With multiple exhibitions now open and a symposium Oct. 28-29, Stanford s interdisciplinary Asian American Art Initiative (AAAI) aims to make the university a major center for the study of Asian American art.
With multiple exhibitions now open and a symposium Oct. 28-29, Stanford s interdisciplinary Asian American Art Initiative aims to make the university a major center for the study of Asian American art.
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Isabel Rosario Cooper was a mixed-race Filipina actress who, amid scandal and political turmoil in the early decades of the 20th century, rose to fame in Manila before trying to make it in Hollywood. Cooper has mostly been lost to historical memory, but on the fleeting occasions when she does surface, she is usually accompanied by Gen. Douglas MacArthur. The story goes like this: The beautiful, young Cooper falls in love with the towering military hero in a country on the brink of war. She follows him to Washington, D.C., where MacArthur puts her up in the lavish Chastleton Hotel, and they engage in a five-year affair. Unable to secure her lover’s fidelity, though, she dies by suicide
February 8, 2021
The life of Filipina vaudeville and film actress Isabel Rosario Cooper is the focus of a new book by a University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa professor.
Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Department of American Studies professor and Honors Program director, details Cooper’s relationship with General Douglas MacArthur by portraying her not as a tragic heroine, but as someone caught within the violent histories of U.S. imperialism. Their relationship was a failed love affair between a venerated war hero and a young woman of Filipino and American heritage.
“My motivation for the book was to tell the story that is often hidden by convenient or familiar narrations especially of women, and women like actors, or mistresses and get a more complex picture of their humanity as they navigated a shifting social order,” Gonzalez said. “So much of Isabel Cooper’s story is wrapped up in her relationship to Douglas MacArthur, and as a consequence, that overshadows a lot of other i