Vicente L . Rafael | University of Washington (original) (raw)
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Papers by Vicente L . Rafael
Kritika Kultura, 2024
This essay takes its inspiration from a series of addresses given by the former slave and radical... more This essay takes its inspiration from a series of addresses given by the former slave and radical abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Douglass hailed the promise of photography to bring forth democratic modes of representation. He saw in photography the power to bring distances up close and level social hierarchies by revealing the common humanity of those below with those above. Douglass, however, hedged his optimistic view. He saw that the "vast power" of photography also came with great danger. It can reveal truth but it can also foster error depending on "the master we obey. " It is this double-edged power of photography that I explore, looking at the dialectical workings of photographic images along the following axis: portraiture, war, and civil rights and civil wrongs. And I do so comparatively, toggling between examples from the United States and its former colony, the Philippines. Finally, I ask how photography's social power linked to the notion of photography as a civil contract can at times produce surprising transformations, while at other moments stifle such changes.
Journal of Asian Studies, 2024
Philippine Studies, 1975
Schumacher's trenchant critique of Constantino's re-writing of Philippine history.
Cultural Politics during the Marcos Years and in the Age of Duterte, 2023
The Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte, 2022
This essay traces three reorientations in studies of the Philippines in the United States, in the... more This essay traces three reorientations in studies of the Philippines in the United States, in the wake of a critique regarding American orientalism in the late 1990s. The first is the rediscovery of the American empire at the heart of American national history and, by implication, of the buried significance of overseas colonies. Second is the renewed interest in comparisons between and among empires, colonies, and nationstates. Third is the emergence of "diaspora" as an analytical frame for understanding both filipino global migrations and filipino American cultural politics.
The purpose of this conversation is to reflect on the inter/trans-disciplinary potential of trans... more 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 collection is to focus on trans-disciplinarity; they are divisions that can stem from the actual department scholars belong to, from the research and discourse that informs their research, and from the academic community that they choose to address in their publications.
From Marcos to Duterte, we see a history of authoritarian modernity characterized by the dialecti... more From Marcos to Duterte, we see a history of authoritarian modernity characterized by the dialectic of biopower and necropower: the state's attempts to provide not just life but more than life for its citizens precisely in and through the exclusion and execution of those it regards as its social enemies. This chapter traces the emergence of neoliberal programs designed to produce disciplined subjects, but always under the shadow of counterinsurgency aimed at regulating dissent and killing the threats to the state's authority. [Note: This paper is an excerpt from Ch. 2 of my book, "The Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte", Duke U Press, 2022.s] Authoritarian Modernities One way of situating Duterte is to see his rise to power as part of a long historical arc that begins with the downfall of the Marcos dictatorship in 1986. After ruling for nearly two decades, Marcos was overthrown by a civilian-backed coup supported by the United States, encouraged by the Catholic Church and the US government, and with the massive participation of Filipinos from all classes, led by elites, mostly in Metro Manila. The early accounts of what came to be known as "People Power" or the EDSA uprising (named after the main highway, Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, where it occurred) was that it marked the toppling of a brutal dictatorship that had used the instruments of the state to plunder the economy while repressing dissent. By forcing Marcos and his family to flee, the Filipino people, through non-violent means, restored liberal democracy. This narrative, however, is only partly true. As other scholars have pointed out, People Power, while succeeding in ending the dictatorship, left many of the institutions and
Kritika Kultura, 2024
This essay takes its inspiration from a series of addresses given by the former slave and radical... more This essay takes its inspiration from a series of addresses given by the former slave and radical abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Douglass hailed the promise of photography to bring forth democratic modes of representation. He saw in photography the power to bring distances up close and level social hierarchies by revealing the common humanity of those below with those above. Douglass, however, hedged his optimistic view. He saw that the "vast power" of photography also came with great danger. It can reveal truth but it can also foster error depending on "the master we obey. " It is this double-edged power of photography that I explore, looking at the dialectical workings of photographic images along the following axis: portraiture, war, and civil rights and civil wrongs. And I do so comparatively, toggling between examples from the United States and its former colony, the Philippines. Finally, I ask how photography's social power linked to the notion of photography as a civil contract can at times produce surprising transformations, while at other moments stifle such changes.
Journal of Asian Studies, 2024
Philippine Studies, 1975
Schumacher's trenchant critique of Constantino's re-writing of Philippine history.
Cultural Politics during the Marcos Years and in the Age of Duterte, 2023
The Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte, 2022
This essay traces three reorientations in studies of the Philippines in the United States, in the... more This essay traces three reorientations in studies of the Philippines in the United States, in the wake of a critique regarding American orientalism in the late 1990s. The first is the rediscovery of the American empire at the heart of American national history and, by implication, of the buried significance of overseas colonies. Second is the renewed interest in comparisons between and among empires, colonies, and nationstates. Third is the emergence of "diaspora" as an analytical frame for understanding both filipino global migrations and filipino American cultural politics.
The purpose of this conversation is to reflect on the inter/trans-disciplinary potential of trans... more 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 collection is to focus on trans-disciplinarity; they are divisions that can stem from the actual department scholars belong to, from the research and discourse that informs their research, and from the academic community that they choose to address in their publications.
