BiblioVault - Books about Manila

City of Screens: Imagining Audiences in Manila's Alternative Film Culture
Jasmine Nadua Trice
Duke University Press, 2021
Library of Congress PN1993.5.P6T753 2021

In City of Screens Jasmine Nadua Trice examines the politics of cinema circulation in early-2000s Manila. She traces Manila's cinema landscape by focusing on the primary locations of film exhibition and distribution: the pirated DVD district, mall multiplexes, art-house cinemas, the university film institute, and state-sponsored cinematheques. In the wake of digital media piracy and the decline of the local commercial film industry, the rising independent cinema movement has been a site of contestation between filmmakers and the state, each constructing different notions of a prospective, national public film audience. Discourses around audiences become more salient given that films by independent Philippine filmmakers are seldom screened to domestic audiences, despite their international success. City of Screens provides a deeper understanding of the debates about the competing roles of the film industry, the public, and the state in national culture in the Philippines and beyond.

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Empire's Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper
Vernadette Vicuna Gonzalez
Duke University Press, 2021
Library of Congress PN2918.C66G669 2021

In Empire's Mistress Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez follows the life of Filipina vaudeville and film actress Isabel Rosario Cooper, who was the mistress of General Douglas MacArthur. If mentioned at all, their relationship exists only as a salacious footnote in MacArthur's biography—a failed love affair between a venerated war hero and a young woman of Filipino and American heritage. Following Cooper from the Philippines to Washington, D.C. to Hollywood, where she died penniless, Gonzalez frames her not as a tragic heroine, but as someone caught within the violent histories of U.S. imperialism. In this way, Gonzalez uses Cooper's life as a means to explore the contours of empire as experienced on the scale of personal relationships. Along the way, Gonzalez fills in the archival gaps of Cooper's life with speculative fictional interludes that both unsettle the authority of “official” archives and dislodge the established one-dimensional characterizations of her. By presenting Cooper as a complex historical subject who lived at the crossroads of American colonialism in the Philippines, Gonzalez demonstrates how intimacy and love are woven into the infrastructure of empire.

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Escape to Manila: FROM NAZI TYRANNY TO JAPANESE TERROR
Frank Ephraim. Foreword by Stanley A. Karnow
University of Illinois Press, 2002
Library of Congress DS135.P45E64 2003 | Dewey Decimal 940.530899240599

With the rise of Nazism in the 1930s more than a thousand European Jews sought refuge in the Philippines, joining the small Jewish population of Manila. When the Japanese invaded the islands in 1941, the peaceful existence of the barely settled Jews filled with the kinds of uncertainties and oppression they thought they had left behind.

In this book Frank Ephraim, who fled to Manila with his parents, gathers the testimonies of thirty-six refugees, who describe the difficult journey to Manila, the lives they built there upon their arrival, and the events surrounding the Japanese invasion. Combining these accounts with historical and archival records, Manila newspapers, and U.S. government documents, Ephraim constructs a detailed account of this little-known chapter of world history.

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Feeding Manila in Peace and War, 1850–1945
Daniel F. Doeppers
University of Wisconsin Press, 2019
Library of Congress DS689.M2D64 2016 | Dewey Decimal 338.195991609034

Getting food, water, and services to the millions who live in the world’s few dozen megacities is one of the twenty-first century’s most formidable challenges. This innovative history traces nearly a century in the life of the megacity of Manila to show how it grew and what sustained it. Focusing on the city’s key commodities—rice, produce, fish, fowl, meat, milk, flour, coffee—Daniel F. Doeppers explores their complex interconnections, the changing ecology of the surrounding region, and the social fabric that weaves together farmers, merchants, transporters, storekeepers, and door-to-door vendors.

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Ginseng and Other Tales from Manila
Marianne Villanueva
Calyx, 1991
Library of Congress PR9550.9.V49G5 1991 | Dewey Decimal 823

Please fill in Nominee Manila Critics Circle Award These beautiful and poignant stories evoke a complex and empathetic picture of the Philippines. They reveal characters trapped in the extremity of urban violence or the crushing poverty of the provinces. The reader comes away with new insight into human nature and the valor and courage of the Philippine people. copy

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Migrant Returns: Manila, Development, and Transnational Connectivity
Eric J. Pido
Duke University Press, 2017
Library of Congress JV8685.P536 2017

In Migrant Returns Eric J. Pido examines the complicated relationship among the Philippine economy, Manila’s urban development, and balikbayans—Filipino migrants visiting or returning to their homeland—to reconceptualize migration as a process of connectivity. Focusing on the experiences of balikbayans returning to Manila from California, Pido shows how Philippine economic and labor policies have created an economy reliant upon property speculation, financial remittances, and the affective labor of Filipinos living abroad. As the initial generation of post-1965 Filipino migrants begin to age, they are encouraged to retire in their homeland through various state-sponsored incentives. Yet, once they arrive, balikbayans often find themselves in the paradoxical position of being neither foreign nor local. They must reconcile their memories of their Filipino upbringing with American conceptions of security, sociality, modernity, and class as their homecoming comes into collision with the Philippines’ deep economic and social inequality. Tracing the complexity of balikbayan migration, Pido shows that rather than being a unidirectional event marking the end of a journey, migration is a multidirectional and continuous process that results in ambivalence, anxiety, relief, and difficulty.

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Philippine Sanctuary: A Holocaust Odyssey
Bonnie M. Harris
University of Wisconsin Press, 2022
Library of Congress DS135.P45H37 2020 | Dewey Decimal 940.8318092

During World War II, the United States government and many Western democracies limited or closed themselves off entirely to Jewish refugees. By contrast, a Pacific island nation decided to keep its doors open. Between 1938 and 1941, the Philippine Commonwealth provided safe asylum to more than 1,300 German Jews. In highlighting the efforts by Philippine president Manual Quezon and High Commissioner Paul V. McNutt, Bonnie M. Harris offers fuller implications for our understanding of the Roosevelt administration's response to the Holocaust.
This untold history is brought to life by focusing on the incredible journey of synagogue cantor Joseph Cysner. Drawing from oral histories, memoirs, and personal papers, Harris documents Cysner's harrowing escape from the Nazis and his heroic rescue by the American-led Jewish community of the Philippines in 1939. Moving and rich in historical detail, Philippine Sanctuary reveals new insights for an overlooked period in our recent history, and emphasizes the continued importance of humanitarian efforts to aid those being persecuted.

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