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Issue No. 40                       November 18 - 24,  2001                          Quezon City, Philippines







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Reactionary Tendencies in the U.S. Production of Knowledge About the Filipino/The Philippines

It has been more than a century since US imperialism colonized the Philippines. Yet such historical tragedy still finds justification among various American scholars. This is not surprising at all in the current period of Pax Americana where the US as the only superpower continues to flex its muscle worldwide. Until the errors in the historical interpretation of American colonialism in the Philippines are corrected, Filipinos will find themselves forever under the shadow of Mother America, this essay by US-based Prof. E. San Juan, Jr. suggests.

BY E. SAN JUAN, JR.*
Bulatlat.com

In 1973, in the midst of Marcos' martial law diktat, I published an essay in the Journal of Contemporary Asia entitled "Reactionary Ideology in Philippine Culture." Twenty five years after, here I am presuming to expound on "reactionary tendencies," this time in the U.S. production of knowledge about myself and other Filipinos, in the Philippines and elsewhere. Fearful of repeating myself, I would urge everyone to buy a copy of the latest issue of Amerasia Journal (Summer 1998) where my lead article on this subject may be found. An addendum to and further reflections on what I said there may be in order here.

Reactionary tendencies" would refer here to the apologetic mode of recounting/explaining U.S. colonial domination of the Philippines and legitimating its aftermath in the wake of the nationalist resurgence in the sixties to the eighties in the Philippines. The exemplary text here is the Pulitzer prizewinning book by Stanley Karnow, In Our Image (1989). The numerous critiques of this book by Michael Salman, Peter Tarr, and others are devastating and, to my mind, incontrovertible: salient among them is a pertinacious method of reification, positivism (accepting colonial ideology as fact and/or rationale), and a revindication of the imperial "civilizing mission." The term "Orientalism" sums up, for the postmodernist scholar, the inadequacy of this approach derived by Karnow, the vulgarizer of academic lore, from such teachers as David Joel Steinberg, Theodore Friend, Peter Stanley, and Glenn May. Salman comments on Karnow's epistemological apparatus:

Unable to blink the violence [of U.S. military pacification], Karnow reduces its significance by perpetuating the myth of the conquest as inadvertent and adding his own myth of atonement. He contends the United States lacked a "colonial vocation," although the conquest of the Philippines was preceded by centuries of North American experience with conquest, enslavement, genocidal policies, and the general political and social subordination of non-European peoples.

In short, U.S. history before 1898 already displays the habitus of hierarchy, subordination, racializing domination and oppression of people of color, so that it is quite impossible to chronicle the U.S. adventure in the Philippines, including its "Benevolent Assimilation" policy and Taft's slogan of "Filipinos for the Philippines," divorced from that contextual ground or framework of “internal colonialism” tied to the rise of merchant capitalism and the emerging world-system of core/periphery inequalities.

‘Manifest destiny’

An example of U.S. Anglo-Saxon "manifest destiny" may be discerned in the selective application of the U.S. constitution and statues on the new subjugated subjects. In 1914, Justice Grant Trent of the Philippine Supreme Court explained this differential treatment:

With the acquirement of the Philippine Islands a most important change in the territorial policy became necessary.  The United States found here a monarchical form of government. The municipal law was for the most part that of Latin Europe. The “habits, traditions, and modes of life of the people were entirely dissimilar to those of continental America." A general and unqualified extension of the Constitution and laws of the United States to these Islands was considered impracticable and tending unnecessarily to disturb the existing order of things.  For reasons which it is unnecessary to set forth in this opinion, Congress did not desire that the Philippine Islands should be admitted into the customs union; that the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands should be given the status of citizens of the United States...(Quoted in Fernando 1998, 157-58)

Premised on the mission of tutelage announced by President McKinley in his decision to annex the islands, the selective or differential incorporation of the Philippines is symptomatic of that Orientalizing hubris which has, since the early reports of the Civil Commission to the canonical texts of Foreman, Worcester, Cameron Forbes, Hayden, and others, defined the epistemological parameters of scholarship on the Philippines.

