We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Jose Garcia Villa--Critique of a Subaltern Poetics.
- Authors
San Juan Jr., E.
- Abstract
The case of Jose Garcia Villa, an exiled Filipino poet who lived in the U.S. from 1930 to 1997, illustrates the predicament of the subaltern, neocolonized artist embedded in what Pierre Bourdieu calls "the literary field" (see The Rules of Art). The significance and ultimate value of Villa's accomplishment, as epitomized in Doveglion: Collected Poems (2008), can only be fully appraised by contextualizing the genesis and structuring of his themes, styles, and artistic manifestoes in the fraught historical-political relations between the imperial hegemon, the United States, and the dependent, peripheral socioeconomic formation, the Philippines. Underlying this colonial subsumption is the global relations of nations and peoples within the inter-state system of global capitalism between the 1930 Depression in the US, World War II, and the Cold War period marked by the communist victory in China, the Korean War, the IndoChina War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the Middle East conflicts. Complicating this grid, further historical specifications concerning the function of artistic organizations, the language question, and the arguments between groups advocating the individualist art-for-art's sake ideology and its antitheses (civic morality, religious metaphysics, revolutionary socialism), should be factored in to arrive at a fully determinate, processual, and historical-materialist assessment of the Villa phenomenon as an example of an ethnic, subaltern poetics articulated within the uneven, contradiction-filled transition from modernity to postmodernity.
- Subjects
PHILIPPINES; UNITED States; VILLA, Jose Garcia, 1908-1997; FILIPINO poets; DOVEGLION: Collected Poems (Book); NATIONALISM; PHILIPPINES-United States relations; HISTORICAL materialism
- Publication
EurAmerica, 2010, Vol 40, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
1021-3058
- Publication type
Article