Three 91探花 professors will participate in a presentation and discussion on May 7 about a memorial plaque that was recently removed from Seattle鈥檚 Volunteer Park due to concerns about its accuracy.

Originally called City Park, Volunteer Park was renamed in 1901 to honor veterans of the Spanish-American War. A commemorative plaque 鈥� championed by J. Willis Sayre, a veteran of the war who also supported the park鈥檚 name change 鈥� was installed in 1953 and described the war as one of liberation for the peoples of the Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico. The war is now widely viewed as one of imperial conquest.

In May 2021 鈥� around the same time a community member requested that Seattle Parks and Recreation remove the plaque 鈥� published a Northeast Asian Weekly op-ed titled 鈥�.鈥� Seattle Parks removed the plaque that summer.

Giebel, a 91探花associate professor in the Jackson School of International Studies and of history, focuses on colonialism and imperialism in Asia.

鈥淲ords matter,鈥� Giebel said. 鈥淭erminology matters in how we commemorate and how we remember. It鈥檚 something that needs to be renegotiated all the time. There are also facts, and we must honor our facts even if they make us uncomfortable. In this case, there is simply no way around this misrepresentation.鈥�

The program, 鈥淰olunteering for Empire: The Wars of 1898 and Seattle鈥檚 Volunteer Park,鈥漺ill discuss issues with the plaque in relation to the history of the war, its aftermath and how subsequent generations viewed the conflict. It will also examine broader questions related to racism, U.S. foreign policy and the consequences of American wars.

Giebel will moderate a panel featuring 91探花faculty members, professor and historian of Southeast Asian history and American colonialism, and, associate professor and historian of Latin American and Caribbean history. Their discussion will examine the intersections of race, colonialism and national identity.

鈥淰olunteer Park is one of the most important public spaces in Seattle, and yet like many of the public spaces in Washington and the U.S., it is permeated with the legacies of the U.S. Empire,鈥� Rafael said. 鈥淭he stone plaque that commemorated Seattle volunteers’ participation in the so-called 鈥榣iberation鈥� of the Philippines is just one example of the distortion of history to reflect the dominant historical narrative that U.S. intervention was a sort of rescue mission.鈥�

In the 1890s, a nationalist movement rose against Spanish colonial rule in the Philippines. A provisional government had declared Philippine independence by early 1898. Meanwhile, the U.S. declared war on Spain, and Spain surrendered only to the U.S.

American troops refused to recognize Philippine sovereignty. While a constitutional assembly formally established the Philippine Republic in 1899, the U.S.-Spanish Treaty of Paris sold the Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico to the U.S.

鈥淭he Republic of the Philippines was really Asia鈥檚 first republic,鈥� Giebel said. 鈥淲ithin weeks of the declaration of independence, the Americans are coming in and conquering it and destroying it. It was really a war of conquest.鈥�

The Philippine-American war resulted in more than 250,000 Filipino deaths from 1889 to 1902 and caused ecological and economic destruction of the islands, Rafael said. The Philippines remained a U.S. colony until 1946, an occupation that 鈥渟aw the persistent rise of revolts, insurgencies and colonial counter-insurgencies that resulted in even more violence and massacres.鈥�

鈥淎s a Puerto Rican scholar whose family lives in Puerto Rico,鈥� Rodr铆guez-Silva said, 鈥渢his is also a unique opportunity to bring attention to the new forms of subjugation to U.S. interests lived by people in former colonies like the Philippines, as well as the everyday realities of dispossession and displacement experienced by inhabitants, and their diasporas, in the U.S. colonies of today: Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands.鈥�

The event will also feature librarian Abe Ignacio, who co-authored 鈥淭he Forbidden Book鈥� featuring over 200 political cartoons from 1898 to 1906 that chronicle the war between the United States and the Philippines. Ignacio will explain how the American public viewed the war at the time.

鈥淭he conquest of the Philippines is one of the most forgotten wars in American history,鈥� Giebel said. 鈥淭hat moment of the Spanish-American War where America really branched out beyond the continent and became truly an empire, is something that is absolutely covered up in mainstream historical understanding.鈥�

The event is sponsored by Volunteer Park Trust, the 91探花Southeast Asia Center and the 91探花Center for Global Studies.

For more information, contact Giebel at giebel@uw.edu, Rafael at vrafael@uw.edu and Rodr铆guez-Silva at imrodrig@uw.edu.

