Read more
Offers a radical, "Third World" approach to current debates on canon revision, multiculturalism, Eurocentrism, and reforms in education and culture.In Part One, the author examines what is at stake in the complex relations between theory and practice in exchanges involving Paul de Man, Mikhail Bakhtin, Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, and others. In Part Two, San Juan focuses on the materialist aesthetics of Louis Althusser and Pierre Macherey, examining their resonance in a Hemingway novel and in the poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid. In Part Three, the author conducts an appraisal of James Baldwin's worldview, the textualization of the Asian diaspora in the United States, and the interface between postmodern themes and "postcolonial" sensibilities.
The ultimate project of the author is to envision the emergence of a new field called "world cultural studies" from a radical "Third World" perspective. The transition from Western "hegemony" to the transformative, oppositional inquiry of "Others" epitomizes the itinerary of San Juan's exploration of the discipline once called litterae humaniores but now reconceived as the praxis of critical transgressions.
About the author
E. San Juan Jr. is Director of the Philippines Cultural Center in Storrs, Connecticut. He is the author of more than sixty books, including
Hegemony and Strategies of Transgression: Essays in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, also published by SUNY Press;
From Exile to Diaspora: Versions of the Filipino Experience in the United States; and
In the Wake of Terror: Class, Race, Nation, Ethnicity in the Postmodern World.
