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336 Book Reviews

White Love and Other Events in Philippine History. By Vicente L. Rafael.

Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000. 288 pp.

The Introduction to this collection of eight essays posits that Philippine

history and the essay form are complementary. Because the essay lends
itself to the episodic, in contrast to epic, style of narration, the essay
embodies what it seeks to portray: the ironies, contradictions, and in-
stabilities of history which escape the grand overarching framework of
nationalist historiography. Collectively, the essays seek to convey the
“conditions of possibility and impossibility for the historical emergence
of the nation and its various states” (p. 4). Rafael contends that “the
fundamental irony of Philippine nationalism” (p. 13) is that anti-
nationalist forces are themselves already embedded in the constitution
of the nation. Nationalism’s project of exorcising colonialism converges
with the return of colonialism’s ghosts in the form of the state appara-
tus and persistent socioeconomic inequalities. Philippine history is con-
sequently “fractious” (p. 2), overflowing with revolution and counter-
revolution, advances and reversals, self-sacrifice and duplicity, freedom
and unfreedom.
The essays that follow teem with incisive, charming, and sophisti-
cated insights. But the essays also display instances of haziness, excess,
and deflected explanatory force. The overall coherence of the book is
therefore compromised. And so this review will proceed chapter by
chapter. Perhaps the discrepant quality of the essays is to be expected
as the essays were written in the course of the 1990s admittedly “with
different audiences in mind and for different occasions” (pp. 15–16).
Unavoidably, “the chapters are full of gaps and hesitations, imperfect
arguments that already anticipate their revisions” (p. 16). Rafael hopes,
nonetheless, that the book “might provoke other connections and con-
jectures” (p. 17), and it certainly will.
Chapter 1, “White Love: Census and Melodrama in the U.S. Colo-
nization of the Philippines”, juxtaposes the technologies of power, sur-
veillance, and discipline entailed by the first American colonial census
in 1903, on the one hand, and the resistance posed by “seditious”
Tagalog plays, on the other. The census’s racializing project stands in

© 2001 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

Book Reviews 337

marked contrast to the absence of “a discourse on race” (p. 48) in na-

tionalist melodramas. In the census gender is “naturalized in relation to
the paternalism of the colonial state” (p. 48), whereas in Tagalog plays
gender is open to questioning and negotiation. The binarism pitting vi-
cious colonizer and virtuous colonized is subtly replicated in this essay.
The colonized subject’s racial prejudice — vis-à-vis “the Chinese” and
aboriginal Negritos — is occluded, and the relationship of racism to na-
tionalism elided.
In Chapter 2, “Colonial Domesticity: Engendering Race at the Edge
of Empire, 1899–1912”, Rafael examines the ambiguities of White
American women’s double identity in the colony, how they invested the
colonial project with both domesticity and sentimentality by concomi-
tantly performing and disavowing the everyday inequalities of U.S.
imperialism. Written explicitly to engage with “the constitutive role of
empire in the formation of U.S. nationhood” (p. 53), this essay’s role
in explicating the ironies of Philippine nationalism is not apparent.
Chapter 3, “The Undead: Notes on Photography in the Philippines,
1898–1920s”, highlights the elusiveness of photography by dissecting
photos of the Filipino-American War, which invariably memorialized
U.S. mastery and superiority, and the portraiture of wealthy Filipinos
who circulated such photos as gifts and personal mementos. Photo-
graphs in the latter set were suggestive of “the fantasy of an autonomous
space” which, as enjoyed by the Filipino bourgeoisie, “may well have
contributed to entrenching and rationalizing Filipino collaboration with
U.S. rule” (p. 100). The discussion of non-resistance encoded in por-
traiture, however, ends rather abruptly in the suggestion that photo-
graphs are not reducible to “either colonial or anticolonial narratives”
even as these evoke “an alternative temporality” (pp. 100–2).
In Chapter 4, “Anticipating Nationhood: Identification, Collabora-
tion and Rumor in Filipino Responses to Japan”, the “uncanny perme-
ability of emergent national identities” (p. 103) of Rizal and his cohorts
is said to “haunt … the formation of Filipino identity throughout the
first half of the twentieth century” (p. 107). These ambiguous identi-
ties would come to the fore in the élite’s collaboration with Japanese rule
and in the “emptiness” of collaborators’ rhetoric based on the then new

