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I'm reading a book called From Exile to Diaspora: Versions of the Filipino Experience in the United States, by E. San Juan, Jr. (Westview Press, 244 pp.; $39). San Juan reminds us that 1998 (the year in which his book was published) "marks the centenary of the founding of the first Philippine Republic and also the intervention of the United States with the outbreak of the Spanish-American War." As a result of that intervention, one of the most unsavory episodes in our history, "the Philippines became a colonial possession of the United States, with its people subjugated and 'Americanized' for almost a century." And the consequences of that history, in turn, have harshly shaped the experience of Filipinos in the United States.
San Juan is angry—angry at the "invisibility" and "forgottenness" of Filipinos in the U.S., angry at the "persisting subjugation of Filipino bodies and psyches"—but his prescription for change is not likely to help, unless you have faith in "a politics of counterhegemonic struggle … a struggle between imperial-transnational powers and insurgent subalterns around the world … a popular-democratic politics of contestation to dispute the dominant logic of representation, the scenarios of hegemonic interpellation that constitute subjectivity, identity, and agency, inflected by class, race, gender, sexuality, and so on."
I remain unpersuaded. But what San Juan's book brought home to me again is the enormous value of seeing familiar history from an unfamiliar perspective. That's a theme that tends to get lost in the debates between advocates of Traditional History ("the Eurocentric master-narrative," their opponents call it) and the Multiculturalists. The history of Filipinos in the United States is not a trivial subject. Its claims on us are both moral and intellectual—the two can't be neatly separated—and it deepens our understanding, but not when presented as San Juan (and many "diversity requirements") would have it, as a cartoonish narrative of dastardly capitalistic "EuroAmericans" and their sins in counterpoint to the valiant struggles of "people of color."
In September 1998 I was at the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Osijek, Croatia, for the seminary's Second Consultation on Theological Education and Leadership Development in Post-Communist Europe. Quite a mouthful, that—but the conference itself, centered on the theme "Equipping Kingdom Leaders for the 21st Century," had nothing ponderous about it. Directed by Peter Kuzmic, who divides his time between ETS in Osijek and Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, the consultation was sponsored by the International Fellowship of Evangelical Mission Theologians, the Oxford Centre for Mission Studies, and the Overseas Council, and cosponsored by the Council for East European Theological Education and the East European Schools of Theology. More than 150 people, mostly from East-Central Europe but also from Africa, Asia, Latin America, North America, and Western Europe, met for four days, beginning each day with a session of Bible exposition.
A recurring theme was tension between the evangelical groups represented at the conference—which generally make up only 1 percent or slightly more of the population of the countries represented—and the established church, Orthodox in most cases (although Croatia itself is historically Roman Catholic, and intensely so). I wished that some of my Orthodox friends from the States could hear these stories firsthand.
On the map drawn by San Juan, Croatia figures merely under the sign of "Europe," agent of hegemony. But of course the history of Europe from a Croatian perspective differs sharply from "standard" histories of Europe. (See, for example, Croatia: A Nation Forged in War, by Marcus Tanner, Yale Univ. Press, 338 pp.; $35, hardcover; $16, paper).
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