ABOUT THE BOOK
Situating the crisis of the humanities in the terror-wars of global capitalism, E. San Juan opens up the field of critical theory to unacknowledged counter-hegemonic impulses in selected modernist writers in Europe and the United States.
Composed as strategic interventions in the field of cultural studies, the essays attempt a dialectical fusion of inventory and self-critique . By way of Pablo Neruda’s radical poetics, San Juan surveys the achievement of Filipino writers in an embattled U.S. neocolony, the Philippines.
A provocative reappraisal of Asian American Studies is offered for heuristic dialogue in the wake of 9/11 and the recent financial collapse. Using a comparative approach to Edward Said and Antonio Gramsci as a point of departure, San Juan initiates a project of revaluation by deploying Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics to retrieve historical indices and institutional contexts of power. Excluded from orthodox post-colonial studies,
the Philippine social formation with its manifold contradictions is remapped to provide the scenario and narrative of the predicament of Euro-American bourgeois culture in this current conjuncture of neoliberal market barbarism.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
E. SAN JUAN, Jr., emeritus professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Ethnic Studies, was recently a fellow of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University. Earlier he was a fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center, Bellagio, Italy; Fulbright professor of American Studies at Leuven University, Belgium; and a visiting professor at National Tsing Hua University and Tamkang University, Taiwan. He served previously as a fellow of the Center for the Humanities and professor of English, Wesleyan University; chair of the Department of Comparative American Cultures, Washington State University.
San Juan received his A.B. magna cum laude from the University of the Philippines, his A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. He has taught English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Brooklyn College (CUNY), University of Connecticut, Bowling Green State University, University of the Philippines, and Ateneo de Manila University. His ground-breaking book Racial Formations/Critical Transformations won awards from the Association for Asian American Studies and the Gustavus Myers Center. He received the 1994 Katherine Newman Award from the Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literatures in the United States.
San Juan's books include Beyond Postcolonial Theory (Palgrave/St. Martin's Press); Hegemony and Strategies of Transgression: Essays in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature (State University of New York Press); The Philippine Temptation: Dialectics of U.S.-Philippines Literary Relations (Temple University Press); and After Postcolonialism: Remapping Philippines-US Confrontations (Rowman and Littlefield). His collected essays in philosophy and cultural studies are found in the following volumes: Racism and Cultural Studies (Duke University Press), Working Through the Contradictions: From Cultural Theory to Critical Practice (Bucknell University Press), Balikbayang Sinta: An E. San Juan Reader (Ateneo University Press), In the Wake of Terror: Class, Race, Nation, and Ethnicity in the Postmodern World (Lexington Books), and Critique and Social Transformation (The Edwin Mellen Press). His collected poems in Filipino may be found in Alay sa Paglikha ng Bukang-liwayway (Ateneo de Manila University Press), Balikbayang Mahal: Passages from Exile, and Sutrang Kayumanggi (LuLu.com), among others. His works have been translated into Russian, German, Spanish, Italian, French, Chinese, Japanese, and other languages.
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