Between Empire and Insurgency The Philippines in the New Millennium Essays in History, Comparative Literature, and Cultural Politics

E. San Juan’s new work offers a continuation and elaboration of themes broached in his previous book published by UP Press, From Globalization to National Liberation. For both projects, the organizing motive is the sustained inquiry into the predicament of colonialism/neocolonialism and the quest for radical democratic transformation in the Philippines. The principles of historical materialism (articulated by Gramsci, Amado V. Hernandez, Renato Constantino, and others) inform the commentaries on authors, texts, and aesthetic discourses. Within the framework of globalization defined by the current imperial hegemony of the global North, the author investigates the process of the Filipino diaspora and its translation into fiction, reportage, and film. Original here are the observations on African-American internationalism, the current women’s liberation movement in the neocolonial formation, and the vicissitudes of the Moro people’s struggle for autonomy and self-determination. In anticipation of further research, the author initiates at pivotal conjunctures of the book a critique of the academic field of cultural studies and its prospect after the 2008 crisis of “shock” or disaster capitalism and its ecosystemic reverberations in the second decade of the new millennium.

About the Author

E. SAN JUAN Jr. is currently a research fellow of the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas.
He was recently a fellow of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University; Fulbright professor of American Studies in Leuven University, Belgium, and visiting professor of literature at National Tsing Hua University and Tamkang University, Taiwan. He also served as a fellow of the Center for the Humanities and Professor of English, Wesleyan University; professor and chair of the Department of Comparative American Cultures, Washington State University (1998–2001); visiting professor at the Universita degli di studi Trento, Italy; and Rockefeller Foundation fellow at the Bellagio Study Center, Italy, in 2006.
San Juan’s book Racial Formations/Critical Transformations won awards from the Association for Asian American Studies and the Gustavus Myers Center for Human Rights. He received the 1994 Katherine Newman Award from the Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literatures in the United States and the 1999 Centennial Award for Achievement in Literature from the Cultural Center of the Philippines. His collected poems in Filipino written in the last four decades, Alay sa Paglikha ng Bukang-Liwayway, was published by Ateneo de Manila University Press; and three new collections recently appeared: Sapagkat Iniibig Kita (University of the Philippines Press, 2005), Ulikba at Iba Pang Tula (UST Publishing House, 2013), and Kundiman sa Gitna ng Karimlan (UP Press, 2014).
San Juan received his AB magna cum laude from the University of the Philippines, his MA and PhD from Harvard University. He has taught English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Brooklyn College (CUNY), University of Connecticut, and Bowling Green State University. He is one of the internationally distinguished writers included in the HarperCollins World Reader. He serves on the editorial board of Cultural Logic, Kritika Kultura, Left Curve, Atlantic Studies, Humanities Diliman, and many other international journals.
San Juan’s recent books include: Beyond Postcolonial Theory (Palgrave/St. Martin’s Press); Racism and Cultural Studies (Duke University Press); Working Through the Contradictions (Bucknell University Press); From Globalization to National Liberation (UP Press); US Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines (Palgrave); In the Wake of Terror: Race, Ethnicity, Nation and Class in the Postmodern World (Lexington); Critique and Social Transformation (Mellen); Critical Interventions (Lambert); and Toward Filipino Self-Determination (SNNY Pess). After Postcolonialism: Remapping Philippines-US Confrontations (Rowman and Littlefield) won the 2001 Myers Distinguished Book Award.
San Juan’s works have been translated into Russian, German, Spanish, Italian, French, Chinese, Japanese, and other languages.