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The Sovereign Trickster

The Sovereign Trickster

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In The Sovereign Trickster Vicente L. Rafael offers a prismatic view of the age of Rodrigo Duterte in the contemporary Philippines. Framing Duterte as a trickster figure who boasts, jokes, terrorizes, plays the victim, and instills terror, Rafael weaves together topics ranging from the drug war, policing, and extrajudicial killings to neoliberal citizenship, intimacy, and photojournalism. He is less concerned with defining Duterte as a fascist, populist, warlord, and traditional politician than he is with examining what Duterte does: how he rules, the rhetoric of his humor, his use of obscenity to stoke fear, and his projection of masculinity and misogyny. Locating Duterte's rise within the context of counterinsurgency, neoliberalism, and the history of electoral violence, while drawing on Foucault’s biopower and Mbembe’s necropolitics, Rafael outlines how Duterte weaponizes death to control life. By diagnosing the symptoms of the authoritarian imaginary as it circulates in the Philippines, Rafael provides a complex account of Duterte’s regime and the social conditions that allow him to enjoy continued support. Vicente L. Rafael provides a complex account of how Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte uses humor, fear, misogyny, and violence to weaponize death as a means to control life. Vicente L. Rafael is Professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Washington and author of Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language amid Wars of Translation; The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines; White Love and Other Events in Filipino History; and Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule, all also published by Duke University Press. Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction. Prismatic Histories  1
1. Electoral Dystopias  6
Sketches I: The Dream of Benevolent Dictatorship  18
2. Marcos, Duterte, and the Predicaments of Neoliberal Citizenship  21
Sketches II: Motherland and the Biopolitics of Reproductive Health  36
3. Duterte's Phallus: On the Aesthetics of Authoritarian Vulgarity  42
Sketches III: Duterte's Hobbesian World  57
Duterte's Sense of Time60
4. The Sovereign Trickster  63
Sketches IV: Comparing Extrajudicial Killing  87
Death Squads  89
On Duterte's Matrix  94
Fecal Politics  98
5. Photography and the Biopolitics of Fear: Witnessing the Philippine Drug War  103
Conclusion. Intimacy and the Autoimmune Community  131
Notes 147
References  151
Index  169

“In this remarkable book, Vicente L. Rafael, the preeminent scholar of language, nationalism, and colonialism in the Philippines, shows how the global swing to the right crystallizes in a specific national history. Rafael eloquently shows why Rodrigo Duterte must be placed in the long history of the use of antidemocratic means to bolster electoral democracy and how the darkest coercive practices in the Philippine archive are enacted in Duterte's obscene power.”
“Vicente L. Rafael brings a fierce intelligence and formidable analytical power to explain Duterte’s dark charisma and the violence at the heart of his presidency. In these probing and insightful essays, he accounts for how and why a strongman from the country’s periphery has held a nation in thrall for so long.”
"This fascinating book seeks to explain why Rodrigo Duterte, the outgoing president of the Philippines, has been so popular despite his gruesome human-rights record, authoritarian ruling style and unapologetic vulgarity"
"The Sovereign Trickster provides readers with an erudite, in-depth, and historically-contextualized analysis of how Duterte’s persona operates, and why it is so appealing to so many. . . . Anyone with an interest in recent Philippine history should find The Sovereign Trickster incredibly entertaining, accessible – it is a rare writer who can juxtapose Foucault and Mbembe and explain the relevance of their ideas clearly – and analytically illuminating. This is a book that grapples with serious questions of relevance to many societies, but does so with an eloquence that makes it a pleasure to read."

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Weight 1 oz
Dimensions 1 × 6 × 9 in