On Becoming Filipino: Selected Writings of Carlos Bulosan (Asian American History & Cultu) [Hardcover]

E. San Juan (Author)

Book Description

Series: Asian American History & Cultu | Publication Date: May 16, 1995

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". While hospitalized for three years for tuberculosis and kidney problems, Bulosan began writing poetry and short stories. Despite having little formal education, he saw his talent for writing as a means to give a voice to Filipino struggles, both in the Philippines and in the United States. He went on to publish three volumes of poetry, a best-selling collection of stories, "The Laughter of My Father", and "America Is in the Heart", the much acclaimed chronicle based on his family's battle to overcome poverty, violence, and racism in the United States. "The Cry and the Dedication" carries on Bulosan's passionate, satirical style. E. San Juan, Jr. is Fellow of the Center for the Humanities and Visiting Professor of English, Wesleyan University, and Director of the Philippines Cultural Studies Center. He was recently chair of the Department of Comparative American Cultures, Washington University, and Professor of Ethnic Studies at Bowling Green State University, Ohio. He received the 1999 Centennial Award for Literature from the Philippines Cultural Center. His most recent books are "Beyond Postcolonial Theory", "From Exile to Diaspora", "After Postcolonialism", and "Racism and Cultural Studies".

Editorial Reviews

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

From the Publisher

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

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Temple University Press (May 16, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566393094
• ISBN-13: 978-1566393096
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,694,082 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gripping Epic!, July 24, 2001

By 

J. Jennings (New York, Washington D.C., Vancouver) - See all my reviews

This review is from: On Becoming Filipino: Selected Writings of Carlos Bulosan (Asian American History & Cultu) (Paperback)

This reading should be considered one of Filipino-America's (and Asian America's) best literary works as of yet. There is no other writer prior to the cliche' "Amy Tan-esque" era that has made a lasting impact on American literature. The novel is (r)evolutionary in its attempt to educate generations of literature afficionados. What better way to pay tribute to equal rights activists than Bulosan's magnum opus? Bulosan is the next Walt Whitman and then some, beginning with his incipient stages in rural Pangasinan province, to his voyage to America and initiation into manhood and the adventures in between. He is Walt Whitman's echo, fervent, passionate, honest - speaking for all humankind, and fighting for the rights of 1930s struggling working class of Filipinos, Mexicans, Native Americans, African-Americans, and Asians.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Potent, April 2, 1999

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[e-mail] (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: On Becoming Filipino: Selected Writings of Carlos Bulosan (Asian American History & Cultu) (Paperback)

Powerful works. Bulosan is poetic, honest and down-to-earth, and very vivid and lyrical in his descriptions of the atrocities he suffered as a Filipino living in America.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Grips the Heart, March 20, 2003

By 

Robert L. Anderson (Killeen, TX United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: On Becoming Filipino: Selected Writings of Carlos Bulosan (Asian American History & Cultu) (Paperback)

This book grips the heart and pulls on all the strings. It brings out the Filipino experience for the "Manongs" as no other book that I have read. This collection of short stories, essays, poems, and correspondance lets Carlos Bulosan bring out the total message. A must have book