Rafael, Vincente L.

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Rafael, Vincente L.

(Vincente Leuterio Rafael)

PERSONAL:

Born in Manila, Philippines; immigrated to United States, naturalized U.S. citizen. Education: Ateneo de Manila University, B.A. (magna cum laude), 1977; Cornell University, M.A., 1982, Ph.D., 1984.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of History, University of Washington, Smith Hall 315, Box 353560, Seattle, WA 98195-3560; fax: 206-543-9451. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer, editor, and educator. Ateneo de Manila University, lecturer, 1977-79; Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, teaching assistant, 1979-81; University of Hawaii at Manoa, assistant professor, 1984-88; University of California, San Diego, assistant professor, 1988-90, associate professor, 1990-2000, professor of communications, 2000-03; University of Washington, Seattle, professor of history, 2003—.

MEMBER:

Association for Asian Studies.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Cornell Graduate Fellowship Award, 1979-80; Cornell Southeast Asia Program Summer Fellowships, 1980, 1981, and 1984; Western Societies Program Summer Research Fellowship, Cornell University, 1981; Sage Graduate Fellowship Award, 1981-82; doctoral dissertation grant, Social Science Research Council/Ford Foundation and ACLS; Martin T. McVoy Graduate Fellowship, Cornell University, 1983-84; Lauriston Sharp Prize for Outstanding Dissertation, Cornell University, 1984; Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship, Stanford University, 1986-87; research and training award, University of Hawaii Research Council, 1987-88; National Book Award for History, Manila Critics' Circle, 1989, for Contracting Colonialism; Humanities Research Institute fellowship, 1992-93; visiting fellow, Program for Cultural Studies, East-West Center, Honolulu, HI, 1994; Luce Foundation grant, 1995; visiting research fellowship, Humanities Research Institute, University of California Irvine, 1997; residential fellowship, Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center, 1997; Andrews Visiting Chair in Asian Studies, University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1998; National Book Award for History, Manila Critics' Circle, 2000, for White Love and Other Events in Filipino History; Guggenheim fellowship, 2000-01; Simpson Humanities Center fellowship, University of Washington, 2004-05.

WRITINGS:

Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule, Ateno de Manila (Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines), 1988.

(Editor) Discrepant Histories: Translocal Essays on Filipino Cultures, Temple University Press (Philadelphia, PA), 1995.

(Editor, with others) Figures of Criminality in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Colonial Vietnam, Southeast Asia Program Publications, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University (Ithaca, NY), 1999.

White Love and Other Events in Filipino History, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 2000.

The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 2005.

Contributor to books, including Notebooks in Cultural Analysis, edited by Nathalia King and Norman F. Cantor, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 1986; The Cultures of United States Imperialism, edited by Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 1993; The Places of History: Regionalism Revisited in Latin America, edited by Doris Somer, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 1998; and Southeast Asian Studies for the Twenty-first Century, edited by Anthony Reid, Arizona State University (Tempe, AZ), 2004.

Contributor to periodicals, including Philippine Studies, Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs, Pilipinas, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Culture and History, Critical Inquiry, Diaspora, San Diego Union, Social Text, Cultural Anthropology, American Literature, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, Public Culture, American Historical Review, and Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies. Member of advisory board for Critical Asian Studies, Cultural Anthropology, Positions, and Public Culture.

SIDELIGHTS:

Author and history professor Vincente L. Rafael specializes in the history of Southeast Asia and the Philippines; comparative colonialism, especially in relation to Spain and the United States; and comparative nationalism. Rafael also studies and researches broadly in fields such as cultural anthropology, literary studies, and European continental policy, he reported on the University of Washington Web site. Widely published in scholarly journals and academic books, Rafael also writes on topics such as race and gender in U.S. popular culture; language, power, and subjectivity; and translation as social practice.

Discrepant Histories: Translocal Essays on Filipino Cultures contains ten essays, three of them original to the collection, on subjects related to the Philippines and the country's culture and ethnicity. "What these ten essays, by experts of varied nationality, have in common is a concern for subtle crosscultural exchanges continuing between former colonial powers (Spain, but more typically the United States) and the Filipino people," observed Leonard Caspar in a review in Pacific Affairs. Contributor Benedict Anderson, in what Journal of Southeast Asian Studies reviewer Niels Mulder called a "lucidly written" essay, looks at the origins of Cacique democracy in the Philippines. Warwick Anderson "demythologizes the benevolent intentions of American sanitation in his analysis of ‘Laboratory Medicine As Colonial Discourse,’" Mulder noted. Other topics include the writings of American colonial wives in the Philippines; studio photographs of middle-class Filipinos; the 1903 Philippine census; images and interpretations of notorious president Ferdinand Marcos and his First Lady, Imelda; and Philippine cartoons. Each subject is "examined for its underlying intellectual, emotional and visionary implications and for its ironic underside," commented John A. Larkin, writing in the Journal of Asian and African Studies. Larkin concluded that the book is a "fine collection, full of the astute observations of an adept commentator on Philippine culture. Rafael sets forth an agenda of topics for historical consideration that will be discussed by scholars of the Philippines for some time [to] come."

White Love and Other Events in Filipino History provides an expansive and diverse examination of Philippine history from 1898 to the present day. In eight analytical and critical essays, Rafael covers American colonialism in the Philippines, collaboration with the Japanese during the years of occupation, the Marcos dictatorship, the rise of the Tagalog/English hybrid language, Taglish; a comparison of Imelda Marcos with the sexy "bomba" (bombshell) starlets of the 1960s; and the role of domesticity and photography during the colonial days. The "discrete essays in this collection do form a sustained, even obsessive, interrogation of a set of tightly intertwined themes," remarked Andrew Abalahin in Pacific Affairs, including mass-produced images and the politics behind them and the psychology underlying individual and collective self-projection. Lino L. Dizon, writing in the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, called White Love and Other Events in Filipino History "an engaging, mind-boggling book that handles the Philippines with expertise." Abalahin concluded: "This collection does perform a great service by putting Filipino experience within the radar of postmodem theorists. Filipinists, other area specialists and social scientists will also encounter much fascinating information and enchanting analysis."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Journal of Asian and African Studies, July, 2003, John A. Larkin, review of White Love and Other Events in Filipino History, p. 122.

Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, September, 1999, Niels Mulder, review of Discrepant Histories: Translocal Essays on Filipino Cultures, p. 399; October, 2001, Lino L. Dizon, review of White Love and Other Events in Filipino History, p. 484.

Pacific Affairs, spring, 1996, Leonard Casper, review of Discrepant Histories, p. 135; summer, 2002, Andrew Abalahin, review of White Love and Other Events in Filipino History, p. 328.

Pacific Historical Review, August, 2003, Vina A. Lanzona, review of White Love and Other Events in Filipino History, p. 466.