Intellectual Portrait Gallery: Agusto Fauni Espiritu's Five Faces of Exile

Espiritu writes a book which may be described as a “collective intellectual biography” of five figures in Philippine letters whose lives and texts were influenced by their expatriation in America: Carlos P. Romulo, Carlos Bulosan, Jose Garcia Villa, N.V.M. Gonzalez, and Bienvenido Santos. With a bio...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Burns, Gerald
Format: text
Published: Archīum Ateneo 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss10/3
https://archium.ateneo.edu/context/kk/article/1122/viewcontent/_5BKKv00n10_2008_5D_202.2_Article_Burns.pdf
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Institution: Ateneo De Manila University
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Summary:Espiritu writes a book which may be described as a “collective intellectual biography” of five figures in Philippine letters whose lives and texts were influenced by their expatriation in America: Carlos P. Romulo, Carlos Bulosan, Jose Garcia Villa, N.V.M. Gonzalez, and Bienvenido Santos. With a biographer’s touch, Espiritu identifies the themes that are more or less common and played out differently among them: performativity, ambivalence, nationalism in their self-representation, cultural hybridity, and patronage relations—leading to what may be called a genuine “transnational” perspective for Asian American intellectual history. However, his use of other big terms such as “exile,” “nation,” “Filipino” and “Filipino-American,” and “intellectual” raises questions and provokes discussions that may yet inform our reading of these critical biographies.