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