The Imperialist War on Terrorism 
And the Responsibility of Cultural Studies

By E. San Juan, Jr. 
Philippines Cultural Studies Center/Bulatlat.com

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. 

--WALTER BENJAMIN

In the dawn, armed with a burning patience, we shall enter the splendid Cities.  (A l’aurore, armes d’une ardente patience, nous entrerons aux splendid Villes. 

--ARTHUR RIMBAUD

When we left the U.S. last December 8, everyone was betting on when the war, rather the U.S. invasion of Iraq for regime change and the capture of huge oil reserves, will begin. The plot unfolds inexorably. But the real question was: when did the war really begin? Was September 11, 2001, the day of reckoning, a singular event out of which history was born? An anti-apocalypse? The long-awaited advent of what?

Here we are, the beginning of another year of hope. But do we have that “burning patience” to continue the struggle for change? for radical social transformation? Before we can revisit the goals of national democracy and liberation, for genuine equality and social justice, I want to situate myself in the circumstantial web of what’s going on, the thickness of the historical process.

All throughout last month, the mysterious signing of the Mutual Logistics and Support Agreement (MLSA)—just like the Balikatan Exercises—raised again the specter of U.S. military occupation of the country, this time under the pretext of mutuality, like the 1951 Mutual Defense Treaty and the Visiting Forces Agreement of 1999. No one, least of all the Congress, is consulted, much less the public. U.S. troops can be stationed anywhere, enter or leave—surely much better than the old Clark Field and Subic Naval Bases, in tune with flexible cyber-spaced, globalizing capitalism.

Through cyberspace Internet we got news, at around the same time as this mutual shenanigans, of the bloodbath in Mindoro Oriental and the Campaign Plan Habol Tamaraw led by the infamous Col. Jovito Palparan.  So many civilians have been killed, among them Oscar Sacdalan, Vedasco Anilao Lalong-Isip, Jude Garcia, and the abduction of Jun Saducos and Anthony Danez Martinez. Hundreds of families have become refugees in their own country, just like the thousands displaced in Basilan and other battle zones in Mindanao while the government, incapable of learning anything, persists in suppressing the BangsaMoro peoples right to self-determination.

Despite the appeals of KARAPATAN, church bodies, and the pleas of Bayan Muna representatives in Congress, nothing seems to have stopped the military in their campaign of barbaric slaughter—not only in Mindoro but throughout the country. If the security of life and whatever meager property the peasants and indigenous peoples in Mindoro cannot be protected by the government, who has legal monopoly of violence and other coercive means, then this government has lost legitimacy. In fact, it is open to being indicted for state terrorism.

It is precisely on this ground, the massive state terrorism of the military, police and paramilitary forces of the GRP, that Luis Jalandoni, the chairperson of the National Democratic Front Negotiating Panel, has responded to the Colin Powell-Arroyo doctrine of summary condemnation of the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army as “terrorist” organizations. Jalandoni calls on the present regime to renounce state terrorism and indemnify its numerous victims, among them Benjaline Hernandez and 148 activists killed in assassinations, extrajudicial executions, indiscriminate massacre. It would be painful to recount the litany of human rights violations that burden our history since the Marcos dictatorship, nay, since the 1989-1916 Filipino-American War, with1.4 million Filipinos and Moros killed by the “civilizing” missionaries of Manifest Destiny.

If the present order is a regime of state terrorism—even if selective, what are the majority of citizens doing about it? Since ours is a constitutional republic, citizens from whom all power emanates can alter the social contract if the government has failed to answer their needs. All signs indicate that the social contract has been broken, violated, damaged many times over since we became a mock-sovereign nation in 1946.

Right in the midst of the controversy over Powell’s exorbitant act of extending the State Department reach to the liberated zones of the New People’s Army, we read this news from Canada: a Filipina domestic worker, out of the generosity of her heart, has given her kidney to her sick employer in Toronto.  Frustrated with the public health care system, this Canadian employer turned to the Filipina for help, claiming that she is part of the family. Earning $2 an hour, for 24 months, under the Live-in Caregiver Program, Filipina domestics function as modern-day slaves, vulnerable to any and every kind of abuse and exploitation.  Canada tolerates the import of Filipinas to provide rich Cambodians their internal organs and body parts, according to the Philippine Women Center of British Columbia.

I will soon move on to address the Moro struggle, which is to my mind the crucial “weak link” in imperialist-comprador hegemony. But I want to shift your attention first to this unprecedented phenomenon in our history, a qualitative change in our geopolitical status in the present global system.

