Granted formal independence in 1946, the Philippines serves as a battleground between the neoliberal project of capitalist globalization and the enduring aspiration of Filipinos for national self-determination. More than ten million Filipino workers—over one-tenth of the country's total population—work as contract workers in all parts of the world. How did this "model" colony of the United States devolve into an impoverished, war-torn neocolonial hinterland, a provider of cheap labor and raw materials for the rest of the world? In Toward Filipino Self-Determination, E. San Juan Jr. explores the historical, cultural, and political formation of the Filipino diaspora. By focusing on the work of significant Filipino intellectuals and activists, including Carlos Bulosan and Philip Vera Cruz, as well as the issues of gender and language for workers in the United States, San Juan provides a historical-materialist reading of social practices, discourses, and institutions that explain the contradictions characterizing Filipino life in both the United States and in the Philippines.
In this epoch of disastrous neoliberal globalisation, E. San Juan's critique seizes the crisis in neo-colonial Philippines as a point of intervention. As current Philippine President Duterte's timely war on drugs and corruption rages, San Juan foregrounds the facticity that Filipinos are once more confronted with the barbaric legacy of U.S. domination, legitimised today as civilising 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 post-conceptual view of photography. The author also diagnoses the symptoms of nihilistic neoliberal ideology found in media discourses on diaspora, terrorism, and globalisation. His critique of academic postcolonial studies sums up the arguments elaborated in his previous books, Beyond Postcolonial Theory (St Martins Press), After Post-Colonialism (Rowman & Littlefield), and especially US Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines (Palgrave Macmillan). Overall, San Juan seeks to deploy a historical-materialist perspective in elucidating the dialectical interplay of contradictory forces symbolised in art and diverse cultural texts. In the process, he delineates the contexts of events and encounters generating 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 on the planet.
Please note this is a 'Palgrave to Order' title (PTO). Stock of this book requires shipment from an overseas supplier. It will be delivered to you within 12 weeks. This book offers the first history of the Filipinos in the United States, focusing on the significance of the Moro people's struggle for self-determination.
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