Ateneo LCSP hosts lecture on book on the life of Isabel Rosario Cooper

On 4 July 2025, Ateneo’s Literary and Cultural Studies Program (LCSP), in cooperation with Kritika Kultura and PLUME, hosted a lecture by Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez on her book Empire’s Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper, published by Duke University Press in 2021.

Dr Gonzalez is a Professor of Ethnic Studies and Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to Empire's Mistress, she has also authored Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai‘i and the Philippines. Furthermore, she is co-editor of Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai’i (and the Duke University Press decolonial guide series) and Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader.

Her book covers the life of Isabel Rosario Cooper, one of Filipino cinema’s pioneering actors in the 1920s and 30s, but one whose affair with Gen Douglas MacArthur is often remembered as a salacious footnote in the latter’s career.

In her book, however, Dr Gonzalez goes beyond her affair, instead following Cooper’s career from the Philippines; to Washington DC, during her time with MacArthur; to Hollywood, where she tried to establish a career before eventually dying penniless. Through this, she hoped to examine how American imperial ambitions influenced movements and relationships, and how colonized individuals — especially women like Cooper— utilized these dynamics to their advantage. 

In her lecture “Empire’s Mistress: Gender, Sex, and Imperial Intimacies,” Dr Gonzalez discusses the process of writing her book and the difficulties that she faced in filling in the archival gaps of Cooper's life. This task required her to go into speculative fictional interludes in an attempt to challenge the one-dimensional narratives that surround Cooper.

Following the lecture, Jacky Palma and Martin Pua, two AB Literature students from the LCSP, presented their reactions to Dr Gonzalez’s book and her lecture.

This was followed by a short but lively open forum. In particular, more than a few members of the audience were curious about further details on the challenges Dr Gonzalez faced when doing research for the book, especially when dealing with sources tied to the late Gen MacArthur’s family.