Empire's Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper

“Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez crafts a gorgeous and meticulous portrait of one of the most intriguing women of the twentieth century, Isabel Rosario Cooper. Woven out of ghosts of texts and archival fractures and gaps, Empire's Mistress is a replete mystery tale, a feminist biography, a Hollywood story, an intimate study of Philippine-U.S. relations, and a masterful work of postcolonial noir. Above all, Empire's Mistress is a haunting, by which afterlives of empire address our contemporary dilemmas about how to articulate, frame, and center unspoken lives to tell history accurately. A deeply satisfying work of exhumation, Empire's Mistress makes complex history live, and I'm grateful for Gonzalez's unflinching, refractive, and always revelatory gaze on that history.” -- Gina Apostol, author of * Insurrecto *
“Imaginatively tracing the life of Isabel Rosario Cooper in and through the elisions and silences of the archives, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez makes a significant contribution to rethinking the process of archival research when it involves marginalized subjects whose existence appears sporadically in the historical accounts of others. A compelling read.” -- Vicente L. Rafael, author of * Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language amid Wars of Translation *
"Gonzalez’s book is part- excavation, part-celebration of Cooper, that puts the story of MacArthur and his mistress into a new context, and not necessarily in a sordid way. Gonzalez is mindful at all times that Cooper was a daughter of colonization. That is why you read this book, to see another small-scale, personal perspective of the U.S. Philippines relationship where colonial mentality is more than a massive headache." -- Emil Guillermo * Philippine Inquirer *
“Empire’s Mistress is a dynamic text at the cutting edge of transdisciplinary research and will appeal to lay readers looking for a juicy noir tale and to scholars of women’s history, twentieth century US–Philippines political relations, and postcolonial and cultural studies. Gonzalez’s writing against the archival grain is a pleasure to read.” -- Thea Quiray Tagle * Philippine Studies *
“Empire’s Mistress is a clever reflection of both the disjointed American imperial archive and the non-linear life Cooper had invented for herself. . . . Gonzalez not only engages in interdisciplinary analyses and methodologies to study the archive, but beautifully interweaves multiple genres—academic prose, poetry, playwriting, and art—to speculate a historical narrative that dances on the fine line between fiction and non-fiction.” -- Kristin Oberiano * Western Historical Quarterly *
“[Gonzalez] insists on a speculative archival reading that allows Cooper to move from being the object of the possessive to a framing that makes her a different kind of subject . . .  ultimately centering and valuing the intimate knowledges formed and passed between women who experience the violence of empire.” -- Rachel Yim * Women & Performance *
“Gonzalez is . . . especially lively when she is highlighting her personal discovery of archival documents. . . . Her glimpses into early Manila and the colonial life of American soldiers who married Filipina women was fascinating, and the best-researched part of this tale.” -- Kirby Pringle * Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television *
“Empire’s Mistress is a work of art—figuratively and literally—that unearths the engrossing life of Isabel Rosario Cooper. . . . It is an archetype of how archival research should be repurposed.” -- Luis Zuriel P. Domingo * Sojourn *