E. San Juan, Jr. is a Filipino cultural critic and public intellectual. His works span a broad spectrum of fields and disciplines, from cultural studies, comparative literary scholarship, ethnic and racial studies, postcolonial theory, semiotics to philosophical inquiries in historical materialism.
He applies a Gramscian approach and a critical Marxist optic on cultural events and texts in the Philippine historical process of national liberation. San Juan is also notable for being the first Filipino male intellectual to have engaged with feminist discourse in his "Filipina Insurgency: Writing Against Patriarchy" (Giraffe Books, 1999).
Two significant contributions of San Juan to Philippine culture and literature are his translation into English of selected poems by Amado Hernández; and the re-discovery of Carlos Bulosan's writings, evidenced in his numerous anthologies of Bulosan's works; and his critical essays on Hernandez in "The Radical Tradition in Philippine Literature,"" ""Toward A People's Literature,"" "" Writing and National Liberation,"" "" The Philippine Temptation,"" ""After Postcolonialilsm,"" ""Hegemony and Strategies of Transgression,"" and "Only by Struggle".