American studies needs Filipino studies. The various turns in American studies scholarship over the past quarter-century, including but hardly restricted to the imperial, remain dimly lit without the Philippines from 1898 onward as a constellation of primary significance. Asian studies needs Filipino studies. Richer nearby countries and their more prestigious languages dominate the worldwide architecture of Asian studies, but it is the Philippines that was, and remains, the definitive precursor and pivot of globalization in the Pacific. Hispanic studies, both in its Latin American and Iberian versions, needs Filipino studies. The history of the Spanish-speaking world is premised by the overlooked outpost that yet marks the culmination of both Latin America and Iberia. And then there are the fields and subfields dedicated to Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, and Taiwan, not to mention any number of theoretical approaches, all of which take on new coordinates when the Philippines is understood as a polestar. And, of course, there is the Philippines proper. But equally of course, there is no such thing as the Philippines proper. There surely never was. The archipelago is inherently transnational, transethnic, excessive of its own borders. It is globalized and, within and without its seven thousand islands, it is tidal. One of those tides, that of Filipino studies, has surged dramatically in recent decades. Two new anthologies offer its currents, Filipino Studies: Palimpsests of Nation and Diaspora, edited by Martin F. Manalansan IV and Augusto F. Espiritu, and Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language amid Wars of Translation by Vicente L. Rafael. Their impact, and staying power, will ride largely on the shores upon which they land.

Filipino Studies is an ambitious collection of eighteen essays by an equal number of scholars, many of whom are well known in Filipino studies and a few of whom are read beyond the field. It is an impressive gathering of contributors. The essays themselves range over the social sciences and humanities, from Neferti Tadiar's opening salvo, “Challenges for Cultural Studies under the Rule of Global War,” and John D. Blanco's nuanced “Oriental Enlightenment and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse?” to chapters on Filipino American abstract art by Sarita Echavez See, on transnational Filipino satellite television culture by Emily Noelle Ignacio, on Eartha Kitt and “The Filipina in Black Feminist Performance Imaginary” by Lucy Burns, and on the workings of the Chinese Exclusion Act in the Philippines by Richard T. Chu. There are fine essays by Kimberly Alidio on US “educational biopolitics” in the Philippines and by Julian Go on the relations of Filipino elites with Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Catalan counterparts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (111).

The best moments in the anthology, however, may or may not arise in the best-written or -thought essays (and, obviously, judgment on that will vary from reader to reader) so much as in those passages that do Filipino studies creatively and so could lead to other creative academic praxis, both within the field and far beyond. The ludic elements of Martin Joseph Ponce's “Pinoy Posteriority” – sample subheading: “Ass-Backwards: Lust and Loathing in San Francisco” – a counterintuitive essay on “racialized and neocolonial queer positionalities and temporalities” in two novels, play in productive counterpoint to the fifty tones of grim that make up the verbal range of most academic prose (255, 251). The imagined, if romanticized, scene that emerges in the penultimate paragraph of Kale Bantigue Fajardo's essay on a quasi-historical, quasi-mythical community of Filipino fishermen in Louisiana hints at the great potential of creative writing as a serious force in academic writing. The repeated invocations by Dylan Rodriguez of the unknowability of so much history, merged with his simultaneous dedication to the “stalking” traces of “insane” Filipino soldiers that ghost the historical record, provide a compelling way of thinking analytically about what cannot be thought positivistically (172). This is to say that when Filipino studies imagines how it can be, Filipino Studies is at its most potent.

Without question, the anthology is often stimulating and liberational. Yet at the same time, it is incongruous to the point of distraction. The discourses and topics ricochet from essay to essay, depending on the rhetoric of the writer and the discipline, even within the book subdivisions themselves. The culminating section, for instance, carries the promising title of “Philippine Cultures at Large: Homing in on Global Filipinos and Their Discontents” as a lead-in to its four pieces. The first is the theoretically engaged “Diasporic and Liminal Subjectivities in the Age of Empire” by Francisco Benitez and the last is an anecdotal reflection piece by Rick Bonus about a pair of study-abroad trips he led to the Philippines. The Benitez essay will be either inspirational or largely illegible to a reader, depending on whether that reader is versed in a particular type of discourse and finds it useful, while the Bonus essay will strike that same reader as either inspirational or overly legible, again depending on whether the reader finds that kind of discourse useful. Juxtaposed in the same section, however, these contributions to Filipino Studies make Filipino studies look like it is far too unsure of what it can contribute in the first place.

