Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Vicente L. Rafael, (Professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Washington in Seattle), who will discuss authoritarian imaginary in the Contemporary Philippines.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the Rockefeller Hall 374. Lunch will be served, and this talk is co-sponsored by the Department of History. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

President Rodrigo Duterte's term ended in May 2022 amid a violent drug war and the hardships of the COVID pandemic. Yet, surveys indicated that the president’s astronomic popularity did not suffer significantly. His job approval rating remained high—as much as 91% according to one poll--even as the majority of the people had become increasingly pessimistic about the state of the country.

Why this massive popularity amid the most catastrophic of conditions? How was it that a mass murderer continued to register such highly positive ratings? Why did his governance by fear meet with such widespread approval? Or is it the case that by focusing on Duterte, we’ve missed something much more fundamental, namely the persistence of structures of power that envelop and enable the survival of sprawling urban communities where his support was most evident? How did his authoritarian imaginary circulate and reinforce existing notions of community? That is, how did a certain fantasy about sovereign power—the power to decide who shall live and who shall die—oscillate between ruler and ruled? Indeed, is there something about the construction of community that preceded and will continue beyond Duterte’s regime-- something about the logic and logistics of living together--that also create the conditions for cultivating violence and spreading death?

About the Speaker

Vicente L. Rafael is Professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is the author most recently of The Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte (2022) as well as several other works on the history and cultural politics of the colonial and post-colonial Philippines. Recently, he also co-edited with Phrae Chittiphalangsri, Of Peninsulas and Archipelagos: the Landscape of Translation in Southeast Asia (2023).