Empire's Mistress: The Labor of Love in Imperial Circuits
Mar 31, 2022 | 2pm (ET)
Lecture (Zoom) | Speaker: Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez (University of Hawai'i)
2022 Spring Lecture Series: Not the Usual Suspects: Everyday Agents of Globalization in the Twentieth Century
This talk examines the sexualized labor of love and hospitality through the relationships that American soldiers built with Filipino women during the U.S. occupation of the Philippines. It reframes the story of Isabel Rosario Cooper, the sometime-mistress of General Douglas MacArthur, away from a tragic romance to that of labor, survival, and creativity within the deeply asymmetrical structure of empire to understand how intimacy was integral to its workings.
About the Speaker
Vernadette Gonzalez is Professor of American Studies and Director of the Honors Program at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. Her first book, Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai’i and the Philippines (Duke 2013) examines the convergences of cultures of militarism and tourism in U.S. circuits of empire. She is 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. 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.
About the Lecture Series
Not the Usual Suspects: Everyday Agents of Globalization in the Twentieth Century
This lecture series reassesses globalization from a bottom-up perspective. Globalization processes have typically been associated with intergovernmental organizations, multinational corporations, and NGOs. Less known are the “everyday” agents of economic, cultural, and political globalization: historical actors who initiated and promoted connection and exchange (intentionally and unintentionally) across world regions through their day-to-day activities. Backpacking tourists in postwar Europe, for instance, redefined the very idea of Europe with their cross-border itineraries and the many interactions with their host communities. The lecture series shines a spotlight on these and other drivers of globalization at the micro-social level. The different lectures discuss the activities of individual and group actors since the 1920s, covering a truly global range of geographies including the Middle East, East Asia, and the Caribbean. By applying an actor-centered approach to the study of twentieth-century globalization, the lecture series highlights the significance of globalization agents not usually suspected of playing this role.
Organizers: Andreas Greiner, Mario Peters
Empire's Mistress: The Labor of Love in Imperial Circuits
March 31, 2022 | 2pm (ET) virtual
Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez (University of Hawai’i)
Doing Utopia and Communal Living in South Africa, Japan, and Jamaica, 1900-1950
April 14, 2022 | 12pm (ET) virtual
Robert Kramm (LMU Munich)
Backpack Ambassadors: How Youth Travel Integrated Europe
April 21, 2022 | 6:30pm (in person)
Richard Ivan Jobs (Pacific University Oregon)
Reaching the People: American Globalism and the Quest for Universal Literacy
May 5, 2022 | 630pm ET (in person)
Valeska Huber (University of Vienna)
