| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the AHR online. About 301 words from this article are provided below; about 658 words remain.

If you are a individual member of the American Historical Association, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time. AHA members can go to the AHA individual membership section to locate their member numbers.
If you are not a member of the American Historical Association, you can:: • Join the AHA and receive many member benefits including print and electronic issues of the American Historical Review.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the American Historical Review (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the American Historical Review.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Methods/Theory

Vicente L. Rafael. White Love and Other Events in Filipino History. (American Encounters/Global Interactions.) Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2000. Pp. xiv, 286. Cloth $54.95, paper $18.95.

The essays collected in this volume offer a sustained inquiry into the meaning of being Filipino/a and the challenge presented to the very idea of history by the impossibility of fixing a Filipino/a identity. Vicente L. Rafael is an insightful and eloquent guide. The book has much to offer to contemporary discussions of the relationship between nationalism and colonialism in the making and unmaking of our conceptions of history. 1

The subtitle to the introduction, "episodic histories," offers an immediate clue to what is to come. What these essays provide is not a coherent historical narrative, to repudiate the possibility of which is one of the author's fundamental goals, but episodes from the last one hundred years of Filipino history that recast the past as a tapestry in motion, consisting of (seemingly) limitless events and images that reinforce, contradict, or simply play off one another. 2

The discussions suggest that what we do with the past is contained only by our own situated limitations. History does not offer easy truths on the past, nor is the past just a construct shaped by the present. Rather, the past offers a site for the play of imagination. The plea here is not for arbitrariness but for a recognition of the possibilities offered by the archives, which permit a whole range of readings of the past if we only care to recognize them. History as we have known and practiced it, then, appears against this archival richness, and the interpretive possibilities it offers, as a strategy of containment, an ideological closure on the imagination of different pasts and, therefore, different futures. . . .

There are about 658 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.