E. San Juan Jr.’s New Book
Reviewed by Michael Pozo
Working
Through the Contradictions:
From
Cultural Theory to Critical Practice
By E. San Juan Jr.
Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2004
Hardcover: $24.95
In Working through the Contradictions: From
Cultural Theory to Critical Practice, E. San Juan Jr. returns to champion
the re-examination of the emancipatory and
anti-Imperialist goals behind cultural and social theories that initially
helped to form the discipline of Cultural Studies upon a foundation of social
justice. Working through the
Contradictions, makes the case for the ongoing necessity for critical
interventions of mind and body. In this case, we may learn from the study of
social and cultural theories and their various adaptive qualities. Such skills
are demonstrated as viable if not essential to deciphering the inconsistencies
in the social and political morass of U.S. hegemony and locating its
world-wide resisters, both past and present.
San Juan again re-engages the works of
Antonio Gramsci, Frantz Fanon, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, Sun-Yat Sen, Aime Cesaire,
Walter Benjamin, Mikhail Bakhtin and Mumia Abu Jamal, among others. Social theories are posited
alongside social outcomes like the “war” on terrorism, the historical reality of
racism in social and political institutions and the recent rise of domestic and
sexual slavery under banners of freedom, democracy and free-markets.
Via the
academic fields of Cultural and American studies, San Juan offers social and academic
critiques that disentangle, reveal and clarify even the subtlest of compromises
towards authentic justice. Picking up from his last book, Racism and Cultural Studies, San Juan stresses the central agreement
needed for any serious critique of social/political injustices and
discrepancies. San Juan argues that social and academic attempts at
multicultural reform or anti-racist or anti-imperialist struggles inevitably
falter without connecting their relation to capitalism’s ability to appease
such demands (via free-markets, material goods etc.) while maintaining the same
debilitating system of power and exploitation. At the academic level, such
reforms often become the stuff of incomprehensible linguistic “play” and the
seduction of cynicism or the appeasement that comes by declaring all things
“problematic”, indefinable or joyfully hybrid. San Juan asserts that these
attempts, “through postal therapy (postnation,
postcolonial, postmodern) fail to comprehend the dynamics of pluralist
Capitalism in its ‘flexible’ phase as a mode of U.S. hegemonic rule presiding
over the redivision of the world market and the
control of international labor-power”(19).
Understanding
the centrality of Capitalism’s detrimental role upon the “subject matter” (i.e.
the human beings and nations) of post colonial theory and ethnic studies allows
for a greater critique and refinement of anti-racist, sexist and imperialist
motivations, as well as actions. To begin our critical interventions, Working through the Contradictions leads
us through this contentious academic and social terrain known as Cultural
Studies. As is evident throughout San Juan’s work, he argues that one of the
casualties of a free-market and consumerist driven society is the supposed
“end” of class and race issues as real determining social factors today.
Indeed, San Juan reiterates the “disappearance” of race and racism alongside class
issues as perhaps the most damaging trend of multiculturalist
projects inside and out of academics. He reminds us that ,
“questions of institutional racism, gender inequality, social justice and
hierarchal power relations in a pluralist or multicultural society should be
addressed conscientiously in the study of literary texts and popular cultural
expression”(19).
What is
hoped to be gained is San Juan’s “searching critique” that
allows a continuous re-examination of reformist and revolutionary agendas as
much as the exploitive forms of power trying to be subverted. Affirming the
reality of uneven development under current Capitalist policies as well as the
need to re-affirm “the centrality of
racial and ethnic problems”(19), San Juan offers textual and social evidence
that one may very well work through conservative as well as liberal
contradictions at this stage of the Capitalist project.
By beginning
with a contemporary analysis of the Philippines, San Juan asks the reader to reassess how
far progressive intellectualism and reformist agendas have moved us towards a
“post”-ism world. Throughout the book, San Juan refers back to the Philippines and Filipinos as telltale
“signifiers” that inequality and social struggles persist. Later, San Juan describes the epidemic of
millions of emigrating Filipino women and men converting into Overseas Contract
Workers (OCW). The economic desperation of OCW’s to
flee is eclipsed only by their physical and sexual abuse and even death by
racist and brutally violent and unjust working conditions overseas. San Juan
counter-argues against the immigrant story of undying gratitude and adopted
patriotism or even rags-to-riches stories by saying, “Since the seventies
Filipino bodies have been the number one export, and their corpses (about five
or six return in coffins daily) are becoming a serious item in the import
ledger”(260).
Citing
the colonial history of the Philippines along with the continual struggle today
of local insurgents against U.S. military/economic influence, San Juan points
out to us that the islands are one instance in which post-colonial enthusiasm
has over-stepped current historical reality. Aided by the legacy of corrupt
comprador governments, the Philippines has yet to rid themselves of the shadow
of the Philippine-American War (1899-1903) and their fate as a U.S. colony from
1898-1946. A clear contradiction, the Philippines remains a disenfranchised member
of the global market along with the rest of the developing world. In light of
this example the argument, then, against certain liberal social and textual
efforts at reform is that they tend to replace collective effort with
individualistic triumphalism (usually meaning
material gain or cosmetic victories).
