On Becoming Filipino: Selected Writings of Carlos Bulosan (Asian American History & Cultu) - Softcover

San Juan, E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566393108 ISBN 13: 9781566393102

Publisher: Temple University Press, 1995

Synopsis

A collection of writings by a prolific and political Filipino American writer

About this title

Review:

"[P]resents an excellent selection of the work of this 20th-century Filipino writer... Editor San Juan has provided an erudite 42-page discussion of Bulosan's work and life as well as a history of Filipinos in America." --Library Journal "Though written in the 1940s and 1950s, Bulosan's work has particular relevance in today's racially charged political debates." --Asian Week "On Becoming Filipino marks a decisive moment in our estimation of Carlos Bulosan's inexhaustible legacy for Asian American and twentieth-century U.S. literatures. This anthology amply captures the startling contemporaneity and political resonance of Bulosan's achievement, and dares us to push the exhausted debates over literary ethnicity and multiculturalism beyond their impoverished terms of bourgeois identity, cultural nationalism, and pluralist representation. This is a remarkably accomplished effort to frame and allegorize Bulosan's writing in terms of a Filipino nomadism ('becoming') and its uneasy displacements across the terrains of U.S.-Philippine colonial and postcolonial relations." --Oscar V. Campomanes, University of California, Berkeley "In this book, Bulosan's political views--Marxist, anticapitalist, antiracist, and anticolonialist--are explored as they evolve, from the late 1930s to the early 1950s... On Becoming Filipino is often a stark testimony to the lives of Filipino migrants: 'I feel like a criminal running away from a crime I did not commit,' Bulosan writes. 'And the crime is that I am a Filipino in America.' Bulosan's letters and essays reveal that...America would always be in his heart--as dream, as ideal, as object of a double-edged love which hurt as it both soothed and savaged." --Viet Thanh Nguyen, A.MAGAZINE

Synopsis:

A companion volume to "The Cry and the Dedication", this is the first extensive collection of Carlos Bulosan's short stories, essays, poetry, and correspondence. Bulosan's writings expound his mission to redefine the Filipino American experience and mark his growth as a writer. The pieces included here reveal how his sensibility, largely shaped by the political circumstances of the 1930s up to the 1950s, articulates the struggles and hopes for equality and justice for Filipinos. He projects a "new world order" liberated from materialist greed, bigoted nativism, racist oppression, and capitalist exploitation. As E. San Juan explains in his Introduction, Bulosan's writings "help us to understand the powerlessness and invisibility of being labeled a Filipino in post Cold War America." Author note: Born in 1911 in the Philippines to a peasant family, Carlos Bulosan was one of the first wave of Filipino immigrants to come to the United States in the 1930s. After several arduous years as a farmworker in California, Bulosan became involved with radical intellectuals and started editing the workers' magazine "The New Tide".

About this edition

• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 1566393108
• ISBN 13: 9781566393102
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240