Empire's Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper by Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez

Abstract

Reviewed by: Empire's Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper by Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez Thea Quiray Tagle VERNADETTE VICUÑA GONZALEZ Empire's Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. 219 pages. What can minor stories uncover about the intimacies of US empire? University of Hawai'i at Manoa Professor of American Studies Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez's second monograph, Empire's Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper, breaks decisively with historiographical conventions to address this question using provocative and refreshing methods uncommon to Philippine studies and Filipino American studies. Focusing its attention on Isabel Rosario Cooper, a biracial Filipina child star-turned-bodabil (the Philippines's homegrown version of vaudeville) performer in Manila who reinvented herself multiple times over, Empire's Mistress rewrites the life story of a mysterious and contradictory woman footnoted in history as "Gen. Douglas MacArthur's mistress" and makes a critical feminist intervention into now familiar histories of US imperialism in the Philippines. To understand Gonzalez's masterful contribution to transpacific Filipino history and cultural studies, it is important to situate this book alongside other interdisciplinary scholarship that similarly attends to the intimate labor of empire building and the sexuality of race in the US. The essays in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Duke University Press, 2006), edited by Ann Laura Stoler, come to mind immediately, along with Lisa Lowe's The Intimacy of Four Continents (Duke University Press, 2015), of which an article-length version appears in Stoler's [End Page 481] edited collection. These texts assess comparatively and relationally the ways in which policing indigenous, mestiza, and colonized women's sexualities and intimacies was central to settler colonial and imperial nation-building projects in North America, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Like these texts, Empire's Mistress also recognizes colonized women's intimate labor (which includes flirting, sex, and seduction) with imperial men as survival strategies that reveal the profound sexual and racial violence at the heart of empire (17). The first half of the book, in particular, illuminates the ways both Cooper and her mother, Josefina, navigated the shifting terrain (both literal and metaphorical) of the "New Filipina" in the Philippines and the US during the Philippines's modernizing and transitional period between Spanish and American colonial rule and during the archipelago's immediate postindependence period. And in its focus on early–to mid–twentieth-century Filipina women's history as national history, Empire's Mistress is a standout text among Filipino studies scholarship by US-based academics, of a kind along with Denise Cruz's Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina (Duke University Press, 2012) and Genevieve Clutario's articles and forthcoming monograph. How Gonzalez tracks this story through the Cooper archives—or, more accurately, despite the lack of archives—is what truly distinguishes this manuscript from the other aforementioned works, which hew closely to historiographical methods of uncovering lost or buried materials in order to tell different stories. What Empire's Mistress does, instead, is to write into the absences, elisions, and lies of the archive to imagine motivations for Cooper's actions far more complicated than the dominant narrative of her as simply or only the Filipina paramour of famed US General MacArthur. It utilizes a method described by scholar and writer Saidiya Hartman as a practice of "critical fabulation," articulated in her 2008 essay "Venus in Two Acts" (Small Axe, 2008:1–14) and more fully fleshed out in her latest book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (W. W. Norton, 2020: 13, xv), which speculates on the practices of "minor figures" of black women as "radical thinkers who tirelessly imagined other ways to live." Within the pages of Empire's Mistress, Cooper emerges as a "dangerously desiring subject," a woman who refuses to be captured or contained by the colonial archive, and whose "choices illuminate how people adapted and survived in conditions not of their own making, and in circumstances that were designed to wear away their dignity and humanity" (6–7). Writing across [End Page 482] genres, geographies, and temporalities, Gonzalez creates a "shadow narrative of archival detritus, fabrications, second takes and other...