Larger narratives of national struggles against a singular economic and
cultural aggression are too dangerous to handle or approach. The popularity of a reductionist individualism omits
class and racial elements into “hybrid” characters (both in the literary and
non-literary sense), promotes singular scenarios of “success” as the collective
norm and follows the impotent stance of distrusting any or all ideology.
With the
aftermath of 9-11 weighing heavily upon all national resistance groups in the
Philippines (and elsewhere), San Juan sees the Abu Sayyaf
as yet another contradiction of modern Capitalism. Secretary of State Colin
Powell has labeled the Abu Sayyaf a terrorist group
because it was suspected that they had received donations (along with other
militant Islamic groups) via Afghanistan from Al Qa’ida.
However, San Juan equates the status of the Abu Sayyaf
to that of a “criminal gang” that was “born out of the U.S. war against the
Soviet Union in Afghanistan and subsequently used by the Philippine government
to sow discord among the more militant Islamic organizations”(43). The Abu Sayyaf becomes living evidence of the dangers and the
result of a new Pax Americana, a “terrorist” group nurtured
by the leading democratic state.
Meanwhile
the Philippines and its local and diasporic citizens challenge theories that too often work
in favor of a debilitating economic, neo-colonialism. The now-common
tentativeness to re-engage in polemical social critique and ideological
struggles has left us bewildered as the oppressive past, heralded as a thing of
a by gone era, returns in the form of the Patriot Act, preemptive strikes,
racial profiling and right-wing Christian fundamentalism.
In his
comparative theoretical analysis, San Juan stays true to a
historical/materialist approach towards aesthetic, cultural and political
issues and debates. Throughout he looks to develop a politics committed to the
cultural and social struggles of class, race and gender. But it is through his
presenting of the works and ideas of social and cultural critics that we see
the connection between such works and the continuous efforts needed for
protecting and enhancing social change. San Juan cites examples such as Engel’s
attitude towards aesthetics, Cesaire’s
re-appropriation of Surrealism’s subversive goals and Fanon’s revolutionary
influence as being against contemporary Post Colonial theory via his writings
on the National-liberation agenda of colonial resistance.
What
makes San Juan’s analysis beneficial and insightful is his tact in
negotiating effectively between dense academic expectations and addressing
urgent social conflicts. The relevance of his critical interludes into theory
is demonstrated by his contextualizing of each writer within their own larger
social roles and involvement. For instance, recognizing and enhancing Gramsci’s notion of the “organic intellectual” we read and
appreciate how Engel’s aesthetics are invested in an accountability of the
discrepancies between intellectual and material production and advancing a
Communist end goal of human emancipation through a utopian vision defying
class- limited ideology. Cesaire’s poetics
re-appropriates European Surrealist aesthetics to present the “unreal” history
of colonialism and racism through a powerfully new language based on the Negritude movement. While Fanon, perhaps
most explicitly, echoes the tradition of “third world” physical and
intellectual struggles as unceasing in its critiques and warnings towards Imperial and Capitalist
exploitation through a constant dialogue with culture.
The final
chapter, “Spinoza and the War of Racial Terrorism”, is an attempt to recover
the beneficial aspects of Benedict de Spinoza’s philosophy of freedom during an era of pivotal global consequences.
He writes, “Spinoza’s principle of the inalienability of human rights can renew
the impulse for reaffirming the ideal of radical, popular democracy and the
self-determination of communities and nations”(345). San Juan offers up the seventeenth century
dissenter’s life and work as an
example of hope to those now demonized as racial/ethnic “aliens” and suspicious
foreigners by practioners of free-market based
morality and stale jingoisms.
Working through the Contradictions
offers powerful
anti-Capitalist critiques that utilize contemporary struggles for equality the
world over as evidence of Socialism’s necessary role for many trying to survive
against economic, cultural and military repression today. The collection of radical
thinkers San Juan gathers offers a possible theoretical groundwork to
maintain a Socialist vision of future liberation. Working through the Contradictions is yet another of San Juan’s unabashed academic
contributions to the greater Socialist program. It is evidence of the exciting
possibilities still being produced in Marxist critical theory.
At the
academic level, his critiques are especially biting towards those who align
themselves with the historical battles for democracy and equal rights. He argues
that without recognition of the larger forces affecting various marginalized
communities and groups, their so-called progressive academic exercises become
complicit in the systematic scheme that favors individual identities to
collective possibilities for hope. For those of us who are in academics, San Juan reminds us that, “it is one thing
to demystify the language of domination, another to eliminate the entrenched
structures and habitus whereby such language produces effects
in the lived experience of humans” (377). If one only takes a moment to
consider how U.S. institutions of higher education
have complied and aided some of the most corrupt and worst abusers of power,
one understands the urgency of academic reformists who forward a Socialist
end-goal. That a revolution was once described as, "a struggle to the
death between the future and the past” is all the more fitting to understand
such efforts.