After Postcolonialism: Remapping PhilippinesDUnited States Confrontations

by E. San Juan Jr.

Overview

This innovative analysis of the Philippine historical crisis is accompanied by a critique of a U.S. racial formation in which Filipinos constitute the largest Asian group. Literary and artistic expressions by Filipinos manifest a new emerging identity defined by the multicultural debates crossing the Pacific, transforming the Philippines into a borderland of East and West.

Caught betwixt the Asian continent and the hegemonic power of the United States, the Philippines occupies a contested space between past and present. Between the memory of colonial experience and an emergent nation-making dream, can a meaningful future be envisioned? This provocative book explores this problematic zone of difference through a critique of the Western production of knowledge in the context of local resistance. While Americanization of the Filipino continues, the encounter of globalizing and nationalizing forces has precipitated a profound political and social crisis whose outcome may be a paradigmatic lesson for many so-called third world countries. What happens in this Southeast Asian nation may foretell the fate of the ideals of democracy and social justice now beleaguered by the market and the unrelenting commodification of everyday life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780847698615
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	05/24/2000
Series:	Pacific Formations: Global Relations in Asian and Pacific Perspectives
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

E. San Juan, Jr. directs the Philippines Cultural Studies Center, Connecticut, and also serves as co-director of the board of the Philippine Forum, New York City. Among his recent books are Beyond Postcolonial Theory, Racism and Cultural Studies, and Working Through the Contradictions.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 Symbolic Trajectories of the Asian Diaspora Chapter 3 Historicizing the Space of Asian America Chapter 4 Specters of United States Imperialism Chapter 5 From Neocolonial Representations to National-Democratic Allegory Chapter 6 Displacing Borders of Misrecognition: On Jessica Hagedorn's Fictions Chapter 7 Kidlat Tahimik's Cinema of the Naïve Subaltern Chapter 8 Prospects and Problems of Revolutionary Transformation Chapter 9 Afterword Chapter 10 Appendix: Writing and the Asian Diaspora

Editorial Reviews

In one of the most thoroug, hard-hitting, perspicacious analyses on the subject, San Juan dismantels the myths surrounding US-Philippine relations and lays bare the harsh realities US imperialism has wrought on its former "showcase of democracy".

Against the Current

This book is a must read for Philippine specialists as well as specialists of Asian-American affairs.

Journal of Asian and African Studies

With his usual hardhitting candor and penetrating insight, E. San Juan, Jr., invites readers to join him in a post-postcolonial interrogation of the Philippine 'problematique' within the context of both American imperialism studies and Asian American studies. To be sure, The Filipino in the United States is a concrete historical phenomenon, but becoming Filipino in the Diaspora continues to be a process of dialectical struggle.

Evelyn Hu-DeHart

This book is a must read for Philippine specialists as well as specialists of Asian-American affairs.

Journal Of Asian and African Studies

It is critical to lay bare the reality of the Diaspora experience through the prism of those who have the skills to articulate it. San Juan gives this expression throughout with a powerful critique of Eurocentric universalism and the myths of multiculturalism. He has provided a provocative analysis of how the fashionable liberal vocabulary of transnationalism has obfuscated what in reality are modes of domination. San Juan's optic is unique, placing him alone at the cutting edge of a progressive counter attack against the orthodoxy of the academy.

Sam Noumoff

This is a great book, full of life and passion, conviction and commitment—all built upon a bedrock of solid literary, cultural, historical, and political analysis. This will be regarded, I believe, as possibly his very best work.

Paul Wong

In this trenchant survey of both the historyand contemporary status of relations between the Philippines and the United States, E. San Juan…display[s] his talent for provocative analysis.

Pilipinas

One of the most thorough, hard-hitting, perspicaious analyses on the subject.

Journal of Contemporary Asia

In one of the most thoroug, hard-hitting, perspicacious analyses on the subject, San Juan dismantels the myths surrounding US-Philippine relations and lays bare the harsh realities US imperialism has wrought on its former "showcase of democracy".

Against The Current

This collection is an indispensable part of Philippine studies.

Multicultural Review