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.

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.

Reviews
"Vincente Rafael's latest work, Motherless Tongues, brings an innovative perspective to the field of translation studies." -- Marianna Deganutti * Target *
"Motherless Tongues is a revelatory and lucid rejection of the delusions of control of language flows implicit in the work of many a translation studies scholar. Amidst the continued hegemony of research moulded by the reassuring stability of different types of social and ideological structures, Rafael's superbly written book illuminates the counterpoint: translation as site for the everyday expression of dissent, subversion and insurgency." -- Luis Perez-Gonzalez * The Translator *

"Motherless Tongues not only demonstrates what a rich ecosystem the Philippines is for thinking through translation, but also offers a new and productive way to think about the relationship between translation and language."

-- Jessica Gross * Journal of Asian Studies *
"Among the most notable aspects of the author's approach in Motherless Tongues is that it is scholarly, theoretically vivid, and, at the same time, deeply personal. . . . The world of Motherless Tongues is encouraging to a degree that is, perhaps, even beyond the author's intentions stated at the outset." -- William B. Noseworthy * Pacific Affairs *
"An excellent collection. . . . Rafael demonstrates that translation is a versatile and complex concept capable of producing both broad generalizations and intricately detailed historical arguments." -- Lanny Thompson * Journal of American History *
"[Rafael] is a perspicacious observer of culture whose discernments constantly open up new vistas." -- Ilan Stavans * Latin American Research Review *
"Motherless Tongues offers much to literary scholarship by way of its complex and detailed historiography. It places hegemonic and nonhegemonic languages in the same zone, street, and classroom to insist that there is always another story, another example. In doing so, it makes a strong case for limber models of literary scholarship that respond to multilingual zones of translation." -- Akshya Saxena * Cultural Critique *
"In this extraordinary collection of essays, anthropologist and historian Vicente L. Rafael offers the reader a fast-paced tour of the complex relationship between language, history, colonization, and war. . . . Rafael goes to considerable lengths to illustrate how the dexterity of language and the agility of translation are enormous assets, impervious to taming and domestication. He thinks like a poet and writes like a politician, fusing the best of oratorical forms to a rhetorical parsimony that ensures that his work is always an absolute pleasure to read." -- Mark Turin * Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute *



Book Information
ISBN 9780822360742
Author Vicente L. Rafael
Format Paperback
Page Count 272
Imprint Duke University Press
Publisher Duke University Press
Weight(grams) 386g