Carlos Bulosan—Revolutionary Filipino Writer in the United States

Carlos Bulosan—Revolutionary Filipino Writer in the United States: A Critical Appraisal is an in-depth, critical evaluation of Bulosan's major works in the context of the sociopolitical changes that configured his sensibility during the Depression, the united-front mobilization prior to World War II, and the Cold War witch-hunting of the fifties. Unprecedented for its thorough historical-materialist analysis of the symbolic dynamics of the texts, this book uses original research into the Sanora Babb papers that have never before been linked to Bulosan. Sophisticated dialectical analysis of the complex contradictions in Bulosan’s life is combined with a politico-ethical reading of U.S.-Philippines relations. San Juan takes the unorthodox view that Bulosan’s career was not an immigrant success story but instead a subversive project of an organic intellectual of a colonized nation-in-the-making. Today, Bulosan is hailed as a revolutionary Filipino writer, unparalleled in the racialized, conflicted history of the Philippines as a colony/dependency of the United States. This book follows San Juan’s pioneering 1972 study Carlos Bulosan and the Imagination of the Class Struggle.

“E. San Juan is a scholar of remarkable range and varied talents remarkable for his commitment to literature and culture as vital areas of contemporary social life.”—FREDRIC JAMESON, Duke University, “E. San Juan is one of the world's most distinguished progressive critics. He is certainly the world's leading scholar and critic of Filipino literature and undoubtedly the leading authority on Filipino-American literary relations.”—BRUCE FRANKLIN, Rutgers University, “E. San Juan's intervention in the current debates on cultural studies is both necessary and significant. We can all learn valuable lessons from the Philippine experience.”—NGUGI WA THIONG’O, Kenyan novelist, “E. San Juan is one of the sharpest and most clarifying voices vis-a-vis Filipino/US and Filipino/world relationships extant. He is an internationalist and political analyst of high morale. It's about time his incisive theoretical summations are given broader access to strengthen the growing understanding of the multicultural united front of progressive thinkers around the world.”—AMIRI BARAKA, “E. San Juan is arguably one of the most important intellectuals of our times. There are few scholars today who are able to capture with such rigor and verve the historically heterogeneous and discontinuous relations of exploitation, domination and conflict constitutive of today's social existence in the global arena of neoliberal capitalism and the system of wage labor. Part of San Juan's remarkable contribution to our understanding of contemporary social life is his profound grasp of critical social theory and his employment of historical materialist critique to reveal both the limitations and folly of much of what passes today as postmodern and postcolonial studies. San Juan has been hailed as a vital public intellectual by Amiri Baraka, Michael Denning, Bertell Ollman, Bruce Franklin, Alan Wald, Fredric Jameson, and other prestigious scholars.”—PETER MCLAREN, UCLA

An internationally renowned cultural critic, E. San Juan, Jr., is a professorial lecturer at the Polytechnic University of the Philippines. He was a fellow of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute, Harvard University, and a Fulbright professor at Leuven University and the University of the Philippines. He authored Racism and Cultural Studies, Beyond Postcolonial Theory and U.S. Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines. He is a recipient of awards from MELUS; the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Edinburgh University; the Asian American Studies Association; the Center for the Humanities, Wesleyan University; the Rockefeller Foundation (Bellagio, Italy); the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas; and the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Issue 26 of the e-journal KritikaKultura devotes a section to commentaries on San Juan’s creative and scholarly achievement.