Since our colonization, thousands of Filipinos have migrated to distant territories, first as recruited workers for the Hawaii sugar plantations, and then as seamen, U.S. navy personnel, nurses and doctors, and so on. We have about 4 million Filipinos in North American, but millions more in the Middle East, Europe, Africa, Asia, and elsewhere. But since the Marcos martial-law regime, the “warm body export” (including mail-order brides, and assorted cargo in the global sex traffic) accelerated tremendously.  Everyday 3,000 Filipinos leave for abroad, close to a million every year. In Hong Kong alone, there are 200,000 Filipina domestics. Moreover, 25% of the world’s seafarers, and cruise waiters, are Filipinos. With about nine to ten million Filipinos scattered around the world as cheap or affordable labor, mainly domestics and semi-skilled workers, the Philippines has become the supplier of what is euphemistically called human capital—in actuality, hands to do work for minimal pay, work largely unpaid, producing enormous surplus value (profits) for transnational corporations as well as for affluent families in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East.

Everyone knows that these Overseas Workers’ remittance of billions of dollars--$12 billion annually—(aside from fees and all kinds of taxes) is the major earner of  dollars needed to pay the foreign debt and keep the system afloat. It guarantees the privileges of the rich and powerful. It preserves and aggravates the impoverishment of over half of the population—check out the recent statistics compiled by Representative Satur Ocampo’s office. Despite the unrelenting cases of brutal treatment, rape, all kinds of conceivable deprivation, and murder—about 4 or 5 coffins of Overseas Filipino Workers arrive at the Manila International Airport, reminiscent of Flor Contemplacion and others, the humorless Labor Secretary Patricia Santo Tomas was quoted as saying: “It’s not politically correct to say you’re exporting people, but it’s part of globalization, and I like to think that countries like ours, rich in human resources, have that to contribute to the rest of the world” (quoted in David Diamond, “One Nation, Overseas,” 1999, <http//wired.com/wired/archive/10.06.> This is as if over four hundred years of colonization have not yet been sufficient contribution to the enrichment of the Western metropoles and the indulgent appetites of their citizen consumers.

Indeed, we have contributed prodigiously to the accumulation of surplus-value/profits and wealth to the whole world—except our own country, the very soil and land of which have been depleted, polluted, ravished, plundered, scorched, pillaged, trampled upon and mutilated....  One commentator ascribes to Filipinos the common refrain: “Look Asian, think Spanish, act American....”  I doubt the applicability or appropriateness of this ascription, something that not a few traditional anthropologists and social scientists delight in when they proudly proclaim that ours is a culture of diversity, hybridity, creative assimilation, and other disingenuous rubrics to compensate for the horrific reality. Some usually resort to an apologetic reprise about how the “third world” poor excel in spiritual beauty. But inner wealth, like inner beauty, is precisely the symptom of the profound alienation and disenchantment afflicting the benighted recipients of Western modernity—multitudes of colonial subalterns blessed by commodity-exchange (their bodies, among others), by the free-wheeling market and sacred private property.

As many Filipinos have still not forgotten, there was a mini-people power when Flor Contemplacion’s body was returned, but when Sarah Balabagan arrived, the mass media “salvaged” her by sublimation—she was turned into a mini-star as ephemeral as Nonie Juice, the miracle tonic, and other fads.  Was the public outrage over Contemplacion’s death merely melancholia and mourning mediated by gossip and other kinship rituals, as some postmodernist sages aver?  Are we still caught in the frame of hallowed Filipino values like hiya, pakikisama, and smooth interpersonal relations? Are we ready to give our remaining internal organs to the Colin Powells and the hustlers from the World Bank/International Monetary Fund?

Now we know that all things develop via contradictions. The diaspora of 9-10 million Filipinos is bound to generate forces of critique and transformation with their own self-generated leadership. They will emancipate themselves, for nobody else can do it for them. Already the Hong Kong domestics have organized as far as the laws will allow; our compatriots in Europe, in countries where they are subjected to vicious racist treatment, have also become more politically aware and have mobilized to raise consciousness and protest their inhumane conditions. If and when they return, we hope that they will not be cadavers but warm electric bodies ready for militant, risky engagements in the political arena, not just with the relentless pursuit of the creature comforts of a frayed if not mythical civil society.