In writing his latest book, set out to make sense of an ongoing global shift to the political right.

Rafael, professor of history at the 91探花, called 2016 a turning point. In the United States, the evidence was the election of former President Donald Trump 鈥� a result that stunned many U.S. citizens. But that shock didn鈥檛 extend to the Philippines, where Rafael was born.

Due to the neocolonial relationship between the two countries, Rafael said what happens in one resonates in the other. The U.S., which colonized the Philippines from 1898 until 1941, typically sets the tone. But Rodrigo Duterte鈥檚 assent to the presidency of the Philippines preceded Trump鈥檚 election.

Duterte, Rafael said, bears many similarities to authoritarians that have emerged in other countries, but he also differs from them. In Rafael鈥檚 book published by Duke University Press, he writes specifically about Duterte鈥檚 rule.

Rafael frames Duterte as a 鈥渢rickster figure who boasts, jokes, terrorizes, plays the victim and instills terror.鈥� His book examines multiple aspects of Duterte鈥檚 rule, including the war on drugs, extrajudicial killings, human rights violations and neoliberal citizenship, emphasizing the colonial and counterinsurgent context of his emergence. Rafael also examines Duterte鈥檚 popularity and 鈥減olitical aesthetics鈥�: his vernacular style of storytelling, his fondness for obscenity and his misogyny as ways of fostering community among his supporters.

91探花News sat down with Rafael to discuss the swing to the right, the relationship between the U.S. and the Philippines and what to watch for in the Philippine presidential election in May and the U.S. midterm elections.

Q: How did the relationship between the United States and the Philippines manifest in 2016?

VR: Duterte presented himself as a “revolutionary nationalist” when he won, which meant, among other things, that he was anti-American imperialism. This gave him an excuse to denounce U.S. criticisms of his war on drugs along with his violation of human rights.

He used profanity to describe former President Barack Obama and the U.S. ambassador and threatened to end U.S. military partnerships with the Philippine military. This anti-imperialist stance was a ruse since he allowed the Chinese wide latitude in operating in the South China Sea and actively solicited Chinese aid. He even joked at one point that China should just annex the Philippines and admired the authoritarian rule of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.

Q: What similarities do you draw between authoritarian leaders?

VR: All authoritarians share a common hatred of democracy and will do everything to manipulate its forms in order to destroy its substance.

They take exception to the law and see themselves as above it, which allows them to abolish any semblance of checks and balances among the branches of government. The wide and systemic use of the military and the police allows them to govern by fear and quash dissent. Propaganda and 鈥渇ake news鈥� are deployed to shape popular perceptions about supporters and vilify enemies.

Authoritarians designate part of the population as deserving of entitlements, while designating another part of the population 鈥� commonly Jewish, Black, queer, homeless, poor and Muslim people 鈥� as abject, undeserving, inherently criminal, subhuman and therefore existential threats to society. These people are targeted for expulsion, exile and incarceration, and ultimately neglect and death. This makes all authoritarian states essentially racist states.

These rulers rely on various corrupt methods to accumulate personal wealth. They surround themselves with cronies who do favors, funnel deals and protect them from investigations. There is no authoritarian state that is not also a state steeped in corrupt practices.

Q: You write about how Duterte and other modern rulers use the relationship between life and death. Can you explain what that means?

VR: Duterte, like many authoritarian rulers, uses the politics of life 鈥� seeking to provide citizens with life that is more than life by way of social services, public education and health, security, etc. 鈥� by way of administering death. Here, rulers seek to define and apprehend those it regards as social enemies by systemically neglecting them, placing them in positions of social or actual death insofar as they present an existential threat to society.

Duterte does this through his war on drugs. He sees drug users and dealers 颅鈥� he makes no distinction between the two 鈥� not only as criminals but also as insurgents who seek to destroy the social order. They deserve to be annihilated. By killing them, he also instills fear in the people who are then forced to acknowledge his power. In this way, he governs life by administering death. He provides the illusion of security using fear.

Q: What鈥檚 at stake as we look ahead to the 2022 presidential election in the Philippines and the midterm elections in the U.S.?

VR: The elections in the Philippines in May 2022 present us with two possibilities. There could be a dramatic shift in governing styles in the Philippines should one of the candidates, the current Vice President Leni Robredo, win. However, there could also be a continuation and intensification of what some have called “Dutertismo” 鈥� the style of rule under Duterte 鈥� should the other candidate, Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. and his vice presidential running mate, Sarah Duterte, Duterte’s daughter, triumph. Polls currently favor the latter by a considerable margin, though Robredo has recently been surging.

