entailed technics from which issued the promise of nationhood. Such a promise consisted of revising the heterogeneous and violent origins of the nation by mediating one's encounter with things foreign while preserving their strangeness. Rafael examines the workings of the foreign …
White love
1994). White love: Census and melodrama in the United States colonization of the philippines. History and Anthropology: Vol. 8, No. 1-4, pp. 265-297
Anticipating Nationhood
To come under colonial occupation is to live in a state of constant displacement. Under siege from the economic, military, and cultural forces of the metropole, a colonized people finds itself cons
Colonial Contractions
The origins of the Philippine nation-state can be traced to the overlapping histories of three empires that swept onto its shores: the Spanish, the North American, and the Japanese. This history makes the Philippines a kind of imperial artifact. Like all nation-states, it is an ineluctable part of a global order governed by a set of shifting power relationships. Such shifts have included not just regime change but also social revolution. The mode…
Of Mimicry and Marginality
Benedict Anderson, Comparatively Speaking
Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson, the Aaron L. Binenkorb Professor Emeritus of International Studies, Government, and Asian Studies at Cornell University and a member of the International Editorial Advisory Board of Philippine Studies, is one of the world's most influential thinkers. Born in Kunming, China, on 26 August 1936, Anderson's father was an official in the Imperial Maritime Customs in China and a Sinophile. An Irish citizen, Anderson …
From Mardicas to Filipinos
Confession, Conversion, and Reciprocity in Early Tagalog Colonial Society
If one were a Tagalog convert to Christianity in the seventeenth or early eighteenth century, one would have probably been compelled to go to confession at least once a year. Confronting the Spanish priest, one would be subjected to his anxious probing in the vernacular as he proceeded through a checklist of possible transgressions against each of the Ten Commandments. Such checklists in the local language, calledconfessionarios, were common thro…
Nationalism, Imagery, and the Filipino Intelligentsia in the Nineteenth Century
Patronage and Pornography
In the aftermath of the February 1986 'revolution' that forced Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos out of the Philippines, the government of Corazon Aquino turned the presidential palace, Malacañang, into a museum and in doing so meant to put the Marcoses legacy of excess on display. A guidebook on the presidential palace describes one instance of that excessiveness, in which the doors leading to the Grand Staircase are said to have 'depict[ed] the Phili…
Anticipating Nationhood
To come under colonial occupation is to live in a state of constant displacement. Under siege from the economic, military, and cultural forces of the metropole, a colonized people finds itself cons
Preface (1988)
Preface to the Paperback Edition
Contracting Colonialism
Power and Difference
Maritime Asia, 1500-1800
Of Mimicry and Marginality
The Cultures of Area Studies in the United States
White love
1994). White love: Census and melodrama in the United States colonization of the philippines. History and Anthropology: Vol. 8, No. 1-4, pp. 265-297
Colonial Domesticity
Taglish, or the Phantom Power of the Lingua Franca
Other| January 01 1995 Taglish, or the Phantom Power of the Lingua Franca Vicente L. Rafael Vicente L. Rafael Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1995) 8 (1): 101–126. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-8-1-101 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Vicente L. Rafael; Taglish, or the Phantom Power of the Lingua Franca. Public Culture 1 January 1995; 8 …
Filipino American Lives
Discrepant Histories
Your Grief Is Our Gossip
Research Article| May 01 1997 "Your Grief Is Our Gossip": Overseas Filipinos and Other Spectral Presences Vicente L. Rafael Vicente L. Rafael Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (1997) 9 (2): 267-291. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-9-2-267 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permission…
Inventing a Hero
Figures of Criminality in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Colonial Vietnam
A complex examination of "criminality" and "the criminal" as constructs and active presences in Southeast Asia. Contributors explore such themes as surveillance, incarceration, law and custom, secrecy, and corruption. A fascinating study of power and subversion in the modern postcolonial nation-state. Contributors include Daniel S. Lev, Henk M. J. Maier, Rudolf Mrazek, James T. Siegel, and others
Regionalism, Area Studies, and the Accidents of Agency
THERE IS LITTLE CERTAINTY AND LESS CONSENSUS, writes Celia Applegate, about the meaning of the word region where Europe is concerned, while in East Asia there is similarly a long and unsettled history of debating just what exactly counts as observes Karen Wigen. The fundamental ambiguity of the regional in both areas owes something to its historical role as a social diacritic. It sets off and distinguishes one place or people from another from th…
White Love and Other Events in Filipino History
White Love and Other Events in Filipino History, a collection of essays most of which are revisions of previously published materials, is “an episodic rather than epic account” of Philippine cultural history. Because twentieth century Philippine history has been intimately connected with the United States, the book is included in the publisher's American Encounters/Global Interactions series. Organized chronologically, the first three essays exam…
White Love
The Cell Phone and the Crowd
Research Article| September 01 2003 The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Contemporary Philippines Vicente L. Rafael Vicente L. Rafael Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Public Culture (2003) 15 (3): 399-425. https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-3-399 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Permissions Search Site Citation Vicente L. Rafael; The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic P…
The Promise of the Foreign
In The Promise of the Foreign, Vicente L. Rafael argues that translation was key to the emergence of Filipino nationalism in the nineteenth century. Acts of translation entailed technics from which issued the promise of nationhood. Such a promise consisted of revising the heterogeneous and violent origins of the nation by mediating one's encounter with things foreign while preserving their strangeness. Rafael examines the workings of the foreign …
History (35 works) · Political science (35 works) · Philippine History and Culture (34 works) · Law (29 works) · Sociology (29 works) · History (24 works) · Philosophy (21 works) · Art (20 works) · Politics (20 works) · Law (19 works)