The Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Theage of Duerte

Professor Vicente L. Rafaelin conversation with Professor John Gershman, NYU Wagner

Vicente L. Rafael is Professor of History and Southeast Asian studies at the University of Washington and author of The Sovereign Trickster (Duke University Press, 2022). He is also the author of Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language amid Wars of Translation ;The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines; White Love Events in Filipino History
; and Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion inTagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule, all also published by Duke University Press.

Rafael weaves together topics ranging from the drug war, policing, and extrajudicial killings to neoliberal citizenship, intimacy, and photojournalism to examine what Duterte does: how he rules, the rhetoric of his humor, his use of obscenity to stoke fear, and his projection of masculinity and misogyny. By diagnosing the symptoms of the authoritarian imaginary as it circulates in the Philippines, Rafael provides a complex

Sponsored by:
Sulo: the Philippine Studies Initiative at NYU
New York Southeast Asia Network
Nordic Institute of Asian Studies
Weatherhead East Asian Institute

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