Against Empire and Toward a Politics and Praxis of Hope: Reflections on E. San Juan, Jr.'s Racism and Cultural Studies

• Main Author: Cabusao, Jeffrey Arellano
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2024
• Subjects: ideology; multiculturalism; US imperialism
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss3/6; https://archium.ateneo.edu/context/kk/article/1025/viewcontent/_5BKKv00n03_2003_5D_202.5_Article_Cabusao.pdf
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

E. San Juan Jr.’s Racism and Cultural Studies: Critiques of Multiculturalist Ideology and the Politics of Difference (Duke UP, 2002) offers a fresh and timely critique of the ways in which racism and the ideology of white supremacy function in the creation of the US nation-state and the current intensification of US imperialism. Racism and Cultural Studies provides an impressive inventory—and unique synthesis—of a variety of historical materialist methods to cultural studies that enable us to challenge the insidious ways in which US imperial hegemony is ideologically and materially produced and maintained. This review highlights how E. San Juan, Jr. creates alternative “methodologies of the oppressed” (a politics and praxis of hope), which recognize the agency of people of color/Third World peoples to envision and collectively organize for radical transformative social change.