Critical Interventions

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.