Carlos Bulosan―Revolutionary Filipino Writer in the United States: A Critical Appraisal

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Carlos Bulosan―Revolutionary Filipino Writer in the United States: A Critical Appraisal is an in-depth, critical evaluation of Bulosan's major works in the context of the sociopolitical changes that configured his sensibility during the Depression, the united-front mobilization prior to World War II, and the Cold War witch-hunting of the fifties. Unprecedented for its thorough historical-materialist analysis of the symbolic dynamics of the texts, this book uses original research into the Sanora Babb papers that have never before been linked to Bulosan. Sophisticated dialectical analysis of the complex contradictions in Bulosan’s life is combined with a politico-ethical reading of U.S.-Philippines relations. San Juan takes the unorthodox view that Bulosan’s career was not an immigrant success story but instead a subversive project of an organic intellectual of a colonized nation-in-the-making. Today, Bulosan is hailed as a revolutionary Filipino writer, unparalleled in the racialized, conflicted history of the Philippines as a colony/dependency of the United States. This book follows San Juan’s pioneering 1972 study Carlos Bulosan and the Imagination of the Class Struggle. Cover Contents Acknowledgments Foreword (Peter McLaren) Introduction Misrecognizing Terra Incognita Historicizing Contingencies From Colonial Wards to Strike Instigators Point Counterpoint: Retrospective Beginning Wrestling with the Minotaur Ordeal of Deferred Homecoming Chapter 1: Passages from Exile: Inventory and Critique Situating the Archive Decoding a Genealogy Deterritorializing Strategy Plotting a Trajectory Counter-intuitive Interventions Prospectus for a Reconnaissance Chapter 2: Parallel lives: Ordeals of Initiation and Discovery Who Made the Golden Gate Bridge? Grapes of Wrath After the Deluge Remembrance of Future Returns Advent of a Workers’ Tribune From Plural to Singular Parallel Lives Converging Witnessing Swerve Truth Addressing Power Chapter 3: Dialectical Mediations: Between Crisis and Emergency A Retrospective Interlude Diagnosis and Prognosis “Little Brown Brother’s” Burden Scholastic Obscurantism Anti-Miscegenation Blues The Plagiarism Perplex Permanent Emergency The Egalitarian Imperative Traveling Corpus Delicti Toward Proletarian Protagonism Chapter 4: Excavating the Ruins: Foreshadowing Rebirths Anti-migrant Interpolation Counter-Memory versus Prophecy Subjugation Unspeakable Unravelling the Contradictions Framing the Ethico-Political Project From Undocumented Aliens to Planetary Citizens? Fellow-Travelling and Other Journeys The Angel of History Beholds the Rubble Chapter 5: Memory, Dreams, History: Divining the Homeland of Revolution Author’s Internment Pastoral Confabulation Promise of Vindication Triangulating Habitat Vagrant Itinerary Thought Experiments Incarnation Poetics Uncanny Demarcations Fragmented Elegy Stigmata Hermeneutic Inquest of a Posthumous Utopia References