Need I remind this audience of what happened last year, l’affaire Abu Sayyaf and its use as a pretext for the invasion by over a thousand U.S. troops of this second front of the war against terrorism, after Afghanistan?  Can you imagine what our country would have looked like if it were really turned into another Afghanistan?  One may counter that the situation in Basilan and other regions is worse than those of Kabul or Kandahar. Comparisons are really unavailing—if not altogether self-serving. But what have we learned?

I have read reports of the resurgence of a “moro-moro” mentality in government and the public. Fighters of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front are now branded “terrorists” and subject to harassment (recently at the Muslim compound in Barangay Culiat, Tandang Sora, Quezon City). It is expected that the MILF will be classified as a “foreign terrorist organization”—foreign, of course, to Americans, but not to Filipinos. We have always lived with the Moros, our Muslim brothers and sisters, as comrades in the struggle against the American soldiers who massacred thousands of men, women, and children at Mount Dajo, Jolo in March 9, 1906, and Mount Bagsak on June 13, 1913, among other barbaric outrages not noticed by the sharp wit of Mark Twain and other philanthropic humanitarians.  These events are not memorialized for their horrors but cited to arouse a sense of solidarity with the courage and sacrifices of the BangsaMoro nation in their struggle for dignity and freedom.

When President Arroyo allowed the U.S. Special Forces to participate in the pursuit of this group of bandits (more exactly, mercenaries), a creation of both the CIA and the Philippine Armed Forces, did she not violate the Philippine Constitution? Indifference to this question is a symptom of the larger problem of either ignorance of the plight of the Moro people, or complicity with the ruling class in the oppression and exploitation of at least 7.5 million citizens who happen to subscribe to another faith.

Thousands, perhaps over a hundred thousand now, have died since the flare-up of Christian-Muslim hostilities in the sixties, climaxing in the years after 1972 with the battle of Jolo, Sulu. The city was actually burned by government forces, producing 2,000 corpses and 60,000 refugees in one night. A ceasefire was reached after the Tripoli Agreement of  1976, but it was often honored in the breach. The split of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front led Hashim Salamat from Misuari’s more secular Moro National Liberation Front  introduced a sectarian but also conciliatory element in the scene, precipitating the formation of the Abu Sayyaf along the lines of the government-sponsored and CIA-funded Bangsa Moro Liberation Organization (BMLO) in 1976.

It is now public knowledge that the Abu Sayyaf, like the MILF, was set up by the government to split the Moro struggle for self-determination and pressure the MNLF into capitulation. Since 1991, according to Senator Aquilino Pimentel, Gen. Alexander Aguirre, former president Estrada’s National Security Adviser, acted as “the handler” of the group some of whose members were involved in the CIA-managed mujahideens recruited to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. But since 1995 the Abu Sayyaf has turned into a Frankenstein’s monster devoted to hostage-taking for ransom and terrorizing civilian communities, as in their attack on the town of Ipil, Zamboanga.

In the midst of U.S. intervention last year, an International Peace Commission went to Basilan on March 23-27, 2002, and produced what I think is the most comprehensive and detailed report on conditions in the region. The conclusion of their report, entitled Basilan: The Next Afghanistan?, is unequivocal: the Abu Sayyaf is a symptom of the disastrous failure of the state in ensuring not only peace and security but honest and effficient government—both provincial governance and military-police agencies—in a milieu where the proverbial forces of civil society (business, church, media) have been complicit. Enmeshed in corruption that involves local officials, military officers, and central government, the region where the Abu Sayyaf thrives has witnessed the reign of absolute terror over civilians. Nowhere in the entire Philippines is the violation of human rights and the brutalization of civilian suspects so flagrant and ubiquitous as in Basilan.

In this context, the deployment of U.S. troops in Mindanao, compliments of the Arroyo administration, has only worsened the situation, demonized and mystified the Abu Sayyaf as an Al Qaeda accomplice, and promoted hostility among various ethnic groups.

