Mistaken for an Empire: A Memoir in Tongues

"As an adult, [Imperial] attempted what no one else had done: translating ['The White Man's Burden'] into Tagalog. These efforts led Imperial to reflect on her many (often disorienting) moves between the U.S. and the Philippines as well as the pain that translating the poem, alongside her own fractured experiences, represented....Kipling's 'burden, ' Imperial suggests, is far more nuanced than many believe....An intriguing and provocative book."-Kirkus

Born in postcolonial Philippines into a family-and country-with a complicated history, Christine Imperial learns from a lifetime of experiences that there is no easy path to understanding or belonging. Setting out to renew her relationship to Tagalog, the language she had previously distanced herself from, she contends with the meaning of her dual Philippine/US citizenship along with the conditions surrounding it, reflecting on imperialist and class systems and the history of her birth country. Beginning with an attempt to translate into Tagalog Rudyard Kipling's "The White Man's Burden"-Kipling's ode to American imperialism after the US takeover of the Philippines-Imperial reflects on and writes against Kipling's poem as she unspools her fractured family's story.

Reckoning with both the anguish and promise of hybridity, Mistaken for an Empire expands into an exploration of the author's relationship to English and Tagalog, history, family and state, origin and belonging. By interrogating the many intricacies of individual and national identity and the legacies that shape them, Imperial grapples with the tangled nature of allegiance, whether it be to family, to country, or to self.


Author: Christine Imperial
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Published: 04/07/2023
Pages: 256
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.83lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.91w x 0.79d
ISBN13: 9780814258637
ISBN10: 0814258638
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Collections | Essays
- Biography & Autobiography | Cultural, Ethnic & Regional | Asian & Asian American
- Biography & Autobiography | Personal Memoirs

About the Author
Christine Imperial received her MFA from California Institute of the Arts. Her writing has appeared in Poetry, American Book Review, and elsewhere. Mistaken for an Empire is her first book.