About E San Juan JrDr. E. San Juan, Jr. was recently Fulbright professor of American Studies at Leuven University, Belgium, and visiting professor of literature at National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. He directs the Philippine Cultural Studies Center in Connecticut and serves as co-director of the Board of Directors, Philippine Forum, New York. Among his recent books are BEYOND POSTCOLONIAL THEORY (Palgrave), RACISM AND CULTURAL STUDIES (Duke University Press), and WORKING THROUGH THE CONTRADICTIONS (Bucknell U Press). He will be a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Italy this Fall 2006.
Filipinos Writing in English / Through English: Reconaissance and Revaluation
A mannered and exhibitionist kind of English as evinced here seems to be Hagedorn’s forte, a byproduct of the fact of the Philippines (ten million of whose citizens now comprise the largest contingent of migrant workers abroad from any country) persisting as a backward neocolony of the United States and its global corporate suzerains. On the whole, Filipino-American writers are to be credited for inventing a unique heteroglotic stylization of English in consonance with its historical predicament as an “internal colony” from a neocolonial dependency, immigrants subjected currently to the pressures of the USA Patriot Act and covert/overt modes of institutionalized racism.
In haphazardly surveying this evolving multicultural canon, I suggest that we deploy Voloshinov/Bakhtin’s theory of utterance and of speech-genres as theoretical tools for interrogating the limits of what is now the official discourse of liberal multiculturalism premised on “cultural diversity,” on the “free market” of decentered and cyborg identities. Of course, whether these new experiments can really liberate Filipinos from neocolonial domination, whether literary texts can by themselves free millions of peasants and workers–not to mention the ten million diaspora of Filipino migrant workers around the world–from globalized exploitation by capital and the U.S. imperial war on terror, remains to be seen (see my Philippine Temptation, After Postcolonialism, and Only by Struggle).
WORKS CITED
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin, Tx: University of Texas Press, 1981.
Chin, Frank. Gunga Din Highway. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1994.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Foucault, Michel. The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon, 1984.
Hagedorn, Jessica. Dream Jungle. New York: Viking 2003.
Haug, Wolfgang Fritz. Commodity Aesthetics, Ideology, and Culture. New York: International General, 1987.
Jameson, Fredric. “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Social Text 15 (1986): 65-88. Linmark, R. Zamora. Rolling the R’s. New York: Kaya Production, 1995.
Lopez, Salvador P. Literature and Society. Manila: University Publishing, 1940.
Lumbera, Bienvenido (with Cynthia N. Lumbera), ed. Philippine Literature: A History and Anthology. Manila: National Book Store, 1982.
Miner, Earl. Comparative Poetics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,1990.
Pratt, Mary Louise. “Linguistic Utopias.” The Linguistics of Writing. New York:Methuen, 1989.
Rizal, Jose. Noli Me Tangere. Tr. Leon Ma. Guerrero. London: Longmans, 1961.
—–. The Reign of Greed [El Filibusterismo]. Tr. Charles Derbyshire. Manila: Philippine Education, 1912.
San Juan, E. After Postcolonialism: Remapping Philippines-United States Confrontation. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000.
—-. “In Pursuit of The Gangster of Love,” Philippine Studies 46 (First Quarter, 1998): 111-121.
—–. “The Decline of Philippine Writing in English.” (University of the East) Dawn (Sept 5, 1969): 7-8.
—–. Only by Struggle: Reflections on Philippine Culture, Politics and Society. Quezon City: Giraffe Books, 2002.
—. The Philippine Temptation. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1996.
—–. Reading the West / Writing the East. New York: Peter Lang, Inc.,1992.
—-. “Semiotics and Fiction.” UP Visayas Journal, 1.1 (August 1992): 67-75.
Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10