Racial Formations Critical Transformations

Racial Formations/Critical Transformations is an interdisciplinary work whose main project is to theorize the centrality of race and racism in U.S. discourse and practice. Addressed not only to academics but also to policy-makers and community activists, it touches on all the perennial issues and problems of education, political strategy, ethics, and rhetoric involving ethnic and race relations. Deploying the resources of critical theory, semiotics, and historical analysis, E. San Juan, Jr., a leading Filipino writer, critic, and scholar whose work on comparative cultural studies has gained international acclaim, offers a global critique of multiculturalism, ethnicity-based social studies, orthodox Marxism, and postmodern approaches from the perspective of the struggles of people of color for representation and self-determination. San Juan urges a totalizing comprehension of how race articulates with power, ethnicity, nation, gender, and class across modes of intellectual production and social formations. His study proposes the histories of people of color as the foundation for a new field of cultural study linking research into U.S. racial practice with counter-hegemonic movements throughout the world.