Between empire and insurgency : the Philippines in the new millennium : essays in history, comparative literature, and cultural politics

Includes bibliographic references

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.