From Marcos to Duterte, we see a history of authoritarian modernity characterized by the dialecti... more From Marcos to Duterte, we see a history of authoritarian modernity characterized by the dialectic of biopower and necropower: the state's attempts to provide not just life but more than life for its citizens precisely in and through the exclusion and execution of those it regards as its social enemies. This chapter traces the emergence of neoliberal programs designed to produce disciplined subjects, but always under the shadow of counterinsurgency aimed at regulating dissent and killing the threats to the state's authority. [Note: This paper is an excerpt from Ch. 2 of my book, "The Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte", Duke U Press, 2022.s] Authoritarian Modernities One way of situating Duterte is to see his rise to power as part of a long historical arc that begins with the downfall of the Marcos dictatorship in 1986. After ruling for nearly two decades, Marcos was overthrown by a civilian-backed coup supported by the United States, encouraged by the Catholic Church and the US government, and with the massive participation of Filipinos from all classes, led by elites, mostly in Metro Manila. The early accounts of what came to be known as "People Power" or the EDSA uprising (named after the main highway, Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, where it occurred) was that it marked the toppling of a brutal dictatorship that had used the instruments of the state to plunder the economy while repressing dissent. By forcing Marcos and his family to flee, the Filipino people, through non-violent means, restored liberal democracy. This narrative, however, is only partly true. As other scholars have pointed out, People Power, while succeeding in ending the dictatorship, left many of the institutions and
[Note: Coming in April 2016, Duke Univ. Press.] Motherless Tongues examines the vexed relationsh... more [Note: Coming in April 2016, Duke Univ. Press.] Motherless Tongues examines the vexed relationship between language and history, so palpable in the conflicted workings of translation in the Philippines, the United States and elsewhere. Crisscrossing various colonial and postcolonial terrains, this book considers the different ways by which translation has played an important, if overlooked, role in setting the conditions for thinking about particular imperial and national events. Such events include nationalist and revolutionary attempts to vernacularize politics, imperial deployments of linguistic difference as a weapons system in the “wars against terror,” and the translation of lives among area studies scholars in the midst and in the wake of the Cold War. Mapping those areas and moments where linguistic exchange and historical imagination give rise to one another, this book traces the ways by which translation simultaneously sustains and subverts regimes of knowledge and relations of power.
What follows are excerpts from my book, The Promise of the Foreign, published by Duke Univ. Press... more What follows are excerpts from my book, The Promise of the Foreign, published by Duke Univ. Press. It comprises the second volume of my first book, Contracting Colonialism. Here's the description of the book:
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 in the Filipinos’ fascination with Castilian, the language of the Spanish colonizers. In Castilian, Filipino nationalists saw the possibility of arriving at a lingua franca with which to overcome linguistic, regional, and class differences. Yet they were also keenly aware of the social limits and political hazards of this linguistic fantasy.
Through close readings of nationalist newspapers and novels, the vernacular theater, and accounts of the 1896 anticolonial revolution, Rafael traces the deep ambivalence with which elite nationalists and lower-class Filipinos alike regarded Castilian. The widespread belief in the potency of Castilian meant that colonial subjects came in contact with a recurring foreignness within their own language and society. Rafael shows how they sought to tap into this uncanny power, seeing in it both the promise of nationhood and a menace to its realization. Tracing the genesis of this promise and the ramifications of its betrayal, Rafael sheds light on the paradox of nationhood arising from the possibilities and risks of translation. By repeatedly opening borders to the arrival of something other and new, translation compels the nation to host foreign presences to which it invariably finds itself held hostage. While this condition is perhaps common to other nations, Rafael shows how its unfolding in the Philippine colony would come to be claimed by Filipinos, as would the names of the dead and their ghostly emanations.
In this wide-ranging cultural and political history of Filipinos and the Philippines, Vicente L. ... more In this wide-ranging cultural and political history of Filipinos and the Philippines, Vicente L. Rafael examines the period from the onset of U.S. colonialism in 1898 to the emergence of a Filipino diaspora in the 1990s. Self-consciously adopting the essay form as a method with which to disrupt epic conceptions of Filipino history, Rafael treats in a condensed and concise manner clusters of historical detail and reflections that do not easily fit into a larger whole. White Love and Other Events in Filipino History is thus a view of nationalism as an unstable production, as Rafael reveals how, under what circumstances, and with what effects the concept of the nation has been produced and deployed in the Philippines.
With a focus on the contradictions and ironies that suffuse Filipino history, Rafael delineates the multiple ways that colonialism has both inhabited and enabled the nationalist discourse of the present. His topics range from the colonial census of 1903-1905, in which a racialized imperial order imposed by the United States came into contact with an emergent revolutionary nationalism, to the pleasures and anxieties of nationalist identification as evinced in the rise of the Marcos regime. Other essays examine aspects of colonial domesticity through the writings of white women during the first decade of U.S. rule; the uses of photography in ethnology, war, and portraiture; the circulation of rumor during the Japanese occupation of Manila; the reproduction of a hierarchy of languages in popular culture; and the spectral presence of diasporic Filipino communities within the nation-state. A critique of both U.S. imperialism and Filipino nationalism, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History creates a sense of epistemological vertigo in the face of former attempts to comprehend and master Filipino identity.
This volume should become a valuable work for those interested in Southeast Asian studies, Asian-American studies, postcolonial studies, and cultural studies.
Border Crossings: Translation Studies and other disciplines, Sep 16, 2016
The purpose of this conversation is to reflect on the inter/trans-disciplinary potential of trans... more 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 collection is to focus on trans-disciplinarity; they are divisions that can stem from the actual department scholars belong to, from the research and discourse that informs their research, and from the academic community that they choose to address in their publications.
![Research paper thumbnail of การสารภาพบาป การเปลี่ยนรีต และการต่างตอบแทนในสังคมตากาล็อกต้นยุคอาณานิคมสเปน [Vicente L. Rafael, "Confession, Conversion, and Reciprocity in Early Tagalog Colonial Society"] (Thai)](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/58264377/thumbnails/1.jpg)
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An essay comparing photographic practices in the US and the Philippines along three axis: portrai... more An essay comparing photographic practices in the US and the Philippines along three axis: portraiture, war and civil rights/civil wrongs.