About thirty years ago, William Appleman Williams already explained the contradictory forces that converged in the 1898 Spanish-American War and the conquest of territories overseas. That "expansion for freedom" was implicated in the conception of the world marketplace as part of the frontier which gave the agricultural interests "freedom and prosperity." This domestic colonial majority, the populist farmers and rural producers, conflated economic nationalism with "the ideology of political freedom," articulating the need for "empire in terms of freedom." Williams analyzes the contradictory motivation of these agricultural bloc of interests: "They believed in the interrelationship between expansion and freedom because their conception of expansion and empire could be demonstrated to offer better conditions than European colonialism, as well as because it could be demonstrated that more markets improved their welfare at home" (1971, 126). Thus, the ideology of the capitalist marketplace informs the original thrust for empire, just as it does its belated exponents Karnow, May, and others. The more elaborate description of this "imperial anticolonialism" is found in the first chapter of Williams' classic work, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1962).

Neoconservative ascendancy

The neoconservative ascendancy in the late seventies and eighties revitalized pragmatic individualism as a universal paradigm of knowledge-production. With the overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship in 1986, and a revanchist outlook toward Central America and Vietnam, the outlook among academic intellectuals changed. Liberalism adopted a defeatist stance, retreating to empiricism and sociobiological metaphysics. A symptom of this regression, with respect to Philippine area studies, may be perceived in Benedict Anderson's highly influential article which appeared in New Left Review (May-June 1988), "Cacique Democracy in the Philippines: Origins and Dreams."

Anderson's main thesis recapitulates an emergent trend in Philippine studies: the internal structures and institutions of Philippine society, scarcely altered by over half a century of U.S. rule, explains to a large extent the backwardness of Filipino democracy now classified as "cacique democracy." Anderson tries to apply a materialist analysis by locating the source of the distorted development of the country in the Spanish period. The lack of a "substantial criollo hacendado class," the absence of a lingua franca that would unite the population, the absence of an intelligentsia, etc. allowed the mestizos (with the help of British and American trading capital) to become the feudal dynastic family of caciques that would dominate society and make deals with the American colonizers. In fact, Anderson thanks McKinley for deciding to annex the islands, thus preventing the country from fragmenting into weak, caudillo-ridden states similar to Venezuela or Ecuador. Anderson also attributes the formation of the Filipino "national oligarchy" to the minuscule bureaucracy the United States set up in the Philippines:

…the American authorities in Manila, once assured of the mestizos' self-interested loyalty to the motherland, created only a minimal civil service, and quickly turned over most of its component positions to the natives…up to the end of the American era the civilian machinery of state remained weak and divided (1995, 12).

This is patently false. Up to the time of the so-called "filipinizing' governor Harrison, Filipino recalcitrance toward U.S. hegemony never abated. Note the sporadic peasant rebellions throughout the islands. The ferocity of Filipino guerilla resistance after Aguinaldo retreated and the resolute nationalist temper of the intelligentsia required massive military campaigns of repression, seditious laws, and other coercive measures to insure peace and order. Anderson admits that "American power depended on military dominance and the tariff," but surely the bureaucratic machinery involved in military campaigns and commercial taxation--not to mention the assiduous pedagogical and educational apparatus at the heart of U.S. ideological disciplining of "hearts and minds"--testifies to a dual policy of violence and manipulation of consent. Hegemonic authority or legitimacy of governance had to be established by violence and its lawmaking effects.

MacArthur and Lansdale

Anderson's thesis relies on a hypothesis that cannot be sustained: the lack of an American autocratic territorial bureaucracy permitted the Filipino mestizo families to take over--from Quezon and Osmeña to Aquino. Anderson even goes to the extreme of claiming that the United States could not succeed in re-establishing the pre-war agrarian and political order because of the "severe weakening of the state's capacity for centralized deployment of violence." Omitted from this account is MacArthur's draconian suppression of the Huks and the democratic forces with the help of Roxas, the Magsaysay-Lansdale rehearsal of Vietnam War tactics in the total mobilization against the peasant uprising in the late forties and early fifties, and the Cold War rearming of the Philippine military for over twenty years after the end of World War II, during the Korean War and the Vietnam War. The heyday of Philippine "cacique democracy," 1954-1972, witnessed the intensification of U.S. Cold War strategy played out in the Philippines as a springboard for aggression in Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, and elsewhere.