I had occasion to deliver a public talk on the situation in Mindanao in Madison, Wisconsin, last November—a Halloween week-end, and had reason to look up an article by the American anthropologist Charles O. Frake in the prestigious journal American Anthropologist, 1998 ISSUE, ENTITLED “Abu Sayyaf: Displays of Violence and the Proliferation of Contested Identities among Philippine Muslims.” While Frake is quite erudite in referencing the history of the Muslims from the Spanish times to the present, he never examines seriously, except in a tokenizing gestural mode, the political and economic context of land dispossession and economic marginalization of the Muslim majority. Instead, typical of postmodernist disciplinary discourse, he focuses on the Abu Sayyaf as an attempt to solve “the logical gap in the identity matrix of Philippine Muslim insurgency.” Since the Moro movement has been fragmented by ethnic antagonisms among Tausugs, Maguindanaos, Maranaos, Yakans, and so on, the Abu Sayyaf, according to Frake, is “militantly Islamicist.” And because its leadership draws from the displaced and unaffiliated youth, as well as the traditional outlaw areas, the group represents “a new layer in the strata of kinds of identity laid down in the long history of conflict in the Muslim Philippines” (1998, 48). In short, the Abu Sayyaf (according to Frake’s postmodernist optic) is a symptom of the problem of “identity proliferation,” since the fault-lines of identity construction are often revealed in explosions of political violence.

Frake is an example of a knowledge-producer intent on unwittting mystification. The result of applying Geertz’ “thick description,” that is, the focus on how participants interpret everyday happenings, instead of clarifying the nexus of causality and accountability, muddles it. Frake wants to answer the question: “How can such nice people [meaning the anonymous members of the Abu Sayyaf], at times, do such horrible things?” But his premise—that the central motivation of individuals in society is to be recognized as somebody, to establish an identity—is completely detached from historical specificities, even from the basic determinants of any cultural complex or location. Despite the empirical citations and putative data, Frake’s attempt to deploy postmodern ethonography on the Abu Sayyaf phenomenon results only in a simplistic reduction: that in situations of struggle, people fail to unite because they continually interpret what’s going on around them, thus multiplying “contested identities.”  I am afraid such “thick descriptions” are really thick, or makapal—obscuring instead of illuminating the plight of the Moro people. Vincent Crapanzano’s critique of Geertz may be quoted here: the method of “thick description” “offers no understanding of the native from the native’s point of view,...no specifiable evidence for his attributions of intention, his assertion of subjectivity, his declarations of experience” (quoted in San Juan 2002, 234).  The same caveats apply to two indefatigable American anthropologists intending to explain Filipinos to themselves: Thomas McKenna’s Muslim Rulers and Rebels (1998) and Nicole Constable’s Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Filipina Workers (1997).

I am not indicting all of American or Western anthropology, let alone the hermeneutic methodology of the social sciences. But I would like to mention here two other sources of historical and political inquiries, aside from the writings of Cesar Adib Majul: one is the work of the Indian scholar Aijaz Ahmad (1982), and the essay of political scientist Robert Stauffer (1981).  In both these thinkers, the differentiated totality of Filipino society and its historical imbrication in the world-system of global capitalism are the two necessary requisites for grasping the concrete linkages and contradictions in the Moro struggle for autonomy and dignity.  For these intellectuals are not only practitioners of a mode of scientific analysis of history but also protagonists in the search for solutions to the most urgent social and political problems of our time.

I cannot imagine any intellectual who, endeavoring to grasp the roots of a long-enduring, complex “Moro problem,” will preemptively assert or claim a detached or disinterested stance. In fact, postmodernists like James Clifford openly announce their point-of-view, their subject-positions—if only to wash their hands, of course, of any complicity with US colonialism or imperialism. Professions of neutrality have been replaced with gestures of liberal guilt manifest in philanthropic compassion. Unfortunately, these gestures only prolong the orientalizing supremacy of Western knowledge-production and its hegemonic influence. In response to this Orientalism, we seem to offer only the famous SIR (smooth interpersonal relations) codified by Prof. Frank Lynch.  Incidentally, in 1970, an American sociologist, George Weightman, noted in his study of the Philippine intellectual elite that “the military academy and Ateneo appear to dispense the best SIR techniques for dealing with Americans” (1970, 28). In fairness to Ateneo University, I would like to interpose here the observation that all educational institutions, all pedagogical agencies (in Karl Mannheim’s phrase, the “everyday constituent assembly of the mind”), are sites of ideological class struggle and none can be hermetically insulated from the pressures of material local and global interests. There is no vacuum or neutral space in the planetary conflict of classes and groups for hegemony.

For this reason, and because the Moro struggle for autonomy and dignity is the key, virtually the catalyst and crucible, of our all-encompassing struggle for national democracy and liberation from imperialism, I would urge everyone to learn more about the history and culture of the BangsaMoro nation, their ethos and aspirations, which are all integral to the vision of a free and prosperous Filipino nation.

