THE FILIPINO PEASANT IMAGINATION VERSUS AMERICAN LEFTISM (tags)
The following remarks are intended to supplement the author's paper "Blueprint for a Bulosan Project" posted in the online journal OUR OWN VOICE. This essay critiques the position of "leftists" in the elite U.S. academies who claim a "manifest destiny" to civilize colonized subalterns and peasant radicals like the Filipino writer Carlos Bulosan who (they claim) have failed to take "America" out of a transnationalizing U.S. Studies. Are we seeing a replay of the "Thomasites" who produced generations of neocolonized "little brown brothers" now serving U.S. imperialist aggression in Iraq, Aghanistan, Palestine, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, and in the Philippines, its former direct colony? "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea...."
E. SAN JUAN's NEW BOOK ON CLASS STRUGGLE IN THE GLOBAL CULTURAL FRONT (tags)
E. SAN JUAN's new book of essays, Working Through the Contradictions: From Cultural Theory to Critical Practice (Bucknell University Press), engages with, among other things, the problem of cultural revolution in the Philippines and the plight of the Filipino Overseas Contract Workers, the 10 million Filipino diaspora, around the world. Without revolutionary theory, as Lenin said, there cannot be any revolutionary praxis. This is a small contribution to the formation of that theory in practice.