Agriculture and Asian American Literature

Agriculture is a significant yet understudied theme in Asian American literature. Representations of farming in Asian American literature often respond to and engage with agriculture’s important role in Asian American history. As farmers and as farm laborers, Asian Americans have been pivotal to US agriculture, and this agricultural experience was foundational to the formation of Asian American communities in the period prior to World War II. Additionally, literary representations of agriculture in Asian American literature navigate racialized traditions of American pastoral and Jeffersonian agrarianism. They have often done so in ways that highlight the systems of racial and economic exploitation at work in US society and position US agribusiness in relationship to US colonialism and neo-colonialism. Consequently, Asian American literature’s representations of farming can expose the assumptions around race, property, and citizenship at work in the agrarianism of the 21st-century US alternative food movement. The writings of Carlos Bulosan, Hisaye Yamamoto, and David Mas Masumoto provide case studies of these trends.

Immigration and Asian American Autobiographical Writing: An Unstraightforward Story

Asian American autobiographical writing about immigration—from the earliest available examples to the contemporary experiments with genre and form—does not tell a straightforward story. Rather, Asian American autobiographies trouble the sustaining myths of American exceptionalism, the American dream, meritocracy, and belonging and therefore challenge narratives of immigrant striving and success. Immigrant narratives examined in this essay by Maxine Hong Kingston, Jade Snow Wong, Kathleen Tamagawa, Carlos Bulosan, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kao Kaila Yang, and Shailja Patel, among others, show the contested and constructed quality of national borders. They show that the nation has always been constructed transnationally, through relationships with other countries and cultures and flows of migration that exceed straightforward definition. Examining narratives from various historical periods and cultural traditions brings into view the connections and contradictions among them and shows how each text intervenes in immigration discourse and exercises autobiographical agency. Rather than straightforward stories, then, Asian American autobiographical narratives illuminate the various entanglements of self-representation, family, identity, and agency with imperialism, racialization, nationalism, and global capitalism. Nor does autobiographical writing merely document experience or history. Instead, it actively constructs self, identity, and nation even as it draws on the culturally available narratives that enable and constrain the stories writers tell about their lives. As it does so, it creates new, unstraightfoward narratives and forms.

Existentialism in America

This chapter examines the transformation of postwar liberalism by identifying the development of an American idiom within the existential thought that became influential after the Second World War. I frame the concerns and historical development of American existentialism through the work of Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Saul Bellow, and Stanley Donen’s film Funny Face (starring Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire). Contrasts are drawn between Ellison and two other writers: Carlos Bulosan and Ann Petry. In addition, the chapter discuses Cold War containment politics, McCarthy era anxieties about communism, changes in perceptions of organized labor, Jim Crow laws, segregation, and cultural attitudes regarding the American welfare state and political action.

Filipino Primitive

This book takes Karl Marx’s concept of “primitive accumulation,” usually conceived of as an economic process for the acquisition of land and the extraction of labor, and argues that we also must understand it as a project of knowledge accumulation. The material collection and display of things associated with racially backward or so-called primitive peoples form the epistemological foundation of American knowledge production, which should more accurately be called knowledge acquisition or extraction. Nowhere can we appreciate so easily the intertwined nature of the triple forces of knowledge accumulation—capital, colonial, and racial—than in the imperial museum, where the objects of accumulation remain materially, visibly preserved. The Philippine exhibit in the American museum serves as an allegory and a “real” case of the primitive accumulation subtending imperial American knowledge just as the extraction of Filipino labor contributes to American capitalist colonialism. With this understanding of the Filipino foundations of the development of an American accumulative drive toward power/knowledge, this book then turns to Filipino American cultural producers like Carlos Bulosan, Ma-Yi Theater Company, and Stephanie Syjuco, who have created powerful parodies of an accumulative epistemology that has been naturalized in different sites and spaces (the museum, the art gallery, and the agribusiness farm) even as they also have proposed powerful alternative, anti-accumulative social ecologies.

The Work of Mothering

The Work of Mothering: Globalization and the Filipino Diaspora argues for a strict relationship between the world-historical situation of the Philippines under empire, nationalism, and globalization and the phenomenon of overseas domestic labor, drawing on the contours that inform the latter but arguing that it is part of a much larger framework of nurture, care, and service structuring the relationship between the postcolonial Philippines and the world. It analyzes maternal figures in novels by Carlos Bulosan, Jessica Hagedorn, and Brian Ascalon Roley; short stories by Nick Joaquin and Mia Alvar; poems by Luisa Igloria; and a film by Kidlat Tahimik. By developing incisive readings of subtle, passing moments in these texts, The Work of Mothering opens up narratives within which the cultural, political, and economic logics of overseas Filipina/o migration, especially but not only domestic labor, emerges. It does so by advancing an archipelagic reading practice that addresses diasporic literatures and cultures without reinscribing them either within nationalist or global paradigms. In doing so, it draws crucially on debates within the sociology of globalization and cultural studies, offering a critical and innovative vantage point that identifies alternative practices of the maternal, pushing up against the historical and political conditions that manage Filipina/o identity for nationalism and globalization.