In my article on Cultural Studies in Ateneo de Manila Unversity’s electronic journal, KRITIKA KULTURA (sponsored by the Department of English), I called attention to recent developments in Cultural Studies as a disciplinary practice in North America and Europe that have subverted the early promise of the field as a radical transformative force (see also my book, Racism and Cultural Studies). In every attempt to do any inquiry into cultural practices and discourses, one is always carrying out a political and ethical project, whether one is conscious of it or not. There are many reasons for this, the main one being the inescapable political-economic constitution of any discursive field of inquiry, as Pierre Bourdieu has convincingly demonstrated. And in the famous theoretical couplet that Foucault has popularized, knowledge/power, the production of knowledge is always already implicated in the ongoing struggles across class, nation, gender, locality, ethnicity, and so on, which envelopes and surrounds the intellectual, the would-be knower, learner, investigator, scholar, and so on.

This is the moment when I would like to close with some reflections, and questions, on why problems of culture and knowledge are of decisive political importance. Although we always conceive of ourselves as citizen-subjects with rights, it is also the case that we are all caught up in a network of obligations  whose entirety is not within our conscious grasp. What is our relation to Others—the excluded, marginalized, and prostituted who affirm our existence and identity--in our society? In a sense we, all Filipinos, are responsible for the plight of the Moros—yes, including the existence of the Abu Sayyaf--insofar as we claim to live in a community of singular persons who alternatively occupy the positions of speakers and listeners, I’s and you’s, and who have obligations to one another, and reciprocal accountabilities.

I am following an argument elaborated by the late Canadian scholar Bill Readings in his provocative book, The University in Ruins. Speculating on the impossibility of subjective self-identity, of being free from obligation to others, Readings comments on an attitude prevalent in the United States—an attitude that, I think, became more articulate when, after September 11, most Americans, newly self-anointed as victims, refused to see any responsibility for what happened to them and disclaimed any share in causing such horrendous disaster, what is indeed a terrible tragedy because it is uncomprehended and disconnected from the flaws of the “egotistical sublime,” hence the hunger for revenge. Readings of course includes his fellow Canadians in the following remark—which we can immediately apply to our own relations with the Moros, Igorots, and other ostracized neighbors:

It is the desire for subjective autonomy that has led North Americans, for example, to want to forget their obligations to the acts of genocide on which their society is founded, to ignore debts to Native American and other peoples that contemporary individuals did not personally contract, but for which I would nonetheless argue they are responsible (and not only insofar as they benefit indirectly from the historical legacy of those acts).  In short, the social bond is not the property of an autonomous subject, since it exceeds subjective consciousness and even individual histories of action. The nature of my obligations to the history of the place in which I live, and my exact positioning in relation to that history, are not things I can decide upon or things that can be calculated exhaustively. No tax of “x percent” on the incomes of white Americans could ever, for example, make full reparation for the history of racism in the United States (how much is a lynching “worth’?).  Nor would it put an end to the guilt of racism by acknowledging it, or even solve the question of what exactly constitutes “whiteness.” (1996, 186)    

If we are indeed accountable for what is happening around us—the killings in Mindoro Oriental, the Abu Sayyaf’s kidnapping and terrorism, President Arroyo’s violation of our sovereignty in welcoming U.S. troops to carry out police actions and exert a repressive pressure on Filipino citizens, and General Powell’s doctrine of stigmatizing Filipino dissenters and critics of the unjust status quo as “terrorists”—then we need to find out what needs to be done. Is the breakdown of civility caused by the lack of a “strong republic,” hence the need to institute authoritarian and quasi-fascist measures? A state is strong or weak depending on the nature of the class relations, the alignment of political forces, determining its conduct. This is where I think we need to define ourselves, everyone, as organic intellectuals in the sense that Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist thinker, construed it.  

In the process of reconstructing our nation, we need organic intellectuals who will integrate themselves with the producing classes—workers, peasants, women, middle strata, the majority of citizens—to establish the basis for a more egalitarian, just and independent nation. Not all can do this work. For Gramsci, all humans possess rational or intellectual capabilities, but only some are able to perform the function of intellectuals in society—the function of organizing the web of beliefs and institutional relations that sustain the social order, its hegemony. Any society harbors traditional intellectuals who support the old inherited order and legitimate its received consensus. What is needed in any society like our own that is seeking to transform itself are intellectuals, or (to use Mao’s terminology) cultural workers, who would commit themselves to a labor of critique and pedagogical service to the masses, who would stake out partisan goals rooted in the solidarity of all the working people, the united front of all sectors, who seek common goals. This will include our Moro brothers and sisters, as well as the Lumads, the Igorots, and others, oppressed and exploited by transnational corporations and foreign governments in collusion with the local mendacious elite. This is a task that conscientious and committed Filipino intellectuals can engage in a vast conscienticizing operation at locales they are strategically placed in.

