Critical Engagements in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature: Salvaging the Ruins of Empire

Few readers know how the U.S.-Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines inflicted torture and death with impunity on millions. Citizens became desaparesidos, to use the Latin-American term. In the Philippines, the victims were "salvaged," kidnapped and killed. This semantic change epitomizes the experience of colonized/neocolonized subjects since the bloody pacification of the islands in the 1899-1913 Filipino-American War. The usual meaning of "salvage," as rescue of selected relics from history's slaughterhouse, is restored here.

In this book E. San Juan, Jr. reviews the dialectical process in postmodern art and symbolic expressions of the Cold War and analyzes the contradictions of re-neoliberal globalization and the retooled "salvaging" in the Duterte-Marcos regime today.

Neocolonialism and decolonization mutually inform the discussion of Filipino indigenization with the emergence of sikolohiyang Filipino--an original construction.