Title | : | Allegories of Resistance: The Philippines at the Threshold of the Twenty-First Century |
Author | : | |
Rating | : | |
ISBN | : | 9715420486 |
ISBN-10 | : | 9789715420488 |
Language | : | English |
Format Type | : | Paperback |
Number of Pages | : | 162 |
Publication | : | First published January 1, 1994 |
Allegories of Resistance: The Philippines at the Threshold of the Twenty-First Century Reviews
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San Juan brings a great diversity of analytical tools to the table in providing insight into/critiquing the role of the Phillipines in the resistance of global capital etc. San Juan is a fierce nationalist and wary of the quasi-fascict methods and reductive sloganeering any revolutionary movement (and make no mistake, Juan favors revolution over reform--his interests lie in the intersection of revolution and cultural texts). His arguments are tremendously alert to contemporary events. However, Juan tends to be a bit too discursive for me, to use his phenomenal skill set to jump quickly from a close reading of a cultural event to Hegelian dialectics (or something like that). Further, while in earlier chapters he harshly critiques certain leading Filipino writers and then finishes the book with a discussion of Hugh Macdiarmid's revolutionary poetics, he doesn't discuss what if anything could be gained from an importation of a poetics which is emancipatory in the Scottish context. This lack of coherency between chapters will be an impedement for anyone not already eye-deep in the sort of problems Sna Juan is responding to.