What about for Filipinos in the fabled “land of promise,” otherwise known as “the belly of the beast”? In the United States, the Filipino Americans have, as you know, suffered from the latest act of vengeance against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda: the Patriot Act. We are struggling against what is the initial stage of authoritarian rule, “friendly fascism” in the new guise of Homeland Security. We have to fight a version of pragmatic patriotism more arrogance than before, planning preemptive or preventive strikes and other unilateral interventions against Jihad International, against all those resisting the domination of the “only remaining superpower.”  We have signed numerous petitions, one called “A Statement of Conscience: Not In Our Name.” We oppose the Manichean outlook that the struggle is between good versus evil, and that the only possible answer to what happened in 9/11 is “war abroad and repression at home.”  What Susan Sontag calls the “dangerous lobotomizing notion of endless war” or the pseudo-war of civilization versus barbarians, has already encouraged all sorts of excesses—racial profiling, killing of innocents who look like Arabs or “terrorists,” contingent on the demonology of the day. If “measure and proportionality require the language of law and justice” (Asad 2002, 38), then the mad rush to war against Iraq after the ruthless devastation of Afghanistan is breaking all records.

Noam Chomsky and other public intellectuals have called the United States  itself “a leading terrorist state” (Chomsky 2001, 16). Just to give an example of how this has registered in the lives of Filipinos in the United States: Last June, 62 Filipinos (among them, doctors and engineers) were apprehended by the US Immigration and Naturalization Services for overstaying their visa or for lack of appropriate documentation. They were arrested as “absconders,” handcuffed and manacled in chains while aboard a plane on the way to the former Clark Air Base in Pampanga. About 140 Filipinos are now being treated as hardened criminals, according to Migrante International, thanks to the Patriot Act. Over a thousand persons, most of them people of color, are now detained in the United States as suspects, already being punished. I am not referring to the prisoners caputured in Afghanistan and confined to cells in Guantanamo, Cuba; I am referring to American citizens who have been jailed on suspicion that they have links with Osama bin Laden or other terrorist groups listed by the US State Department (which now includes the CPP/NPA). Just last November, there was a report of eigh Filipino aircraft mechanics who were detained since last June without bail due to “suspected terrorist links”; they are now being deported because of alleged inaccuraces in their immigration papers. I conclude with this question: How many more Filipinos will suffer globalized state terrorism spearheaded by the United States government, a fate that may befall any one of us who as citizens (here or in the United States) may be branded as unpatriotic or traitors because we dare to criticize, dare to think and resist?   Bulatlat.com

REFERENCES

Aijaz, Ahmad. 1982.  “Who is the Moro?” and “Class and Colony in Mindanao.” Southeast Asia Chronicle (February): 2-10.

Asad, Talal.  2002.  “Some Thoughts on the WTC Disaster.”  ISIM Newsletter 9 (January):

Chomsky, Noam. 2001.  “The United States is a Leading Terrorist State.” Interview by David Barsamian.  Monthly Review 53.6 (November): 10-19.

Constable, Nicole.  1997.  Maid to Order in Hong Kong: Stories of Filipina Workers. Ithaca,  NY: Cornell University Press.

Frake, Charles.  1998.  “Abu Sayyaf: Displays of Violence and the Proliferation of Contested Identities among Philippine Muslims.”  American Anthropologist 100.1: 41-54.

McKenna, Thomas M.1998.  Muslim Rulers and Rebels.  Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Mulhern, Francis.  2000.  Culture/Metaculture.  London and New York: Routledge.

Readings, Bill.  1996.  The University in Ruins.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

San Juan, E.  2002.  Racism and Cultural Studies.  Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Stauffer, Robert.  1981.  “The Politics of Becoming: The Mindanao Conflict in a World-System Perspective.”  Dependency Series No. 31.   Quezon City: University of the Philippines, Third World Studies Center.

Weightman, George.  1970.  “The Philippine Intellectual Elite in the Post-Independence Period.”  Solidarity  (January): 20-25.   

  (Revised text of a lecture part of which was delivered at the Ateneo de Manila University, January 7, 2003, sponsored by the Departments of Filipino and of English.)

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