Synopses & Reviews
Review
andquot;In this rich compendium, Vicente L. Rafael continues to teach us how to think about the long, unpredictable afterlives of empireandmdash;their entangled, translingual socioscapes, their webs of attraction, their insurgent, untameable energies. His pages are populated by intellects of remarkable imagination and insight, including above all, his own.andquot;
Review
andquot;Motherless Tongues presents the most compelling and deft analyses of the role of translation in the contexts of revolution, revolt, war, and empire in the Philippines and the United States. No work of this kind brings the Philippines and the United States together with its singular attention to the politics of translation, nor with the kind of deep linguistic and cultural fluency that Vicente L. Rafael possesses. A significant figure in translation studies, Rafael is positioned to open new pathways to thinking about what translation brings to light in the contemporary moment.andquot;
Synopsis
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 autobiographical attempts by area studies scholars to translate the otherness of their lives amid the Cold War. In all cases, translation is at war with itself, generating divergent effects. It deploys as well as distorts American English in counterinsurgency and colonial education, for example, just as it re-articulates European notions of sovereignty among Filipino revolutionaries in the nineteenth century and spurs the circulation of text messages in a civilian-driven coup in the twenty-first. Along the way, Rafael delineates the untranslatable that inheres in every act of translation, asking about the politics and ethics of uneven linguistic and semiotic exchanges. Mapping those moments where translation and historical imagination give rise to one another, Motherless Tongues shows how translation, in unleashing the insurgency of language, simultaneously sustains and subverts regimes of knowledge and relations of power.
Synopsis
In Motherless Tongues Vicente L. Rafael examines the vexed relationship between language and history as seen through the work of translation in the context of empire, revolution, and academic scholarship in the Philippines, the United States, and beyond.
About the Author
Vicente L. Rafael is Professor of History at the University of Washington. His books include The Promise of the Foreign, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History, and Contracting Colonialism, all also published by Duke University Press.