Vicente L. Rafael is Professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Washington and 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 and Other Events in Filipino History; and Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule, all also published by Duke University Press.