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Full Description
In Empire's Mistress Vernadette VicuÑa Gonzalez follows the life of Filipina vaudeville and film actress Isabel Rosario Cooper, who was the mistress of General Douglas MacArthur. If mentioned at all, their relationship exists only as a salacious footnote in MacArthur's biography-a failed love affair between a venerated war hero and a young woman of Filipino and American heritage. Following Cooper from the Philippines to Washington, D.C. to Hollywood, where she died penniless, Gonzalez frames her not as a tragic heroine, but as someone caught within the violent histories of U.S. imperialism. In this way, Gonzalez uses Cooper's life as a means to explore the contours of empire as experienced on the scale of personal relationships. Along the way, Gonzalez fills in the archival gaps of Cooper's life with speculative fictional interludes that both unsettle the authority of "official" archives and dislodge the established one-dimensional characterizations of her. By presenting Cooper as a complex historical subject who lived at the crossroads of American colonialism in the Philippines, Gonzalez demonstrates how intimacy and love are woven into the infrastructure of empire.
Contents
Archival Detritus, Fabrications, Second Takes, and Other Provocations
1. This Is Not a Love Story 1
2. Death Certificate, Partial 13
3. A General and Unruly Wards 15
4. The Flower of Cathay, Excerpts 28
5. Misapprehensions 30
6. The Farm Boy and the Unbiddable Wife 32
7. The Delicate Moonbeam 48
8. "Dimples": Innocence (Colonial Kink) 49
9. Stage Presence 67
10. Letters Lost at Sea, Imagined, Excerpts 69
11. The New Filipina, Kissing 72
12. Gossip: Fiction and Nonfiction 86
13. "It Girl" Meets General 89
14. Recipe for the Douglas 93
15. The Washington Housewife, the Hollywood Hula Girl, and the Two Husbands: Reinventions 94
16. Out of Place 111
17. 1st Filipina Nurse, Geisha, Little Sergeant, Javanese Nurse, Uncredited 112
18. Lolita's Lines 127
19. Bit Parts: Racial Types, Ensemble 128
20. Caged Birds 149
21. For Future Archives, Apocrypha, and Fictions 160
22. Death Certificate, Entire 165
23. The Suicide 167
24. Last Review 170
Acknowledgments 173
Notes 177
Filmography (with Roles) 199
Bibliography 203
Index 215
