Books by Vicente L. Rafael

Vicente L. Rafael provides a complex account of how Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte uses humor, fear, misogyny, and violence to weaponize death as a means to control life.

Presents a cultural and political history of Filipinos and the Philippines. This title examines the period from the onset of US colonialism in 1898 to the emergence of a Filipino diaspora in the 1990s. It reveals how, under what circumstances, and with what effects the concept of the nation has been produced and deployed in the Philippines.

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.

In an innovative mix of history, anthropology, and post-colonial theory, Vicente L. Rafael examines the role of language in the religious conversion of the Tagalogs to Catholicism and their subsequent colonization during the early period (1580–1705) of Spanish rule in the Philippines. By tracing this history of communication between Spaniards and Tagalogs, Rafael maps the conditions that made possible both the emergence of a colonial regime and resistance to it. Originally published in 1988, this new paperback edition contains an updated preface that places the book in theoretical relation to other recent works in cultural studies and comparative colonialism.

A study of the effects of translation practices and historical writings in the Philippines on questions of nationalism