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The Subversive Reader: Essays on Critical Theory, Cultural Politics, and the Philippine Insurgent Experience
Recognized worldwide as a radical cultural and literary critic, E. San Juan, Jr. has produced a substantial body of writing, most of which remains inaccessible to general readers. His output is wide-ranging in scope, marked by provocation, controversy, and transdisciplinary exploration. The Subversive Reader: Essays on Critical Theory, Cultural Politics, and the Philippine Insurgent Experience features 22 seminal essays, ranging from commentaries on Western cultural studies to reflections on postcolonial theorizing and aesthetic trends. A historical-materialist, San Juan deploys speculative methodology to elucidate problems in cultural judgment clouded by a normative Eurocentric ideology and now challenged by a more geopolitical, emancipatory, and oppositional perspective.
San Juan's landmark 1972 study of Carlos Bulosan was a product of the historical conjuncture when civil rights, anticolonial, and women's movements converged to rectify the white-supremacist canon. His interpretation of Nick Joaquin's oeuvre, Subversions of Desire (1987), grew out of his participation in the anti-Marcos dictatorship movement and the national-democratic mobilization. Leitmotifs of that work and his award-winning 1992 book Racial Formations/Critical Transformations may be discerned in this anthology that critiques hegemonic American and postcolonial studies.
San Juan's historicizing vision underpins the discourses on diaspora, censorship, the language question, semiotics of translation, and the vicissitudes of the Filipino cultural revolution. The last sections seek to problematize the dialectics of the liberation struggle by grappling with the effects of counterinsurgency, terrorism, and witch-hunting, while appreciating the defiance against the scourge of political dynastic restoration offered by women, indigenous communities, and emergent progressive forces—the true heirs to the Filipino Propagandists and their compatriots, the celebrated founders of the heroic revolutionary tradition that constitutes our own Filipino singularity.
San Juan's landmark 1972 study of Carlos Bulosan was a product of the historical conjuncture when civil rights, anticolonial, and women's movements converged to rectify the white-supremacist canon. His interpretation of Nick Joaquin's oeuvre, Subversions of Desire (1987), grew out of his participation in the anti-Marcos dictatorship movement and the national-democratic mobilization. Leitmotifs of that work and his award-winning 1992 book Racial Formations/Critical Transformations may be discerned in this anthology that critiques hegemonic American and postcolonial studies.
San Juan's historicizing vision underpins the discourses on diaspora, censorship, the language question, semiotics of translation, and the vicissitudes of the Filipino cultural revolution. The last sections seek to problematize the dialectics of the liberation struggle by grappling with the effects of counterinsurgency, terrorism, and witch-hunting, while appreciating the defiance against the scourge of political dynastic restoration offered by women, indigenous communities, and emergent progressive forces—the true heirs to the Filipino Propagandists and their compatriots, the celebrated founders of the heroic revolutionary tradition that constitutes our own Filipino singularity.
538 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2023
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