Vicente Rafael (History) compares in this talk the practice of translation between the Spanish Habsburg and contemporary US empires. He focuses on what they have in common – an enduring attachment to logocentrism, or a metaphysics of the sign – and shows how the practice of translation alternately enables and disables this metaphysic from functioning in such disparate areas as Christian conversion, counter-insurgent warfare and the work of the Summer Institute of Linguistics.

Vicente L. Rafael is Professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies at the Univ. of Washington. He is the author of several books and works on the cultural and political history of the colonial and post-colonial Philippines and occasionally writes on the United States and the Spanish Pacific. Currently, he is finishing a book on the necropolitics and aesthetics of authoritarianism, Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte (Duke University Press, forthcoming).