Then again, who reads anthologies from start to finish other than their editors and reviewers? What, after all, is the point of an anthology in an era of Internet searches and online text accessibility and swiftly circulating pdf attachments, not to mention persistent disciplinary walls in classrooms and university departments? Is an anthology like this actually meant to be read as such? Or is the real hope both infinitely lighter and heavier: a gesture at possibility? An ontological proclamation that Filipino studies matters, with eighteen divergent sub-proclamations as proof? Perhaps the anthology is ultimately more important as a speech act than as anything else. The particular essays in Filipino Studies will be parceled out to distinct readerships by the logics of keyword searches and the divisions of the academic marketplace, but as a whole, as an artefact, to what extent does it fulfill its own intent? The editors write that

The metaphor of “palimpsests” that subtitles the project speaks to a similar idea. The editors, citing Caroline Hau, conclude that the goal for Filipino studies scholars should be to produce “open, generous gestures, and attempts toward new conversations and collaborations, in order to think more broadly and aspirationally about emancipatory politics and futures, and to open up capacious vistas of ‘what it means to live as, and call oneself, Filipino’” (10). These are admirable aims. But to what extent is the trebled hope of promoting “capacious” thought borne out by the anthology itself? To what does it not speak? To whom and of whom? What, in short, are the dimensions of its claims? This exceptionally ambitious anthology seems far too often not to be capacious at all.

Put another way, what Filipino Studies does not try to imagine is striking. No anthology, of course, can cover infinite topics in all disciplines, and yet there are remarkable chronological, linguistic, and even biological limits for this project ostensibly aimed at transcending conventional borders. The Philippines has multiple cultural traditions that date long before even the long (more than three centuries) Spanish colonial period, but Filipino Studies only takes as its temporal framework the end of the nineteenth century to the present day. There is no more canonical timeline of Filipino studies than that, the practical effect of which is to diminish substantially any potential interest by scholars of Spanish or Latin American studies in the Philippines. This is a missed opportunity, for the Philippines was a part of Latin America and Spain far longer than it was, say, part of the United States, and because Spanish itself remained a literary and political language in the archipelago until after World War II. Filipino Studies proclaims a will to palimpsestic interrogation, but what kind of palimpsest is it that has rubbed out to the point of virtual invisibility all Filipino cultural texts prior to the rise of Filipino elites in Europe in the 1880s? The same counterpalimpsestic tendencies hold true regarding the dazzling linguistic plurality of the archipelago. The overwhelming attention to English and/or Tagalog texts in the Filipino Studies essays dedicated to twentieth-century topics reflects linguistic hegemony in the islands but not linguistic reality. Abundant Filipino languages with millions of speakers and thriving cultural traditions are effectively absent in Filipino Studies. The upshot, as with the temporal bracketing, is that the anthology ends up more or less reproducing the kind of hegemonies of frame that it seeks to go beyond. Surprisingly, this extends too to the roster of contributors. The editors launch their introduction by explaining that the chapters were written “by a group of Philippine-, US- and Canada-based Filipino and Filipino American scholars” (1). This seems, at best, to be curious criteria for a volume dedicated to an ethos of “expansive dialogue between and among scholars” and “alternative strategies for collaborative knowledge formations” (10). It raises the unfortunate question, for instance, whether a book reviewer must be of Filipino descent to write a critique of Filipino studies or Filipino Studies in the first place. It is not particularly capacious.

The editing problems in the anthology undercut its strengths as well. The editors misidentify in their own introduction how many sections there are in the book (they say four, whereas there are five) and misrepresent whose work appears in the (unacknowledged) third and (acknowledged) fourth sections (5–6). They even misquote the title of their own book, referring to it as Philippine Palimpsests (9). Moreover, multiple essays have basic editing issues such as passages clearly out of order, phrases repeated verbatim within the same chapter, missing page numbers in citations, first paragraphs that are obviously abstracts and not first paragraphs, metatextual introductory pages that awkwardly stagger forward far too long, and the like. A typo here and there is one thing. Repeated proofreading and organizational problems is another.

Vicente Rafael, in contrast, has maintained a polished place in American studies for a long time now. A historian who incorporates post-structuralist theory into his output on Filipino and other Spanish and American studies topics, he has produced a succession of texts that have served as points of reference for scholars working in a variety of fields and in assorted discursive traditions. His latest book, Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language amid Wars of Translation, at first glance seems to be his newest contribution. The content, however, is actually not so new. Versions of seven of the first eight chapters previously appeared in journals, many of them long ago; the two oldest were published in 1999 and 2003. The only previously unpublished chapter is a talk he gave in 2006. The ninth and final chapter is an interview, also available online, in which Rafael himself is the interviewee and whose endnotes largely direct the reader to other sections of Motherless Tongues.

This is all rather odd, as is the structure of the book. The first section, “Vernacularizing the Political,” strings together three chapters with subjects that range over various Filipino topics, often by way of Derridean-inflected glosses on the texts of well-known Filipino thinkers and writers. The second section, “Weaponizing Babel,” furnishes the intellectual core of the book with two essays that interrogate the intersections of translation and war. The third section, “Translating Lives,” consists of generally more informal, shorter musings on the scholarly lives of figures such as Benedict Anderson, Arjun Appadurai, Renato Rosaldo, and Reynaldo Ileto, at least two of whom seem to be friends or mentors of Rafael's (he refers to them by their first names).

Motherless Tongues, in short, is not a monograph so much as a curiously designed, self-referential amalgam. It is not clear why it should exist, other than for the inherent pleasure of holding a book in hand rather than a pdf. Almost all of Motherless Tongues has been published before, albeit in earlier versions, and is available in its discrete parts to its likely audiences, presuming that most of its potential readers are scholars or students in academic communities with access to major periodical databases. The arguments about translation that unify the middle section of the book extend unevenly throughout the other sections, and so, even if they were to convince, they do not render the book coherent. Translation more often than not feels like a frame that has been forced on some selected writings. Readers who have liked Rafael's work in the past will find here the same combination of deconstructionist and vaguely Freudian discourse on Filipino and US history, along with his customary interests in the assorted roles of language in social conflict and change. As always, Rafael can turn a lovely phrase, and there are many in Motherless Tongues worth waiting for, but it often takes a fair amount of wading through textual or historical summaries and literary-theory vocabulary to get to them. These are essays that will find a familiar audience, but the volume would make a lot more sense if presented, with the writings in chronological order, as simply a variety of work by a noted scholar, gathered from nearly two decades’ worth of publications.

Motherless Tongues, in short, is an anthology as much as Filipino Studies, with the primary differences being that one is single-authored and the other is not, and with the former seeming more like a retrospective and the latter more like a proposal. Yet the two books do share some puzzling characteristics, starting with the anachronisms that are occasionally left in place in both of them. Rafael's third chapter, on the use of cell phones in a 2001 political uprising in the Philippines, was originally published in 2003 and explains, “Text messages, or SMS (Short Message Service), are electronic messages sent over mobile phones that can also be transferred to the Internet” (74). It is peculiar to include such an explanation in a 2016 book, and disconcerting in more than a casual way: it throws doubt on whether everything in the essay, and the book by extension, is outdated. Whatever might have been novel about insights on text messaging in 2003 is surely not novel now. Meanwhile, the opening essay in Filipino Studies, a revised talk by Neferti Tadiar that is also from 2003, likewise feels dated when it rails against “the lies of the Bush, Blair, and Macapagal-Arroyo regimes” (29). Again, nothing wrong with the sentence or sentiment per se, but one or more long successor regimes has already passed since those figures stepped down in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Philippines.

There are also issues of overcharged vocabulary that link the two anthologies. Rafael insists that translation should be understood not just as metaphoric war or, literally, as part of the practice of war, but also “as war” (118, 198). Tadiar (just to stay parallel) speaks of the “actual reality of global fascism and its pernicious rule of war” (27). It seems entirely legitimate to loathe the seemingly endless wars that the United States has promoted, and to which Rafael and Tadiar refer, while still thinking it important to distinguish between the horror of those wars and translation, between the horror of those wars and fascism. Conflation of horrors that may be mutually informative but not mutually definitive is not likely to be helpful in the long run, either intellectually or politically.

For the readers of a journal of American studies to turn to Filipino studies, these two anthologies will be attractive in different ways. The hope, however, should be that those readers then turn into contributors. Whether that happens remains to be seen.