Anderson's mode of analysis privileges primordial ties of kinship and family so entrenched in the culture-and-psychology school of Frank Lynch and others criticized by Virgilio Enriquez and the proponents of sikolohiyang Pilipino. (The absurd limits of psychological speculation applied to grasping the vicissitudes of the revolutionary movement may be illlustrated by Benedict Kerkvliet’s attack on Sison’s personality in the lead essay in Patricio Abinales’ volume The Revolution Falters (1996). But this adaptation of Parsonian structural functionalism ignores power relations grounded on property and the political economy of the uneven formation. In particular, it obscures if not hides completely the profound extent of U.S. control of the economic, political, and military institutions that determine elections and the techniques of governance. American electoralism which presumably disperses power horizontally, for Anderson, partly conceals "Spanish caciquism in a geographically fragmented, ethnolinguistically divided, and economically bankrupt polity" (31). This caciquism signifies inequality and the unjust distribution of resources, rights, and obligations. But does the ritual of periodic elections, "politics in a well-run casino," explain why Aquino, the Cojuangcos, and the entire oligarchy continue to exploit the majority of workers and peasants in the Philippines?

The resort to primordialism as instanced by the priority placed on kinship and the patrimonial estate--the status group--reflects the attenuation of class politics in the United States and the West in general after the end of the IndoChina War. It signals a return to a kind of fundamentalism both in ethics and social theory. Marx's guiding concepts of political economy and the articulation of the modes of production are replaced by Max Weber's hermeneutics of the meaning of action. Weber's stress on status and estates over and against class gives legitimacy to the primacy of ethnicity, language and religion in the sociological analysis of conflicts, while his stress on rationality, especially the instrumental organizing of means to ends, allows for the refunctioning of concepts of patronage and clientelism. The recourse to primordialism (family, ethnic bonds, etc.) leads to mystification of effects, a desocializing of bonding or identity-formation.  In this context, the use of primordialism betokens a bankrupt tendency toward metaphysics and obscurantism: "taking phenomena that are simply 'already existing' and 'persistent' and reifying and mystifying them into things that are 'natural,' 'spiritual,' and 'have always existed and always will' (Eller and Coughlan 1996, 50). Primordial factors suited a utilitarian and pragmatic ethos in a reductive simplification of complex social problems (see Kolakowski 1968).

‘Cacique democracy’

The typology of "cacique democracy" offered by Anderson to explain the sameness and cyclic repetition in Philippine history clearly shifts the causal judgement to the Filipinos themselves, now that the country is independent. Unlike Raymond Bonner's  exposure of Washington's complicity with authoritarian excesses, in Waltzing with Dictators, Anderson downplays U.S. interventionism in favor of the inertia of tradition and primordial sentiments and habitus. Weber's notion of patrimonialism in connection with the discretionary exercise of power, with prebendal domination and arbitrary will, serves as the framework of intelligibility for the peculiarities of Philippine "democracy." The term "cacique" evokes certainly a precapitalist, feudal or what Samir Amin calls "tributary" social formation, but Anderson firmly locates it within the framework of modern global capitalism. Instead of being a neutral, value-free category, "cacique democracy" becomes a stigmatizing mark of the Philippine sociopolitical formation in which the heritage of Spanish colonialism outweighs the legacy of U.S. imperial rule.

One measures the distance between Anderson's neoWeberian diagnosis and the potency of concrete historical materialist analysis by comparing his essay with Jonathan Fast's commentary, "Imperialism and Bourgeois Dictatorship in the Philippines," which appeared in New Left Review (April 1973). The disparity may be explained by the altered political milieu of the late sixties/early seventies and that of the eighties, from the renaissance of Marxism and its subsequent displacement by a seductive but compromised social democracy and the blandishments of outright neoconservatism.

