Filipinas Everywhere

E. San Juan is remarkable for his commitment to literature and culture as vital areas of contemporary social life. --Prof. Fredric Jameson, Duke University ***E. San Juan is one of the world's most distinguished progressive critics. He is undoubtedly the leading authority on Filipino-American literary relations.--Prof. H. Bruce Franklin, Rutgers University *** In this epoch of disastrous neoliberal globalization, E. San Juan's critique seizes the crisis in neocolonial Philippines as a point of intervention. As current Philippine President Duterte's timely war on drugs and corruption rages, E. San Juan highlights the facticity that Filipinos are once more confronted with the barbaric legacy of U.S. domination, legitimized today as "civilizing" humanitarianism. This wide-ranging discourse by a Filipino radical scholar interrogates the apologetic use of postcolonial dogmas, Saussurean semiology versus Peircean semiotics, Kafka's allegory on torture, Edward Said's use of Gramsci, and the postconceptual view of photography. Overall, the author seeks to deploy a historical-materialist perspective in elucidating the dialectical interplay of contradictory forces symbolized in art and diverse cultural texts. In the process, he delineates the contexts of events with the end view of generating revolutionary transformations in the Asian-Pacific islands marked by the prevalence of U.S. imperial hegemony in the global system. (Series: Critical Voices) Subject: Politics, Literature, Media Studies, Cultural Studies, Sociology, Post-Colonialism]