Vicente L. Rafael

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 regional, 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 the point of view of a third, a setting off that also involves the deployment of such temporal markers as classical, feudal, or modern. As both essays make clear, the region is that which can alternately or simultaneously appear in various guises: politically as an administrative unit, culturally as an ethnic enclave or linguistic community, economically as zones of production and exchange. It is that which figures the local, the parochial, and the particular in contrast to the national, the cosmopolitan, and the general. As such, it has tended to be seen as backward if not reactionary from the vantage point of the nation-state and urban elites. Yet it has also been valorized as the locus of civilizational authenticity and nostalgic longings, the location of a desirable otherness rendered exotic and available for sacralization as well as commodification. The regional, then, has been neither just symbolic nor just material but both at the same time, circulating in the imagination as much as in the marketplace. For this reason, it has served in a prosthetic capacity as the essential supplement of post-Enlightenment and postcolonial modernity. In any and all cases, the regional only comes into view comparatively: vertically related to that which seeks to maintain and subsume it, such as the empire, the nation-state, or the metropole; and horizontally in a relation of complementarity and conflict with other regions. Rather than think of regions as sovereign or autonomous entities, Applegates and Wigens essays suggest the historical persistence of regimes of regionalities: ways of making and unmaking the peripheral relative to the core, thus practices of locating and relocating the local that are constitutive of and never merely additive to the centers of power. The practice of spacing implied by regionalisms, however, has also complicated the claims of powerful centers. The indefiniteness of its ontology, the porousness of its borders, and the mobility of its geographical location have made the regional ineluctably unstable and arguably destabilizing. Thus has it also furnished sites for surprising insurrections and recalcitrant alterities. For whatever else the local might seem in various discourses of regionalism, it acts to designate some other place,

Betraying empire: Translation and the ideology of conquest

In a bid to prompt discussion of the engagement of translation studies with issues of politics and language ideologies, this article compares the practice of translation between the Spanish Habsburg and contemporary US empires. It focuses on what they have in common – an enduring attachment to logocentrism, or a metaphysics of the sign – and shows how the practice of translation alternately enables and disables this metaphysic from functioning in such disparate areas as Christian conversion, counter-insurgent warfare and the work of the Summer Institute of Linguistics.

Translation and the US empire: counterinsurgency and the resistance of language

Abstract In recent years, much has been written about the revival of counterinsurgency as the preferred strategy of the United States-led forces in their ‘global war on terror’. Such a strategy necessarily requires knowledge of the local languages and cultures. This essay focuses on the US military’s attempts to deploy language as a weapon of war through the strategic deployment of translation practices in consolidating military occupation. It looks into such tactics as the training of soldiers in foreign languages, the development of automatic translation systems, and the protocols for expropriating the mediating power of native interpreters. The essay also inquires into the limits and contradictions of such tactics and their implications for the success or failure of counterinsurgency. Finally, it asks whether there are other ways in which translation works in war time that tend to evade the militarization of speech.

Welcoming What Comes: Sovereignty and Revolution in the Colonial Philippines

After more than three hundred years of colonial rule, Filipinos began a revolution against the Spanish empire in August of 1896. By June of 1898, revolutionary forces had managed to overwhelm the Spaniards who were already reeling from the destruction of their navy in the initial days of their war with the United States and had been fatally weakened by the decade-long revolution in Cuba. In the Philippines, a Revolutionary government was formed under the dictatorship of Emilio Aguinaldo. It declared independence, convened a convention to write a constitution and briefly succeeded in forming a Republic led by the wealthiest men of the archipelago by January of 1899. But by February, Filipinos were engulfed in a new war against an emergent U.S. empire that was to last through much of the first decade of the twentieth century, leading to U.S. colonization of the Philippines until 1941.

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 the making of Contracting Colonialism within the context of the long 1970s in both the Philippines and the United States.

