First and Third Worlds in U. S. Literature: Rethinking Carlos Bulosan

Abstract

1. Re-Imagining Class Struggle Much of criticism on Carlos Bulosan investigates dynamics of Third World writing in work, primarily focussing on poetry or, most predominantly, on novelistic collective biography of Filipinos, Is in Heart.(1) Bulosan has been defined and evaluated overridingly on basis of Is in Heart, widely considered his key work (Kim Such Opposite Creatures 45) and and most controversial work as well as the text of first-generation Filipino immigrant (Alquizola 211). Privileging Is in Heart in study of Bulosan's work, however, by extension also privileges a particular imagination or master narrative of class struggle, a definitive politicized interpretation of the first-generation Filipino immigrant experience, and, as Bulosan's aesthetic conveys revolutionary and revolutionizing concept of imagination as praxis (San Juan Carlos Bulosan 64), a particular strategy of proletarian and Third World cultural resistance.(2) Isolating Is in Heart as of both Bulosan's political and literary imagination and internal colonial experience of Filipinos in U.S. leaves incomplete unfolding tale of the evolution of a Third World socialist (San Juan Reading West 134). In this essay, I will trace this evolution beyond is in Heart through a study of Bulosan's re-imagination of class struggle in final stunning novel, The Cry and Dedication, which provides a fictional rethinking of interrelations of race, nation, culture, and class struggle. What most significantly distinguishes The Cry and Dedication from Is in Heart is Bulosan's recognition of need for liberation of internally colonized Filipinos in U.S. and realization that, in Amilcar Cabral's terms, national liberation is necessarily an act of culture (Cabral Return 43). If Is in Heart is a narrative of coming to class consciousness, The Cry and Dedication reworks that narrative and reconsiders content of class consciousness. Regarding class consciousness as the way in which [class] experiences are handled in cultural terms: embodied in value-systems, ideas, and institutional forms (Thompson 10), we can see how American cultural terms would be inadequate for comprehending class experience of Filipino workers rooted in a history and international space distinct from that of a large percentage of U.S. workers. Bulosan's return to source in The Cry and Dedication constitutes a recognition that cultural domination reinforces and shapes class domination such that a genuine working-class movement can emerge only after cultural and racial equality are achieved; in short, that, following Frantz Fanon's thesis, it is at heart of consciousness that international consciousness lives and grows (248). In articulating paradox of America in Is in Heart, Bulosan wonders, Why was so kind and yet so cruel? Was there no common denominator on which we could all meet? (147). The Cry and Dedication, however, is not a search for a common denominator but rather a cultural nationalist affirmation which both articulates and enacts an anti-imperialist politics and program of liberation for Filipinos in U.S. through a cultural resistance that redirects and reimagines narrative of class struggle by realigning relations between history, culture, and class consciousness. In exploring Bulosan's creation of a Third World proletarian consciousness in The Cry and Dedication, I will discuss two major aspects of novel: 1) The trope of homecoming and recuperation of identity for Filipinos in U.S.; and 2) The sexual and literary politics of cultural nationalism. 2. Back to Future: Bulosans's Literary Homecoming While in writing Is in Heart Bulosan's attention was focussed on a U. …