Beschreibung
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 writers from Europe, Asia, and the United States. Composed as 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.
Autorenportrait
An internationally renowned cultural critic, E. San Juan, Jr. was recently a fellow of W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University, and Fulbright professor of American Studies, Leuven University, Belgium. His books include Critique and Social Transformation, Working Through the Contradictions, and Balikbayang Mahal: An E. San Juan Reader.
