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

• Main Author: Burns, Gerald
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2024
• Subjects: exile; expatriation; Filipino American; intellectual biography; intellectual history
• 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
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

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.