Social contextualization of knowledge-production does not elucidate everything, but I think it is a necessary initial point of departure for evaluation of research programs and results. The volume Philippine Colonial Democracy edited by Ruby Paredes finds its condition of possibility in the years immediately before and after the collapse of Marcos' authoritarian rule. Unlike Anderson, the contributors to the volume (which include the avowed enemy of Filipino nationalist historians, Glenn May) have not completely erased U.S. complicity in the making of the Philippine state and its institutions. In fact, the editor points to the ambivalent attitude of the Filipino elite in its response to U.S. intentions during the 1986 crisis as part of a historical legacy of U.S. colonialism. Nonetheless, the theoretical framework here is the patron-client one supposedly given a novel twist, novel in the sense that the relation is reversible and not one-sided. In fact, the clientelist scheme is claimed to be reciprocal:

Denied equality with Americans under law, Filipino leaders adopted tactics of guile and manipulation to win from American patrons political concessions they needed to maintain the loyalty of their Filipino clients.  Since American colonials were ambitious careerists, they needed Filipino cooperation to give them the aura of administrative success necessary for further advancement.  This symbiosis of interests produced a complex pattern of patron-client interactions.  A Filipino politician in Manila could be simultaneously patron and client to a variety of American colonials, just as an American official could find himself promoting Filipino inferiors and cultivating Filipino superiors. (1988, 6).

Disingenuous

This argument is disingenuous, to say the least. In the first place, the Filipino elite cannot be so simply defined as genuine representatives of the Filipino masses whose collective interests they were supposed to articulate. Second, concessions given by the American colonial administrators to these selected Filipinos who used "rhetorical militance" before their mass clientele and obsequiousness to their masters cannot be interpreted as a sign of equal treatment. And third, this historical account of Filipino shrewdness and American managerial cunning further confirms instead of neutralizing the asymmetrical relation between the colonial subject and the metropolitan master. It does not provide "the middle ground between the colonial chronicles of civilization's proconsuls and the nationalist epics of heroic resistance." On the contrary, it apologizes for the failure of the United States in really conforming to its ideal vocation of civilizing the natives, a failure due not to American racist arrogance and commercial greed but to Filipino ineptitude and docility. This is basically a rehearsal of Karnow's program to rehabilitate the U.S. colonial record in the Philippines and, by implication in Vietnam, Puerto Rico, and its "internal colonies."

There seems to be an ill-concealed attempt here to establish Filipino-American relations during the colonial period as one characterized by reciprocity and mutual exchange. The shadow of Marcel Mauss and his notion of the gift as the complex system of exchanges between groups by means of which undivided (pre-state) societies functioned. The gift is "the primitive way of achieving the peace that in civil society is secured by the State." But in modern societies, under the fetishized social relations of capitalism, relations are no longer reciprocal, even though the ideology of reciprocity is celebrated, as in "a fair day's work for a fair day's pay" (Hulme 1992, 330). In a situation of colonialism, client-patron relationship denotes absence of reciprocity. It is not a middle ground or compromise between colonial tyranny and nationalist heroics. One of the best demonstrations of this thesis is found in Roxanne Lynn Doty's book Imperial Encounters where U.S. discourse on the Philippines, particularly at the height of  the Cold War, is deconstructed as a new version of the imperial "civilizing mission" dating back to the Open Door Notes of 1899-1900 (see Patterson 1997).

Alfred McCoy

Alfred McCoy was one of the contributors to the volume Philippine Colonial Democracy. In his contribution to a 1991 volume of essays From Marcos to Aquino: Local Perspectives on Political Transition in the Philippines edited by Ben Kerkvliet and Resil Mojares, McCoy rejects the model of localized social equilibrium used to produce knowledge of Philippine society. He criticizes Kerkvliet’s reliance on the patron-client paradigm (used by Lynch, Lande and many Filipinologists) that implies reciprocity, not compulsion, between the propertied classes and the propertyless. McCoy notes that “much of Western writing often describes Philippine politics in terms of patron-client ties, a pattern of reciprocal exchange between superiors and inferiors that maintains society in a state of equilibrium” (1991, 106). Here we encounter perhaps the beginning of a change in mainstream knowledge-production about Filipinos/the Philippines, its methodology and epistemic foundations. But no luck. It turns out that McCoy is aiming for a reconciliation of conflict theory with clientelism since he cannot explain otherwise why the planters, who use a mix of coercion and patronage to stay in power, succeeded in restoring the status quo before Marcos during the Aquino regime. Crude empiricism takes over, displacing insight into structures and material determinants of power, abandoning any pretense to define the nexus of causal forces that condition the alternation of violence and acquiescence.

