From Globalization to National Liberation: Essays of Three Decades

by E. San Juan, Jr.

University of Hawaii Press, 2009.

Our contemporary moment -- marked by the collapse of global capital, ecological crises, war and U.S. occupations, and intensified racial inequality -- challenges all of us to speak truth to power and to deepen our politics of solidarity with all who experience oppression: from prisoner abuse in Guantanamo to war crimes in Gaza, from the racialized poverty in post-Katrina New Orleans to the massive and gruesome human rights violations in the Philippines. As we celebrate the fortieth anniversary of New Left social movements and their intellectual and academic victories (Ethnic Studies, Asian American Studies, Women’s Studies, etc.), we find that these times provide new challenges and opportunities for advancing, in new ways, the emancipatory vision of movements from the past.

The selected essays, interviews, and lectures of the past three decades by E. San Juan, Jr., a major Filipino American public intellectual and 2009 fellow of Henry Louis Gates’ W.E.B. DuBois Institute, bear witness to the emergence of a monumental global shift from the politics of despair to a politics of hope. This collection (divided into three main sections) provides a richly textured interdisciplinary approach to reading our “new times” (shifts, transitions, contradictions of global capitalism), specifically how “the ideology of neoliberal transnationalist exchange has evolved, after 9/11, into the unilateral ‘American Exceptionalist’ discourse of the ‘war on terrorism’ and the more contentious ‘clash of civilizations’” (xvi). In exploring the ideological transition from globalization to a U.S.-led Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), San Juan recognizes new forms of national movements for self-determination developing as a powerful collective global force: “the battlefronts of Palestine, Colombia, Mexico, Nepal, the Philippines, aside from those in the Middle East, are mounting a formidable united front from the grassroots to oppose the destructive maelstrom of globalizing corporate power” (xviii). This theme of transitioning from the dominance of finance capitalism (globalization) to the global reach of subaltern resistance (rooted in national liberation), first explored in San Juan’s earlier works such as The Philippine Temptation (Temple UP, 1996) and After Postcolonialism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), is especially useful for reimagining Cultural Studies, American Studies, and Ethnic Studies as part of an international challenge to U.S. racial imperialism.

The collection’s point of departure is a much needed interrogation of the “post” that frames our current intellectual moment: whether it’s the “end of theory,” a “postnationalist” globalized world, or the “post-racial” U.S. society of the Obama era. Part one returns to the necessity of engaging theory, specifically the debates concerning frames of intelligibility offered by postcolonial theory. San Juan resuscitates the silenced subaltern (a return to Gayatri Spivak’s claim) by writing against the politics of despair of postcoloniality (Dipesh Chakrabarty). Through an examination of old and new materials in the Gramsci archive, San Juan resituates the relationship between the subaltern and the critical intellectual within a larger context of international solidarity. A thorough rethinking of dominant theoretical frameworks will enable intellectuals to hear current subaltern alternatives, from the Maoist overthrow of the centuries-old monarchy in Nepal to the reinvigorated national liberation struggles sweeping Latin America (Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador).

Part two reclaims key concepts such as nationhood and class, which postcolonial theory and the neoliberal ideology of globalization have replaced with notions of cosmopolitanism and hybridity precisely “at a time when capitalism was more powerful and predatory than ever” (Terry Eagleton, After Theory, 2003, 10). Advancing Michael Löwy’s Marxist approaches to the historical phenomenon of nationalism (Fatherland or Mother Earth? Essays on the National Question, Pluto Press, 1998), San Juan examines the global dispersal of Filipinos from a Southeast Asian archipelago still in the process of becoming after a century of U.S. colonial and neocolonial control. A detailed cognitive mapping is provided to highlight the interconnectedness of Filipino experiences throughout the diaspora: the racial oppression of Filipinos in the United States (now considered “the largest Asian American ethnic group in the U.S.”), the exploitation of Overseas Filipino Workers (approximately nine million, “mostly female domestic help”), and the gross human rights violations of the people of the Philippines (population of eighty million) under the Arroyo administration (ix, 89, 300). While earlier publications -- Cultures of United States Imperialism (Kaplan and Pease, 1993) and The Forbidden Book: The Philippine-American War in Political Cartoons (Abe Ignacio, et al., 2004) -- have commendably interrogated the violent erasure of the colonial conquest of the Philippines from our collective memory of U.S. Empire, San Juan explores the unique unfolding of Philippine subaltern struggle within the realm of a “Filipino praxis of alter/native writing.” This decolonizing aesthetic can be discerned in the cultural production of Filipino artists: Carlos Bulosan, Pete Lacaba, Levy Balgos de la Cruz, among others.

Part three demonstrates the possibility of critical literacy in the age of empire informed by the responsibility of the intellectual to “insist upon truth… to see events in their historical perspective” (Noam Chomsky quoted in San Juan, 29). Pushing against the Cartesian dualism implicit in deconstructive approaches to reading, San Juan turns to Charles Peirce’s semiotics to articulate an alternative framework for literary analysis. An exploration of Peirce’s “thought in motion” (triad of sign, object, and interpretant) leads to innovative readings of the sign “terror” as deployed in the GWOT and representations of state terrorism in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, a haunting novel on the Sri Lankan civil war. San Juan’s meditation on Sri Lanka enables him to provide insight into the raging civil war in the Philippines. His close reading of the Philippine national sovereignty movement unravels the Colin Powell doctrine, which not only positioned the Philippines as the second front in the GWOT but also categorized Philippine subaltern resistance as “terrorist.” Drawing on a global Marxist archive (Lenin, Trotsky, Sartre, Fanon, Guevarra, Pagaduan-Araullo), San Juan reveals how the GWOT uses the concept of terror to criminalize forms of dissent.

If interdisciplinary fields such as Cultural Studies, American Studies, and Ethnic Studies are to be relevant in these times, they must develop approaches to engaging the following: 1.) the centrality of race in the formation of the U.S. nation-state (remembering its racialized genocidal foundation) and in its policies abroad (Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo); 2.) the contributions of current national liberation struggles in the Global South to our worldwide struggle for dignity and respect for all of humanity and our entire planet. San Juan’s collection illustrates how an enduring history of Philippine subaltern movements for self-determination (“silenced” by both the GWOT and postcolonial theory) functions as the “Achilles heel” of U.S. imperial hegemony in Southeast Asia as well as a source of critical renewal for interdisciplinary fields that emerged from social movements.

From Globalization to National Liberation asks us to question dominant modes of reading and to develop alternatives that can enable us, in the words of Edward Said, “to recall what is forgotten or ignored, to contextualize random facts, and to remember human suffering” (“The Role of the Critical Intellectual.” Oberlin College. May 10, 1995). The fortieth anniversary of social movements for justice (student, feminist, gay and lesbian, U.S. communities of color, Third World) encourages us to remember. San Juan’s recent collection of writings reminds all of us to build upon the past in order to develop new methods of reading, listening, and organizing that can help us hear new sounds, rhythms, and voices of resistance and transformation around the globe. --Jeffrey Arellano Cabusao teaches in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at Bryant University.