Tuesday, April 4, 2023 2pm to 3:30pm
About this Event
View mapEmpire's Mistress: Gender, Sex and Imperial Intimacies (Duke University Press, 2021)
Date/Time: Tuesday, April 4th, 2-3:30 PM (In-person/Live)
Location: CHASS INTS 1111
How does attention to the intimate help us understand the gendered and sexualized dynamics of empire, and the ways in which they continue to shape how we tell our stories in the present? Empire’s Mistress (2021) engages these questions by piecing together the life story of Isabel Rosario Cooper, a mixed-race vaudeville and early cinema star in Manila who became infamous for her liaison with General Douglas MacArthur during the height of American colonialism in the Philippines. It tracks the mobilities and relationships generated by the United States’ desire for the Philippine archipelago—and the ways in which colonized subjects—particularly women—turned those to their own advantage. The scattered and ephemeral archive of “women like her” whose cosmopolitan itineraries ranged from Manila, to Washington, D.C., and Hollywood, outline a life lived on the edges of power but always at the center of imperial desire.
Bio:
Vernadette Gonzalez is Professor and Chair of the American Studies Department, and Director of the Honors Program at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Her most recent book, Empire’s Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper (Duke 2021) is an exploration of the intimacies of imperial geopolitics through the life story of a mixed-race vaudeville and film actress and sometime mistress of General Douglas MacArthur. It received an Association for Asian American Studies Honorable Mention for History in 2023. Her first book, Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai‘i and the Philippines (Duke 2013) won the Association for Asian American Studies book award for the best book in cultural studies published in 2013.
Professor Gonzalez is a coeditor, with Hōkūlani K. Aikau, of Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai’i (Duke 2019), which curates alternative, place based narratives, art, and itineraries that present a decolonial archive and vision for life in Hawai’i. Currently, she is also a co-editor of Bangtan Remixed, an interdisciplinary critical reader about the K-pop group BTS with Patty Ahn, Michelle Cho, Rani Neutill, Mimi Thi Nguyen, and Yutian Wong (under contract with Duke UP) and is at work on a book about hospitality and its discontents.
Sponsored by the Performing Difference working group, Faculty Commons Project, at the Center for Ideas and Society, and the UCR Departments of Media and Cultural Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Asian Studies, and SEATRiP.
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