Filipinas Everywhere Essays in Criticism and Cultural Studies from a Filipino Perspective

In this epoch of disastrous neoliberal globalization, E. San Juan’s critique seizes the crisis in neocolonial 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, legitimized today as “civilizing” 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 postconceptual view of photography. The author also diagnoses the symptoms of nihilistic neoliberal ideology found in media discourses on diaspora, terrorism, and globalization. His critique of academic postcolonial studies sums up the arguments elaborated in his previous books, Beyond Postcolonial Theory (St. Martin’s Press), After Postcolonialism (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 symbolized in art and diverse cultural texts. In the process, he delineates the contexts of events with the end view of generating revolutionary transformations in the Asian-Pacific islands marked by the prevalence of U.S. imperial hegemony in the global system.