Granted formal independence in 1946, the Philippines serves as a battleground between the neoliberal project of capitalist globalization and the enduring aspiration of Filipinos for national self-determination. More than ten million Filipino workers--over one-tenth of the country's total population--work as contract workers in all parts of the world. How did this "model" colony of the United States devolve into an impoverished, war-torn neocolonial hinterland, a provider of cheap labor and raw materials for the rest of the world? In Toward Filipino Self-Determination, E. San Juan Jr. explores the historical, cultural, and political formation of the Filipino diaspora. By focusing on the work of significant Filipino intellectuals and activists, including Carlos Bulosan and Philip Vera Cruz, as well as the issues of gender and language for workers in the United States, San Juan provides a historical-materialist reading of social practices, discourses, and institutions that explain the contradictions characterizing Filipino life in both the United States and in the Philippines.

E. San Juan Jr. is Director of the Philippines Cultural Center in Storrs, Connecticut. He is the author of more than sixty books, including Hegemony and Strategies of Transgression: Essays in Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, also published by SUNY Press; From Exile to Diaspora: Versions of the Filipino Experience in the United States; and In the Wake of Terror: Class, Race, Nation, Ethnicity in the Postmodern World.