Recent years have seen the sad passing of leading lights in the study of Southeast Asia: James C. Scott in 2024, Anthony Reid in 2025, and now, most recently, Vicente – or Vince – Rafael in February 2026. Born in 1956 in the Philippines, Vince Rafael exemplified the onset of a long overdue shift in the intellectual centre of gravity in Southeast Asian Studies to new generations of scholars hailing from the region. Thus even as we mourn the terrible loss that comes with Vince’s passing, we should also commemorate and celebrate the huge contribution that he made to the study of the Philippines and of Southeast Asia and beyond.

Vince conducted his doctoral studies and received his PhD at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and he lived and taught in the United States – at the University of Hawai’i, the University of California at San Diego, and the University of Washington – for the remaining years of his life. But he continued to focus his attention and his affections on the Philippines, without really committing himself to the field of Asian-American Studies despite its strong relevance and resonance among so many students in Honolulu, southern California, and Seattle. His research, his writings, his travels, his family, and, in due course, a deep romantic attachment brought him back to the Philippines over the long and very productive years of his life.

Vince first came to prominence – in the study of the Philippines, Southeast Asia, and beyond – with his brilliant first book, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule, which was first published in 1988 by Ateneo de Manila University Press and again by Duke University Press in 1993. The book’s insights on the importance of language – and translation – in both colonialism and religious conversion were highly original, eye-opening, and illuminating, and it is no exaggeration to say that the book was, is, and will long remain one of the most interesting and important books ever written about Philippine history and about Southeast Asia more broadly.

In fact, Contracting Colonialism easily ranks among the most influential books ever written about colonialism in general, as is evident in bibliographies, footnotes, and reading lists with coverage extending far beyond Southeast Asia. To take one notable example, Edward G. Gray’s classic New World Babel: Languages and Nations in Early America (Princeton University Press, 1999), treating linguistic encounters between Native Americans and European colonial settlers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries along the eastern seaboard of North America, cited Contracting Colonialism in its very first footnote, fulsomely acknowledging the author’s indebtedness to this earlier volume for inspiring him in the research and writing of the book.

Vince Rafael was exceptionally talented as a thinker and a writer, as a speaker and as a teacher and supervisor, as his many former students can attest. Working at the fertile intersection of history, anthropology, comparative literature, and social theory, his writings explored and extended the insights of his former teachers and mentors – Ben Anderson and James Siegel – to previously unexplored aspects of the history of the Philippines. His brilliant first book was followed by several subsequent highly original and interesting volumes, notably including White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Duke University Press, 2000), The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines (Duke University Press, 2005), and Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language Amid Wars of Translation (Duke University Press, 2016) bringing his account of Philippine history from the sixteenth century all the way up through the final years of Spanish colonial rule, the Revolution, and on onwards into the twentieth century, treating American colonial rule, and the Marcos and post-Marcos eras in highly original and illuminating ways.

Rafael complemented other historians’ analyses of economic and social change, and of the interplay of institutions and interests in the field of politics, through close attention to questions of nationalism, communication, and representation – and the limitations and failures of communication and representation – through language and beyond language. Moving beyond materialism and muckraking, his work was distinctive in its close attention to identity, ideology, and experience from a vantage point inspired by various strands of critical social theory rather than cultural essentialism.

Rafael’s last book, The Sovereign Trickster: Death and Laughter in the Age of Duterte (Duke University Press, 2022), offered a characteristically original and eye-opening account of the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte (2016-2022). Building on the works of Michel Foucault and Achille Mbembe, and drawing on recent research by his partner Lila Shahani, he coupled his close, careful analysis of the grotesque ‘necropolitics’ of Duterte’s ‘War on Drugs’ with a commensurately critical account of the seemingly more benign ‘biopolitics’ of the conditional cash transfer (CCT), education, health care, and other social welfare programs advanced and expanded under the Duterte administration.

A distinctly gendered divide between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor citizens of the country, Rafael suggested, was produced and reproduced in ways which served to discipline and divide the population. Under Duterte, good-for-nothing un(der)employed Filipinos susceptible to drinking and illegal drug consumption were pathologized and punished through arbitrary violence and incarceration, even as overworked – and often overseas – Filipinas were enlisted as primary caretakers and custodians of the production and reproduction of the family and the household as an economic and social unit.

The Sovereign Trickster thus showed how biopolitics, necropolitics, and widespread precarity combined to create what Nicole Curato termed a ‘politics of anxiety’, enabling Duterte’s election in 2016. Viewed from this perspective, Duterte’s ‘War on Drugs’ – and its earlier iterations dating back at least to the 1990s in the Philippines and much earlier elsewhere – represent not (only) the idiosyncratic obsession of a single (psychopathological) president, but (also) the deeper structural logics of neoliberal governance in the contemporary Philippines and elsewhere.

Vince Rafael’s long and highly productive scholarly career was thus quite literally ‘bookended’ by two highly original and important books, beginning with Contracting Colonialism and ending with The Sovereign Trickster. But over the intervening years and beyond, he also touched the lives of countless family members and friends, students and supervisees, colleagues, readers, and others whom he encountered on the way. He was effervescent if not positively electric in his enduring intellectual appetite, interest, and curiosity, highly inquisitive, eager to engage, to listen, and to learn about the world. He was extremely gifted and extremely generous, giving so much of himself to those who had the pleasure and privilege to know him in person and to those who knew him through his writings and teachings over the years. He led a rich and rewarding life. He was deeply loved, and he will be sorely missed.

*The views expressed in the blog are those of the author alone. They do not reflect the position of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, nor that of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

*Banner photo by Sebastian Schuster on Unsplash

The post Vicente L. Rafael (1956-2026) in Memoriam first appeared on LSE Southeast Asia Blog.