“Vernadette VicuÑa Gonzalez crafts a gorgeous and meticulous portrait of one of the most intriguing women of the twentieth century, Isabel Rosario Cooper. Woven out of ghosts of texts and archival fractures and gaps, <i>Empire's Mistress</i> is a replete mystery tale, a feminist biography, a Hollywood story, an intimate study of Philippine-U.S. relations, and a masterful work of postcolonial noir. Above all, <i>Empire's Mistress</i> is a haunting, by which afterlives of empire address our contemporary dilemmas about how to articulate, frame, and center unspoken lives to tell history accurately. A deeply satisfying work of exhumation, <i>Empire's Mistress</i> makes complex history live, and I'm grateful for Gonzalez's unflinching, refractive, and always revelatory gaze on that history.” - Gina Apostol, author of (Insurrecto) “Imaginatively tracing the life of Isabel Rosario Cooper in and through the elisions and silences of the archives, Vernadette VicuÑa Gonzalez makes a significant contribution to rethinking the process of archival research when it involves marginalized subjects whose existence appears sporadically in the historical accounts of others. A compelling read.” - Vicente L. Rafael, author of (Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language amid Wars of Translation) "Gonzalez’s book is part- excavation, part-celebration of Cooper, that puts the story of MacArthur and his mistress into a new context, and not necessarily in a sordid way. Gonzalez is mindful at all times that Cooper was a daughter of colonization. That is why you read this book, to see another small-scale, personal perspective of the U.S. Philippines relationship where colonial mentality is more than a massive headache." - Emil Guillermo (Philippine Inquirer) “<i>Empire’s Mistress</i> is a dynamic text at the cutting edge of transdisciplinary research and will appeal to lay readers looking for a juicy noir tale and to scholars of women’s history, twentieth century US–Philippines political relations, and postcolonial and cultural studies. Gonzalez’s writing against the archival grain is a pleasure to read.” - Thea Quiray Tagle (Philippine Studies) “<i>Empire’s Mistress</i> is a clever reflection of both the disjointed American imperial archive and the non-linear life Cooper had invented for herself. . . . Gonzalez not only engages in interdisciplinary analyses and methodologies to study the archive, but beautifully interweaves multiple genres-academic prose, poetry, playwriting, and art-to speculate a historical narrative that dances on the fine line between fiction and non-fiction.” - Kristin Oberiano (Western Historical Quarterly) “[Gonzalez] insists on a speculative archival reading that allows Cooper to move from being the object of the possessive to a framing that makes her a different kind of subject . . .  ultimately centering and valuing the intimate knowledges formed and passed between women who experience the violence of empire.” - Rachel Yim (Women & Performance) “Gonzalez is . . . especially lively when she is highlighting her personal discovery of archival documents. . . . Her glimpses into early Manila and the colonial life of American soldiers who married Filipina women was fascinating, and the best-researched part of this tale.” - Kirby Pringle (Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television) “<i>Empire’s Mistress</i> is a work of art-figuratively and literally-that unearths the engrossing life of Isabel Rosario Cooper. . . . It is an archetype of how archival research should be repurposed.” - Luis Zuriel P. Domingo (Sojourn) “Vernadette Gonzalez’s <i>Empire’s Mistress </i>offers a welcome correction to the common practice of colonial subjects being written out of history. . . . It constitutes a fascinating account of a minor biography intersecting with a major biography and historical events as seen from the colonized periphery.” - Delia Malia Konzett (Pacific Affairs)