REVIEWS | CONTENTS | AUTHOR BIO | SUBJECT CATEGORIES
Postcolonial issues of identity, social control, power, representation, and culture
Discrepant Histories
Translocal Essays on Filipino Cultures
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edited by Vicente L. Rafael
"[A] valuable corrective to the official American history of its colonial occupation of the Philippines. The essays, by both Western and Philippine scholars, range over a wide array of topics, from concepts of Philippine democracy to the symbolic value of gay beauty pageants."
—Asia Week
This collection brings together essays on the Philippines written in the wake of the Cold War and the Marcos regime. Cross-disciplinary by vocation and affiliated by their common engagement with the intersections of power, representation, and agency, the contributors probe the discrepant histories that underlie the formation of the Philippine nation-state and translocal Filipino cultures: the mestizo social hierarchy, colonial medicine, penal colonies, nationalist desire, diasporic literatures, gay beauty pageants, ideas of everyday violence, and state bulimia in the age of global capitalism.
As Filipinos and non-Filipinos, these writers are alert to and intimate with the distance and difference of their own object of study; they intend their essays on the Philippines to translate, localize, and reassess the stakes in current debates around the study of colonial modernity, nationalism, and postcoloniality.
Reviews
"Rafael’s well-crafted introduction [has] imaginative power and visionary focus…there is substantial knowledge to be gained from it about, among other things, American colonialism in the Philippines, bakla subcultures, and Filipino joking and humour [sic]."
—Inter-Asia Cultural Studies
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Writing Outside: On the Question of Location – Vicente L. Rafael
Part I: The Routes of Power
1. Cacique Democracy in the Philippines: Origins and Dreams – Benedict Anderson
Part II: Technologies of Colonial Rule
2. Cholera and the Origins of the American Sanitary Order in the Philippines – Reynaldo Ileto
3. "Where Every Prospect Pleases Only Man Is Vile": Laboratory Medicine and Colonial Discourse – Warwick Anderson
4. "Nothing Without Labor": Penology, Discipline and Independence in the Philippines under United States Rule – Michael Salman
Part III: Nationalism and Diaspora
5. Nationalism, Imagery and the Filipino Intelligentsia of the Nineteenth Century – Vicente L. Rafael
6. Filipinos in the United States and Their Literatures of Exile – Oscar Campomanes
7. Speaking of AIDS: Language and the Filipino 'Gay' Experience in America – Martin Manalansan
Part IV: The Aesthetics and Politics of the Everyday
8. The Power of Appearances: Beauty, Mimicry and Transformation in Bicol – Fennella Cannell
9. Ideas on Philippine Violence: Narrations, Negations and Assertions – Jean Paul Dumont
10. Manila's New Metropolitan Forms – Neferti Xina Tadiar
Index
About the Author(s)
 | Vicente L. Rafael teaches in the History Department at the University of Washington, Seattle. |
Contributors: Benedict Anderson, Warwick Anderson, Oscar Campomanes, Fenella Cannell, Jean-Paul Dumont, Reynaldo Ileto, Martin Manalansan IV, Michael Salman, Neferti Xiua Tadiar, and the editor.
Subject Categories
Asian American Studies
Race and Ethnicity
Asian Studies
In the series
Asian American History and Culture, edited by Sucheng Chan, David Palumbo-Liu, Michael Omi, K. Scott Wong, and Linda Trinh Võ.
The "standard" written histories of Asian immigrants to the United States have been imbued with Western cultural biases. As a critique and corrective to earlier work, Asian American History and Culture, edited by Sucheng Chan, David Palumbo-Liu, Michael Omi, K. Scott Wong, and Linda Trinh Võ, aims to develop a history of Asian Americans that is compatible with their own experience, that treats Asian Americans as agents of historical change and as creators of a new culture. In addition, this series intends to focus on the groups that are flourishing in the contemporary U.S.—Filipinos, Koreans, Vietnamese—about whom little has been written as well as to add to the substantial work done on the Chinese and Japanese in this country.