Emotional Labor of Racialization: Carlos Bulosan’s Anger as a Critique of Filipino Alienation in America

Abstract

This article examines the anger expressed by Carlos Bulosan, a Filipino migrant writer in early to mid-twentieth-century America. Bulosan’s anger evaluates the beginnings of a paradoxical racial form for Filipinos who lived and worked as colonial subjects in the United States. While the Philippines was under U.S. colonial rule (1899–1946), Americans perceived Filipinos as happily servile because of the exploitable labor they performed as household servants, farm hands, and cannery workers. But paradoxically, Americans also considered Filipino men to be sexually threatening because they viewed them through stereotypes of black males as hypersexual predators of white women. By taking into account Bulosan’s antagonism to alienation in the workplace, this essay argues that we especially understand the relevance of Bulosan’s oeuvre to scrutinize racial oppression through his Marxian critique of Filipino alienation in America in a process I call the emotional labor of racialization . Through his anger at work exploitation, Bulosan articulates a materialist analysis of the emotions that assesses the emergence of a Filipino racial form and calls attention to emotional objectification in Asian American racialization. Moreover, through both expressing and describing his struggle to manage a vehement affect such as anger, Bulosan critiques the racialized perception of Filipinos as objects of commodity happiness—as subjects of happiness for hire—in the eyes of white Americans who ascribed to the Filipino laborer the Chinese migrant’s supposedly unusual capacity for highly exploitable work.