This empirical pragmatism is inflected into an eclectic aggregation of data in the recent work of scholars studying the weakening of the revolutionary movement in the nineties. If you examine Rosanne Rutten’s contribution to the aforementioned Abinales volume, you will confront a narrow empiricist obsession with microprocesses of political mobilization that conflates the “how” and “why,” setting aside the whole history of agrarian/land agitation and U.S. colonial complicity with the preservation of the tenancy system detailed in numerous works, among them James Putzel’s A Captive Land (1992) and James K. Boyce's The Philippines: The Political Economy of Growth and Impoverishment in the Marcos Era (1993). The crippling limitation of a 10-months field work to one hacienda in Negros Occidental by a white Western scholar based in the University of Amsterdam is obvious in the uncritical acceptance of the statements by native informants, the indiscriminate lumping of evidence taken from various participants in the struggle, and the deliberate bracketing of U.S. intervention in Marcos’ national security state throughout the period studied.

History disappears, displaced by snapshots of a tragicomic narrative that reaffirms a cyclic tendency in social life. What is striking is Rutten’s claim to value-free neutral description of motives and reasons for the conduct of social actors and the reduction of the complex field of political forces to a matter of subalterns struggling for survival—the basic means-ends instrumentalist approach prized by positivist technocrats of the Huntington/Rostow school. In the massive catalogue of Filipino leftist errors and mistakes presented by the commentators in Abinales’ volume, the positivist innocence of ideology, in particular anti-communist liberal ideology that has grounded American scholarship on the Philippines, flourishes. Scarcely is there any analysis of the peculiar nature of the "postcolonial" or what Teodor Shanin (1982) calls "overdeveloped" state, the politics of global dependency, the class nature of "developing” societies, and the complex character of the state and its apparatus in an uneven, disarticulated social formation. Nor is the problematic of the overarching metanarrative of "modernization" ever addressed (see Luke 1990).

Empiricist positivism

This discursive tradition of empiricist positivism endures, as in recent works by Brian Linn, David Timberman, and Carl Lande. Its resonance vitiates even revisionist stances, manifest when a reflexive practitioner of postmodernist anthropology like Raul Pertierra critiques classical anthropology but links racism and nationalism as reifications of the cultural and the social, devoid of historical contexts and the differentiated totality in which such discourses and practices are inscribed.

Ideas are never innocent of practical consequences, if one may repeat a platitude. One may propose here that future researchers consign the patron-client cliché to the dustbin and deploy instead such theoretical concepts as “counterrevolution” proposed by Arno Mayer, the “authoritarian state in peripheral societies” suggested by Clive Thomas, and “tributary formation” elaborated by Samir Amin for a sharper and more historically specific analysis of developments in Philippine society.

We are already familiar with world-systems theory and the Gramscian adaptation of hegemony to international relations (Gill 1993). What is needed is the dialectical understanding of how current theories as well as traditional approaches to Filipino society and experience have a history and genealogy imbricated with the West’s “civilizing mission,” United States “exceptionalism” and its global crusade against communism, and the contemporary globalizing trend of transnational corporations, mediated by the World Bank/International Monetary Fund, GATT, and WTO, and other agencies. And, most crucially, that their practical consequences spell the fates not only of the scholars and researchers themselves but also of millions of peoples in both sides, past and future, of the geopolitical arena. Bulatlat.com

REFERENCES

  • Abinales, Patricio, ed..  1996.  The Revolution Falters.   Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program.

  • Amin, Samir.  1980.  Class and Nation.  New York: Monthly Review Press.

  • Anderson, Benedict.  1995.  "Cacique Democracy in the Philippines: Origin and Dreams."  In Discrepant Histories. Ed.  Vicente Rafael.  Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

  • Doty, Roxanne Lynn.  1996.  Imperial Encounters.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

  • Eller, Jack and Reed Coughlan.  1996.  "The Poverty of Primordialism." In Ethnicity. Eds. John Hutchinson and Anthony Smith.  New York: Oxford University Press.

  • Fast, Jonathan.  1973.  "Imperialism and Bourgeois Dictatorship in the Philippines."  New Left Review (March-April): 69-96.

  • Fernando, Enrique M.  1998. "A  Regime of Constitutionalism and the Comparative Law Approach."  In Toward the First Asian Republic. Ed. Elmer Ordonez.  Manila: Philippine Centennial Commission.

