Motherless Tongues

"In this rich compendium, Vicente L. Rafael continues to teach us how to think about the long, unpredictable afterlives of empire—their entangled, translingual socioscapes, their webs of attraction, their insurgent, untameable energies. His pages are populated by intellects of remarkable imagination and insight, including, above all, his own."  - Mary Louise Pratt, author of Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation

"Motherless Tongues presents the most compelling and deft analyses of the role of translation in the contexts of revolution, revolt, war, and empire in the Philippines and the United States. No work of this kind brings the Philippines and the United States together with its singular attention to the politics of translation, or with the kind of deep linguistic and cultural fluency that Vicente L. Rafael possesses. A significant figure in translation studies, Rafael is positioned to open new pathways to thinking about what translation brings to light in the contemporary moment."  - Neferti X. M. Tadiar, author of Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization

"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 Pérez-González, The Translator

“We might take this volume as the author’s masterpiece in the understanding of translation as the 'relations of power' of the plurality of languages – vernacular, Spanish and English – by traversing two cultural milieus between the Philippines and the United States.”

“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.”

“A valuable contribution to translation studies, especially in relation to Philippine history and culture, American empire critique, and area studies. . . . Rafael’s gifts as an essayist are on full display: his prose is typified by equal parts charge and clarity; the gravity of colonization and empire is counterpointed by the lucidity and brio of his prose.” - Vincenz Serrano, Southeast 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