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Join us on Tuesday, November 18 from 4:00-5:30 p.m. in ESB 2-36 for "The Authoritarian Imaginary: Intimacy and the Autoimmune Community in the Contemporary Philippines", a talk by Vicente L. Rafael.

Talk Description: President Rodrigo Duterte ended his term in May 2022 amid a violent drug war and the hardships of the COVID pandemic. Yet, surveys indicated that the president’s astronomic popularity had not suffered 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. And to this day, despite having been arrested by the ICC, his popularity continues to hold.

Why this massive popularity amid the most catastrophic of conditions? How was it that a mass murderer continued to register such highly positive ratings, however skeptical one might be about the methods used in these surveys? 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 historical 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?

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 , Of Peninsulas and Archipelagos: the Landscape of Translation in Southeast Asia (2023) and co-edited a festschrift for the anthropologist James T. Siegel, Jim Siegal Reappears, Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, (2025).