Mis-education, Translation, and the Barkada of Languages: Reading Renato Constantino with Nick Joaquin

This paper re-visits the classic piece by Renato Constantino, “The Mis-education ofxa0the Filipino” (1959/1966), inquiring into the colonial basis of his anti-colonial critiquexa0of American English. It explores the affinity between his view of language and those ofxa0American colonial officials, especially around the relationship between English and thexa0vernacular languages. Both conceived of that relationship in terms of a war of and onxa0translation. It then turns to an important but overlooked essay by Nick Joaquin publishedxa0around the same time as Constantino’s, “The Language of the Streets” (1963). By closelyxa0considering Joaquin’s views on “Tagalog slang” as the basis for a national language, wexa0can see a different politics of language at work, one based not on translation as war butxa0as play. Whereas Constantino was concerned with language as the medium for revealingxa0the historical truth of nationhood that would lead to democratizing society, Joaquin wasxa0more interested in the conversion of history into language as a way of expanding literaryxa0democracy.

Response by Rafael to the responses to “Betraying Empire: Translation and the Ideology of Conquest”

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Rev. John N. Schumacher SJ, 1927–2014

Fr. John N. Schumacher SJ died on 14 May 2014, thirty-four days short of his 87th birthday. Born in Buffalo, New York, on 17 June 1927, Father Schumacher entered the Society of Jesus on 30 July 1944, arriving in the Philippines four years later to undertake philosophical studies at the Sacred Heart Novitiate. From 1951 to 1954 he taught English and Latin and served as Prefect of Discipline at the Sacred Heart He returned to the United States to pursue Theology at Woodstock College. He was ordained to the priesthood on 22 June 1957. Fascinated by Rizal, he went on to pursue a doctorate at Georgetown University. He returned to the Philippines in 1964 and became part of the pioneer faculty of the Loyola House of Studies, which would become the Loyola School of Theology, where he devoted over forty years to impart church history to generations of Jesuits, seminarians, and students. Father Jack, as he was known, took his oath as a Filipino citizen in 1977. In 1998, on the centenary of Philippine independence, he received the Ateneo de Manila University’s Gawad Tanglaw ng Lahi.

Empire and Globalization: On the Recent Study of the Philippines in the United States

This short paper traces two of the more important developments in the study of the Philippines in the United States in the wake of critiques regarding American Orientalism in the late 1990s. The first is a rediscovery of the American empire at the heart of US national history, and by implication, of the buried significance of overseas coloniesxa0to metropolitan developments. Second is the emergence of robust cultural critiques of globalization from the perspective of those who have been globalized from below. The paper talks these developments with reference to Paul Kramer’s Blood of Government and Neferti Tadiar’s Things Fall Away, books that mark critically important advances not only in Philippine Studies in the US, but of American Studies in the age of imperial globalization.

Scenes of Translation: Responses to Responses

In his “Response to Responses,” Vicente Rafael thanks and answers the questions raised during the forum. To Garyxa0Devilles’s comment of his “remaining silent” in the way translation can be “radicalized into an ethical technologyxa0or a strategic pedagogy,” Rafael offers the trope of revenge—a desire for justice, which results from the Spanishxa0misrecognition of Filipino attempts at translation—and the language of secrecy and solidarity of the 1896xa0Revolution—which results from the failure of Castilian to become lingua franca—as political technics in themselves.xa0To Ramon Guillermo’s comment of the book’s impoverished, restrictive, and imprecise notions of translation, Rafaelxa0reiterates and contends his multivalent conception of translation: always doubled and open-ended; dialectical andxa0dialogical; “that which is new and for this reason yet to be assimilated and understood;” in sum, “that which is alwaysxa0inside and outside, eccentric yet inherent to the social order,” constitutive as well as disruptive. To Remmon Barbaza’sxa0Heideggerian reading, Rafael thankfully re-emphasizes the recurrent motif of the foreign as call and the affinity ofxa0this with the foreign as promise. Finally, to Roland Tolentino’s “disconcerting” series of questions, Vince Rafael warnsxa0against the fetishization of translation when detached from its particularity, and its envisagement as “the subjugationxa0of the other in order to realize one’s sense of self, a self predicated on the mastery of the other’s discourse.”