  • Gill, Stephen.  1993.  Gramsci, historical materialism and international relations.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

  • Hulme, Peter.  1992.  "Reciprocity and Exchange."  In Formations of Modernity.  Ed. Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben.  Cambridge: Polity Press.

  • Kolakowski, Leszek.  1968.  The Alienation of Reason.  New York: Anchor Books.

  • Lande, Carl.  1996.  Post-Marcos Politics.  New York: St. Martin's Press.

  • Linn, Brian McAlllister.  1989.  The U.S. Army and Counterinsurgency in the Philippine War, 1899-1902.  Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

  • Luke, Timothy. 1990.   Social Theory and Modernity.  Newbury Park: Sage Publications.

  • Mayer, Arno.  1971.  1971.  Dynamics of Counterrevolution in Europe., 1870-1956.  New York: Harper Torchbooks.

  • McCoy, Alfred W.  1991.  “The Restoration of Planter Power in La Carlota City.”  In From Marcos to Aquino. Eds. Benedict Kerkvliet and Resil Mojares.  Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press.

  • Paredes, Ruby, ed.  1988.  Philippine Colonial Democracy. New Haven:   Yale Center for International and Area Studies.

  • Patterson, Thomas C.  1997.  Inventing Western Civilization.  New York: Monthly Review Press.

  • Pertierra, Raul.  1994.  “Philippine Studies and the New Ethnography.”  In Cultures and Texts. Ed.  R. Pertierra and Eduardo Ugarte.  Quezon City: University of the Philippines.

  • Salman, Michael.  1991.  "In Our Orientalist Imagination: Historiography and the Culture of Colonialism in the United States"  Radical History Review 50: 221-232.

  • Shanin, Teodor.  1982.  "Class, State and Revolution: Substitutes and Realities."  In Introduction to the Sociology of "Developing Societies." Ed. Hamza Alavi and Teodor Shanin.  New York: Monthly Review Press.

  • Timberman, David G.  1991.  A Changeless Land.  New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc.

  • Thomas, Clive Y. 1984.  The Rise of the Authoritarian State in Peripheral Societies.  New York: Monthly Review Press.

  • Williams, William Appleman. 1962.  The Tragedy of American Diplomacy.  New York: A Delta Book.

  • -----.  1971.  "The Vicious Circle of American Imperialism."  In Readings in U.S. Imperialism. Ed. K.T. Fann and Donald Hodges.  Boston: Porter Sargent, Publisher.

* E. SAN JUAN, Jr.  will be a Fellow of the Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University, beginning January 2002. He served recently as professor and chair of the Department of Comparative American Cultures, Washington State University.  He was 1993 Fellow at the Institute for the Advanced Study of the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and 1995 Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Culture and Society, Ohio.  His book Racial Formations/Critical Transformations won awards from the Association for Asian American Studies and the Gustavus Myers Center for Human Rights.  He received the 1994 Katherine Newman Award from the Society for the Study of Multi-Ethnic Literatures in the United States and the 1999 Centennial Award for Achievement in Literature from the Cultural Center of the Philippines.

 San Juan received his A.B. magna cum laude from the University of the Philippines, his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. He has taught English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Brooklyn College (CUNY), University of Connecticut, University of Trento, Italy, and Tamkang University, Taiwan. He was 1987-88 Fulbright lecturer at the University of the Philippines. He is one of the internationally distinguished writers included in the HarperCollins World Reader. He is on the editorial board of Amerasia Journal, Nature, Society, and Thought, and Left Curve.

San Juan's recent books are: Beyond Postcolonial Theory (St. Martin's Press); From Exile to Diaspora: Versions of the Filipino Experience in the United States (Westview Press); Hegemony and Strategies of Transgression: Essays in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature (State University of New York Press);  The Philippine Temptation: Dialectics of U.S.-Philippines Literary Relations (Temple University Press); Mediations: From A Filipino Perspective (Anvil Publishing Co.); Allegories of Resistance (University of the Philippines Press), and History and Form (Ateneo de Manila University Press). Forthcoming volumes are Racism and Cultural Studies (Duke University Press) and Scenes, Voices, Trajectories: Introducing Philippine Literature.  His works have been translated into Russian, German, Spanish, Italian, French, Chinese, Japanese, and other languages.

 


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