Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language amid Wars of Translation
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.
Welcoming What Comes: Translating Sovereignty in the Revolutionary Philippines
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Published:April 2016
What was the relationship between sovereignty and revolutionary war among the Filipinos who overthrew Spain and later resisted the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century? To what extent was a political theology of sovereignty, inherited from the Spanish regime, transformed into a discourse of emancipation by Filipino nationalist elites? How were both notions translated in turn into populist, Christian vernacular terms that stressed generosity, compassion, and the work of pity to account for revolutionary history? These are the questions that this chapter raises against the backdrop of more recent debates on the salience of theological legal...
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