Coming Full Circle: The Process of Decolonization Among Post-1965 Filipino Americans

_Coming Full Circle_ is about the healing of the Filipino colonized psyche through the recovery and re-imagination of Filipino identity and culture. It is about the emergence from the 'culture of silence' to critical consciousness that is able to develop new conceptualizations and frameworks about the Filipino American experience.

Decolonization is a psychological process that enables the colonized to understand and overcome the depths of alienation and marginalization caused by the psychic and epistemic violence of colonization. Decolonization transforms the consciousness of the colonized through the reclamation of the Filipino cultural self and makes space for the recovery and healing of traumatic memory, and healing leading to different forms of activism. It is an open-ended process. It is a new way of seeing. As a way of healing, it is also a promise and a hope.

The publication of this book has been a long-awaited event. It hopes to help many Filipinos still struggling to recover from colonizal mentality to finally 'come full circle.'

Leny Mendoza Strobel teaches at Sonoma State University in the American Multicultural Studies Department and in the Hutchins School of Liberal Studies. She lectures widely at other institutions in California and beyond. She is co-editor of _Encounters: People of Asian Descent in the Americas_ (Rowman and Littlefield) and her writings have appeared in _Postcolonial Theory and the U.S.: Race, Ethnicity and Literature_ (University of Mississippi Press), in _Filipino Americans: Transformation and Identity_ (Sage) and in other academic journals and magazines.