Racism and Cultural Studies: Critiques of Multiculturalist Ideology and the Politics of Difference (New Americanists)

Rating:
Summary: Toward a Politics of Hope
Review: The Philippines, a U.S. neocolony, has now captured the world's attention as the second front in the "war against terrorism" after Afghanistan. In this milieu of intensified global crisis and emergency, Cultural Studies must shift its attention to the hinterlands of Empire and enter/sustain dialogue with the many worldwide who, because they are deeply concerned with peace, genuine democracy, and social justice, are taking a firm stand to challenge the brutality of U.S. imperial hegemony. In 1898 the Philippines (from which E. San Juan, Jr. hails) was violently colonized by the United States; it shares this history with Puerto Rico, Cuba, Guam, and Hawai'i. Currently, the Abu Sayaaf-- a counterinsurgency tool created by the CIA and the Armed Forces of the Philippines-- is used to justify the presence of thousands of U.S. troops dominating the Philippines. Recently, Sec. Colin Powell declared the major progressive insurgency groups, the peasant-based New People's Army and the Communist Party of the Philippines, part of the coalition called the National Democratic Front of the Philippines, as terrorist groups.

E. San Juan, Jr., one of our most important and prolific Filipino cultural theorists and a major critic of Establishment postcolonial discipline, offers a crucial intervention for our times. In BEYOND POSTCOLONIAL THEORY (1998), San Juan argues that the progressive insurgent forces of the Philippine National Democratic mass movement play a vital part of the "postcolonial" subaltern resistance, but have been muted and silenced by post-al studies. San Juan's latest RACISM AND CULTURAL STUDIES (Duke UP, 2002) expands this critique in fresh, innovative ways that speak directly to our current collective desire for liberation and freedom for all.

Boldly pushing against the historical limitations of fashionable theoretical trends of the academy, San Juan urgently asks us to reclaim the various rich and dynamic Marxist traditions (both Western and Third World Marxisms) of theorizing the connection between culture/knowledge production and the struggle for radical social transformation (the twin task of ideological and material struggle). In RACISM AND CULTURAL STUDIES (RCS), San Juan offers a rigorous historical materialist method of regrounding the dominant "new times=new politics" model of contemporary Cultural Studies. Thus, with San Juan's alternative methodology we shift from reified notions of difference to a dialectical regrounding in which difference is conceived as, in the words of Red Feminist Teresa Ebert, "difference within a material system of exploitation" (see her LUDIC FEMINISM for an excellent critique of post-al difference). This shifting of grounds enables San Juan to bring to the fore the importance of analyzing the complex ways in which difference-- race, gender, sexuality-- is historically produced and reproduced. A leitmotif of this book, to be sure, is the advancement of Marx's challenge to idealism. It is not enough to interpret the world. We must collectively and creatively struggle for a radically transformed society in which difference will no longer be produced by a racialized and gendered division of labor (exploitative social relations of production). Instead, genuine differences will emerge: so that each can live "according to his/her needs and abilities."

In this process of regrounding, San Juan acknowledges that we do, indeed, live in "new" times, but this "new-ness" must be contextualized properly (recall Jameson's mantra: "historicize, historicize, historicize"). San Juan asserts: "New post-Cold War realignments compel us to return to a historical-materialist analysis of political economy and its overdeterminations in order to grasp the new racial politics of transnationality and multiculturalism" (42). One of the central goals of this book is to confront the insidious ways in which racism, which established the foundation of the U.S. nation-state as a "racial-socioeconomic formation," functions as an international political force that is gendered, sexualized, and "naturalized" through U.S. nationalism. The focus on race and its dialectical connection to class resonates with other recent publications, such as Mark Solomon's THE CRY WAS UNITY: COMMUNISTS AND AFRICAN AMERICANS, 1917-1936 (1998). There Solomon asserts that "Capitalism's cornerstone was' laid by slavery and fortified by racism."

Far from advocating a return to economically deterministic, vulgar Marxism, San Juan provides a breathtaking inventory and synthesis of various figures from both Western and Third World Marxist traditions-- running the gamut from Antonio Gramsci to Frantz Fanon-- that provide examples of how to dialectically challenge current post-al temptations of abstracting civil society from the state, culturalizing hegemony, divorcing nation from class, and conflating the nationalism of oppressed neocolonial nation-states with the nationalisms of oppressor nation-states. The extended afterword focuses on the Philippine movement for genuine national sovereignty in relation to the Filipino Diaspora in a way that concretizes the dialectical method of global cognitive mapping proposed throughout the book.

An interdisciplinary tour de force, RACISM AND CULTURAL STUDIES offers timely critiques and suggestions for advancing a unique "methodology of the oppressed" that may, for the moment, seem submerged or repressed in the industrialized global North, but is, as I write, being tested and refined in the overexploited global South where the wretched of the earth have been proclaiming through protracted organized mass struggle (based on a worker-peasant alliance) that "another world is possible." In the so-called "Third World," subalterns have uttered this expression long before it became the clarion call of the young and courageous anti-globalization movement in the North.

I urge all of us to engage San Juan's latest book-- to learn from his lessons in dialectical analysis and his suggestions for creating strategies for cognitive mapping, to listen to his impassioned appeal to activists, insurgent intellectuals (both organic and academic), and all democratic minded people to critique the central roles that racism and U.S. nationalism play in the ways in which global capitalism wrecks havoc on the daily lives of millions all over the world. After a careful reading of this book, one will appreciate its ability to sustain in new and imaginative ways a politics of hope in these perilous times-- an intervention that can, to quote Raymond Williams, "make hope practical, rather than despair convincing" (quoted in RCS, 313).