© 2001 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

338 Book Reviews

language of English (pp. 109–14). Rumours during the Japanese oc-

cupation were similar to collaborationist rhetoric in being “epistemologically
empty” (p. 117), but these were different in not being “predicated on
dissimulation and duplicity” (p. 121). Avoiding a simplistic dichotomy,
Rafael does not privilege rumours over collaborationist rhetoric by not-
ing that rumours do not necessarily represent anti-colonial nationalism.
Rizal’s porous identity, in his view, pervades rumour-mongering despite
the half-century in between. What would explain such persistence?
In Chapter 5, “Patronage, Pornography, and Youth: Ideology and
Spectatorship during the Early Marcos Years”, the staged romance of
Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos is finely linked to the aesthetization of
patronage politics, the complementary difference between the President
and the First Lady serving as weapon to depoliticize spectator crowds.
Imelda Marcos’s spectacular rise is located side-by-side with the explo-
siveness of sexually explicit movies (bomba). The Marcos conjugal he-
gemony began to erode with the rise of a new type of explosion: the
youthful street demonstrations which eventually led to “the destruction
of spectacle” (pp. 150–61). In this essay, Rafael brilliantly traces the
beginnings of “authoritarian wishfulness” which enabled the couple to
portray themselves as the fount from which emanated “the circulation
of political and economic power” in the country (p. 122). However, the
essay begs the question of why the Marcoses succeeded in doing so. It
provokes us to ponder the unanalysed relationship between authoritari-
anism and nationalism during this period.
Chapter 6 on “Taglish, or the Phantom Power of the Lingua Franca”
takes up the question of linguistic hybridity and its relationship to a
social hierarchy dominated by “mestizos” and “mestizas” envied and
adulated by the lower classes. Rafael adduces the capacity of “Taglish”
to blend the otherwise unequal languages of English, Spanish, and
Tagalog, thereby collapsing hierarchy in their substitutability and “re-
lation of constant interruption” (p. 176). But the flattening of linguis-
tic hierarchy is illusory because social inequalities remain undisturbed.
If anything, the use of “Taglish” reinforces the social structure. Rafael
argues that the seeming access to power through language is nothing
more than a mere phantasm. The essay, however, makes no theoretically

© 2001 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

Book Reviews 339

cogent explanation why, in the first place, assertions of equality in the

linguistic sphere should materialize in the transformation of the social
structure. The term “Chinese mestizo” is also used as if it were on the
same epistemological ground as “Spanish mestizo”, without factoring in
the major shift in terminology which has ensured that, in the late twen-
tieth century, the word “mestizo” denotes only those of mixed White
ancestry.
Chapter 7 on “Writing History After EDSA” offers an explanation
for the popularity of the writings of historian Ambeth Ocampo. The ob-
vious “features of Ocampo’s writings — an ironizing sensibility, an alert-
ness to the crossings of fiction and fact, and a materialist fondness for
the everyday” (p. 196) — inscribe political ambivalence, which captures
the desires and anxieties of the élite-educated generation of “martial law
babies”. Rafael further locates Ocampo’s appeal to his use of “post-
EDSA English” which is “colloquial”, “decolonized and domesticated”
(pp. 200–1), the use of which, paradoxically, reinforces the privileged
position of its users—just as “Taglish” does. If this English “readily
incorporates Taglish inflections” (p. 201), what distinguishes it from
“Taglish”? Indeed, in this and the previous essay, the concept of
“Taglish” is vague as the term subsumes a wide range of linguistic prac-
tices. This essay also triggers the question of whether the general dete-
rioration of Philippine tertiary education, including the teaching of
English in supposedly élite schools, may be an important factor in the
popularity of vernacularized English.
The final chapter, “‘Your Grief Is Our Gossip’: Overseas Filipinos
and Other Spectral Presences”, inquires into attempts by state actors and
public intellectuals to contain the “dislocating effects of global capital”
(p. 204) as embodied by “overseas contract workers” (OCW) who re-
turn as corpses, Flor Contemplacion being exemplary. What Rafael
terms “nationalist mourning” ultimately fails due to money which, like
gossip, insinuates itself into everything, commodifying even mourning,
as in the profit-driven movie production of Contemplacion’s story. This
essays feeds, rather than questions, the stereotypes of the “arrogant” but
“envied” homecoming balikbayan, mainly from North America, and the
“self-sacrificing”, “victimized”, and “pitied” OCW.

© 2001 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

340 Book Reviews

Many studies have shown that in their localities migrant workers are
admired and envied, and they do not see themselves as victims. The
essay’s fundamentally economistic view of international labour migra-
tion (p. 205) is oblivious to the non-financial motivations and concerns
articulated by migrants themselves, discussed in recent additions to the
migration literature. The ambivalences of homecoming actually-living
OCWs are muted by the focus on the returning dead, the possibilities
of haunting by the former eclipsed in the dissection of the spectral
corpse. Ultimately, the essay fails to analyse the spectrality of money in
the form of remittances by overseas Filipinos. How is this spectre to be
distinguished from the haunting effects of money, given that, in the
Philippines as elsewhere, circulation always appears to exist apart from
production?
In the Introduction, Rafael notes that the sensation of vertigo the
Philippines generates has its advantage in that Filipinos and the Phil-
ippines elude outsiders’ attempts to understand and master them. This
elusiveness provokes many questions. Why should it be peculiar to the
Philippines alone? Do Filipinas/os feel this vertigo, and sense their na-
tional history to be “fractious”? Why does elusiveness seemingly not
elude the historian?
Filomeno AGUILAR

Filomeno Aguilar is Senior Lecturer in History at the School of Humanities, James Cook,
Australia.

© 2001 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore