Vicente Rafael's most recent book is an ambitious theorizing of translation that posits translation as a site for struggles for power and legitimacy, thus making translation not accidental to, but constitutive of empire in particular and of political struggle more generally. Rafael argues that empire not only engages in wars of translation but also on translation, with the aim of making all things reducible to a single universal (imperial) language. With this reduction would come, finally, a cessation of translation as all things could be spoken through this universal language: thus the war on translation. As language and translation are often embedded in power struggles, these wars of and on translation need not only occur in imperial settings, as Rafael demonstrates. In fact, he charts these wars of and on translation not only through political events, but also through personal lives and familial relationships.

What Rafael celebrates, however, is what he calls the “insurgency of language,” which is language's ability to resist these wars of and on translation and the attempts to homogenize and instrumentalize language. Rafael traces the wars of and on translation, and the insurgency of language, through three separate sites of translation. The first section of the book discusses translation during three key moments in Philippine history: the revolutionary Philippines, the American colonial period, and the EDSA II uprising. The second section, entitled “Weaponizing Babel,” transfers insights gained on translations' uses in empire to the direct weaponization of translation in the American War on Terror. The final section of the book traces translation through a discussion of the lives, research, and writings of key figures in area studies (with an emphasis on Philippine studies): Benedict Anderson, Arjun Appadurai, Renato Rosaldo, and Reynaldo Ileto. The final chapter in the book is an interview that Rafael gave to the journal Translation: A Transdisciplinary Journal, where he lays out many of the theoretical concerns central to Motherless Tongues.

Motherless Tongues builds on the work of previous theorists of translation (most notably Jacques Derrida) while making a wholly unique contribution to the field both in its theorization of language as insurgent and in the historical examples it reads through the wars of and on translation. Chapter 3, on the way translation was at work in and through the use of text messages during the EDSA II uprising, and chapter 5, on the United States' attempts to weaponize language in service of the War on Terror, are particularly insightful ways of reading Rafael's theories through modern political moments. Although Rafael's analyses are tied to neither one century nor one milieu, the book coheres because he effectively shows that many of the same translation forces that were at work in the Spanish and American Philippines are still at work in the present-day Philippines and in the United States’ new imperial translation projects in the Middle East.

The last section of the book turns from the political and historical to the personal and reads translation through the lives of several giants of area studies. Chapter 6, “The Accidents of Area Studies: Benedict Anderson and Arjun Appadurai” is less directly tied to Rafael's discussion of translation than are the other chapters in this third and final section, “Translating Lives.” For this reason, this chapter will be most interesting to those in area studies or who study Appadurai's or Anderson's work. The other chapters in this final section return to Rafael's theorizing of translation, however, and this final section will also be of great interest to anyone working on autobiography. Chapter 8 in particular, on Reynaldo Ileto, is a compelling theorization of autobiographical writing as well as a testing of Rafael's theories of translation through a personal life rather than a political event.

European thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Roman Jakobson, both of whom Rafael cites, have long dominated syllabi in translation studies seminars. Motherless Tongues not only demonstrates what a rich ecosystem the Philippines is for thinking through translation, but also offers a new and productive way to think about the relationship between translation and language. One hopes that Rafael's work will make Southeast Asian studies more prominent within translation studies. Motherless Tongues, as an ambitiously transdisciplinary book, will be of interest to scholars in a number of fields. It will be of most interest to graduate students and professors in translation studies, comparative literature, history, and area studies, and deserves a wide readership.