Should Marcos Jr. and Sarah Duterte win, it would mean the continuation of some sort of authoritarian rule. Marcos Jr. would surround himself with many of Duterte’s people and continue many of his policies, including the war on drugs. He would also bring back many cronies of his father, former president and dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr., who engaged in torture and stole millions from the nation鈥檚 coffers. The U.S. would have to deal with country鈥檚 continuing corruption and unrelenting violations of human rights, not to mention the Chinese incursions into the South China Sea that Marcos Jr. would continue to allow.

A Robredo victory would not necessarily end corruption but would at least temper it. She would return a semblance of good government and would be far more responsive to natural disasters. She would seek to control the police and put an end to extrajudicial killings. As a human rights lawyer, Robredo would also seek to protect the rights of workers and Indigenous peoples, among others. She would modulate relations with the U.S., depending on who is in power in the U.S. after 2022 and 2024.

To put it differently, a Robredo presidency would go a long way towards restoring democratic norms and practices. But given the dismal drift of U.S. politics toward Republican authoritarianism, it might not meet with much support from the U.S. The two countries might very well be moving in opposite directions. Under Robredo, the Philippines would stand as a stark rebuke to the U.S. under the extreme right wing of the Republican party. A Republican-dominated regime would find more things in common with Marcos Jr. and Duterte, such as their love of power and pursuit of personal wealth.

For more information, contact Rafael at vrafael@uw.edu.

91探花 history professor says his new book, “,” seeks to ask some longstanding questions in novel ways.

What is the relationship is between history and language, for example. Is language simply a means for understanding history? Or, is it also a historical agent in its own right, capable of making history, not simply expressing it? And, what is the role of translation in the historical agency of language?

To get at what Rafael calls “the historical agency of language,” he examines the workings of translations in a variety of contexts, mostly in the Philippines and the United States from the late 19th century through the early 21^st century.

He studies such topics as the shifting notions of sovereignty in the Philippine revolution against Spain, the role of English in the U.S. occupation of the Philippines in the early 20^th century, and the weaponization of translation in its more recent “war of terror” and invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Rafael also examines the use of cell phones and texting in the civilian-backed coup in the Philippines in 2001, and the function of autobiography in the writings of area studies specialists during the Cold War. Starting with a critical description of the complexity of translation, the book’s chapters are linked by a recurring concern with, as he put it, “how language both invites and eludes translation, and how translation in turn supports even as it upends relations of power and structures of authority in colonial and post-colonial settings.”

He said the book came about somewhat accidentally. Most of the chapters began as separate essays meant for different occasions and audiences. But taken together, Rafael said, they began to coalesce around a set of obsessions related to “decolonizing, as it were, the common sense understanding of language and translation as mere instruments of empires and nations.”

The last chapter of the book includes the transcripts of with the editor of Translation: A Transdisciplinary Journal where Rafael relates the beginnings of his longstanding interest in translation and history.

He became interested the Spanish colonization of the Philippines in graduate school at Cornell, he said, but noticed there were few sources written by colonized natives, among a general absence of pre-colonial written documents.

One place to look for native agency, he realized, was in the native languages themselves. These he found in the writings of the Spanish missionaries who, rather than teach natives Spanish, decided to learn the different vernaculars themselves. They used the native languages to translate the Gospel and write sermons to communicate with native peoples and transmit directives coming from the colonial state down to the local level.

Rafael then asked how missionary translations of the Christian Word ended up being displaced and re-inflected 鈥� even resisted 鈥� by entirely different meanings and references encoded in native languages. It is that difference between what the missionaries meant to say and what the native converts actually heard that made all the difference, Rafael argues, in revising our understanding of the history of Spanish colonialism and native conversion in the Philippines.

“So I got very interested in this topic and asked myself what would happen if one were to take a look at languages as historical agents, because we often think of historical agents as human beings,” he said. “But there is a certain way in which you can also think of language as a historical agent that is somehow free of human control, or better yet, how it exceeds human control, and that鈥檚 exactly the path I tried to pursue.”

鈥淢otherless Tongues鈥� is Rafael’s fourth book. His earlier books are “” (2005), “” (2000) and “” (1993), all published by Duke University Press.

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For more information, contact Rafael at 206-543-5699 or vrafael@uw.edu.