Working Through the Contradictions: From Cultural Theory to Critical Practice

Gathering together classic and new essays by the internationally renowned U.S.-based Filipino artist and thinker E. San Juan Jr., Working through the Contradictions addresses major issues of cultural theory, comparative politics, and international relations. Committed to the ideal of a popular, egalitarian democracy, San Juan exposes the limits of the current vogue of transnationalism, cosmopolitan humanitarianism, and varieties of dissentious multiculturalism. Opposing the triumphalist discourse of U.S.-centered globalization, San Juan reaffirms the value and power of a historical materialist critique of the new world order. Connecting the theoretical debates in American Studies to the recent U.S. intervention in the Philippines against the Abu Sayyaf guerillas, Spinoza’s philosophy to current racism against Asian Americans, European surealism to Caribbean history, San Juan’s dialectical method illuminates the contradictions of thought and practice that open up opportunities for social transformation and spiritual renewal. Working through the Contradictions is an uncompromising critique of late capitalist society and its ideology of transnationalism, hybridity, and border-crossing pluralism. Post-September 11 white supremacist racism becomes the actuality that proves how moralizing neoliberal and borderless paradigms can no longer elide the inescapable contradictions at the heart of a market-based society. What is needed is to work through these contradictions until a site or space emerges for a new social order of justice and equality.