“FILIPINAS EVERYWHERE” by E. SAN JUAN, Jr.

[forthcoming from DE LA SALLE UNIVERSITY PUBLISHING HOUSE]

In this epoch of disastrous neoliberal globalization, E. San Juan’s critique seizes the crisis in neocolonial Philippines as a point of intervention. As President Duterte’s timely war on drugs and corruption rages, we are once more confronted with the barbaric legacy of U.S. domination now legitimized today as “civilizing” humanitarianism. This wide-ranging discourse of a Filipino diasporic scholar interrogates the terrorist use of postcolonial dogmas, deconstructive semiology versus Peircean semeiotics, Kafka’s allegory, commodified versions of photography, and other symptoms of nihilistic free-market ideology. Overall, San Juan seeks to deploy a historical-materialist perspective in elucidating the dialectical process of contradictory forces impelling revolutionary transformations in this transitional Asian-Pacific islands that, with its subjugation in the Filipino-American War of 1899-1913, marked the fateful advent of U.S. imperial hegemony in the planet.