SISA'S VENGEANCE: Rizal's Sexual Politics and Cultural Revolution

Selected excerpts of reviews of  E. San Juan, SISA’S VENGEANCE, forthcoming in a revised and expanded form from VIBAL PUBLISHING COMPANY; the original edition still available from amazon.com

———————————————————————————————————————

In this book, E. San Juan has established that historical materialism is necessary, and addressing the “woman question”  is integral to the materialist study of history. His interpretation of Rizal fills a gap in the literature on Rizal…Appropriating this interpretation in a time of globalizing terror and poverty makes Rizal a deathless, dangerous, subversive comrade of revolutionaries in history….San Juan has in fact presented a more holistic, uncensored Rizal.

—Prof. Teresa Lorena Jopson, 

Dept of Social Studies, University of the Philippines, “A Radical 

Rizal” (Humanities Diliman, July-December 2014)

Scholar E. San Juan addresses the question “who is the real and true Rizal” as he seeks to “explore the network of duplicities and contradictions” related to it in a postmodern age…Rizal remains “unique and extraordinary in his single-minded commitment to his people’s liberation…” The hero’s personal tragedies as well as those of other martyrs (in particular, of Burgos, Gomez and Zamora)…are visible in his writings as an anagogic idea of vengeance—a “collective mode of fulfilling a promise to ancestors to heal the rupture of interrupted group exchanges—as the legitimizing foundation of a nation-in-the-making….” The 150th birth anniversary of the hero is an opportunity to reassess Rizal. Now more than ever, it is time to rethink what it means to be Filipino in a time when the country is being re-colonized by the United States under the guise of the global war on terror and the diasporic condition of Filipino laborers scattered across the globe…

—Mai Andre D.P. Encarnacion, “Review of Sisa’s Vengeance”, U.P. Newsletter (March 2012)

Whatever San Juan writes is worth reading because of the intensity of his style and the special emphasis he gives certain aspects of the works he deals with. Until I read his analysis, I had not seen the multiplicity of possible layers of meaning in a tiny, vivid incident involving Maria Clara and a leper; San Juan finds Rizal’s novels to be “primarily significant today as critiques of feudal and individualist experience in Philippine colonial society.”

—Prof. Edgar C. Knowlton, Jr., University of Hawaii, “Review of Toward Rizal,” World Literature Today (Spring 1984)