Carlos Bulosan

Reviews "Norman Rockwell's Four Freedoms: Images that inspire a nation" by Stuart Murray and James McCabe (Berkshire House, 1993; Grammercy, 1998).  Nearly every Norman Rockwell coffee table book includes his famous "Four Freedoms" paintings. Most tell the basic story behind the works-how the artist was inspired by President Franklin Roosevelt's State of the Union speech of 1941, how he sought without success to find sponsorship by a government agency, and how the paintings were originally published in four issues of Saturday Evening Post magazine in 1943. This generously illustrated volume by Stuart Murray and James McCabe tells a much more complete-and much more fascinating-story.  The book also includes the four essays published with the four paintings when they appeared in the Saturday Evening Post magazine in 1943 -- by Booth Tarkington, Carlos Bulosan, Stephen Vincent Benet, and Will Durant -- and five more essays by John Frohnmayer, Theodore H. Evans, James MacGregor Burns, Brian Urquhart, and William J. vanden Heuvel.

Isang posibilidad ng bagong daigdig ang ihinahapag sa atin ng buhay at panulat ni Carlos Bulosan.  Pinatunayan niya na may buhay sa labas ng kinasanayan nating mundo.  Sa mundong iyon, walang pagsasamantala ng tao sa tao at ang fokus ng mga pagsisikap ay ang pagyabong ng bawat indibidwal tungo sa pagyabong ng lahat. 

Salungat ang bagong daigdig na iyon sa kasalukuyang lipunan natin na ang pangunahing konsern ay pagkakamal ng tubo, na ang buhay ay ginagabayan ng batas na matira ang matibay.  Sa daigdig na iyon, walang estadong tatagpas sa mga kamay ng lumilikha ng yaman; walang estadong bubusal sa mga bibig ng umaawit ng kalayaan.

Mahigit limampung taon nang namayapa si Carlos Bulosan at umaalingawngaw pa rin ang kanyang tinig.  Ang bisyon niya ng daigdig at panitikan ay palatandaang hindi natin maaaring isantabi sa pagnanais makaahon sa samutsaring trahedyang kinalulugmukan ng ating bansa.  Sa pagnanais nating makamit ang tunay na kasaganaan at kapayapaan.

Tinatalakay ng sanaysay kung bakit kailangang pakinggan natin si Carlos Bulosan;  kung bakit, ngayon higit kailanman, kailangan nating bumaling sa kanya.

This monograph attempts to clarify the relationships of Filipino Americans to the diaspora of Christian settler colonists in Mindanao with the hope of facilitating solidarity between Filipino Americans and the peoples of Mindanao and Sulu. It begins with a consideration of Carlos Bulosan, perhaps the most prominent figure within the discipline of Filipino American Studies, in terms of the brief appearance of Mindanao in America is in the Heart. The bulk of the monograph, however, is centered on literatures of the Southern Philippines, a region that is often overlooked within the discipline of Filipino American Studies, and in particular it examines the historical evolution of landlessness, displacement, and war in the Southern Philippines through the close reading of texts produced there. The first text is "Blue Blood of the Big Astana, " a story from the Commonwealth period of US-Philippine history, written by Ibrahim Jubaira, the most-recognized Muslim writer in English from the Philippines. Jubaira's story is notable for its depiction of the persistence of ideas concerning land tenure, status, and kinship from a time just prior to US colonial rule within a context determined by the increasing inroads of merchant capitalism fostered by the US colonial state. However, Jubaira's story is very partial when contextualized in terms of debates concerning the fate of Mindanao and Sulu during the years preceding the formal independence of the Philippines. The monograph then moves to the near-present to consider a story by the Maranao writer Loren Hallilah I. Lao, "The Trip to a Forbidden Land, " as a plea for peace that is constrained by the middle-class setting of the story. Finally, the emphasis shifts to a set of oral histories collected in the volume Land Tenure Stories in Central Mindanao. The shift to this set of texts corrects an urban and middle-class bias in the stories of Jubaira and Lao that would prevent Filipino American readers from understanding the concerns of Muslims and indigenous peoples and the causes of conflicts in the Southern Philippines. The stories of a specific conflict over land told by Muslims and Manobos in Land Tenure Stories highlight the importance of land as a necessary part of the livelihoods of many of the indigenous, Muslim, and Christian people of Mindanao and the ways in which landlessness and the lack of livelihoods are causes of conflicts in the Southern Philippines.

This essay examines the cultural and political terrain of US health intervention in the early twentieth-century Philippines. It focuses specifically on the relationship between colonial-economic refugeeism and physical illness in Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart. Unlike other scholarship on the novel, my study explores a transnational vision of care that informs Bulosan’s depiction and defense of Popular Front politics. I argue that the novel is structured by but also imagines radical alternatives to racialized clinical categories emerging from U.S. imperialism and immigration policy.

Carlos Bulosan, in a 1949 letter to Philippine labor leader Amado Hernandez, warned his friend and political ally that they must be guarded in their future correspondence. Referencing FBI surveillance of left-wing labor activists in the United States, Bulosan tells Hernandez, " I'm being watched too. " To cover their tracks they employed aliases in their communiqués, Carlos adopted the nom de guerre, " Julie " and addressed his letters to Hernandez using his middle name " Victor. " " Julie " was but one of many anonyms that Bulosan used in his political communications during the Cold War to circumvent the watchful eye of the FBI. ii The letters to Hernandez along with similar dispatches to Luis Taruc, leader of the Hukbalahap (Huk) peasant movement were eventually discovered by Philippine police after the arrest of Jesus Lava, a key figure in the Philippine Communist Party (PKP). This information alarmed American intelligence operatives who worked closely with the Philippine government to suppress left-wing political opposition in the newly independent nation. Consequently, federal authorities redoubled efforts to disrupt transnational ties linking Filipino partisans in the United States and the Philippines. American authorities believed that a worldwide communist conspiracy was at the root of political unrest in the former U.S. colony and that Filipino labor activists in the United States communicated with insurgents in the Philippines through an elaborate spy ring that linked left-wing cadres across the globe.

The sesquicentennial of the U.S. Constitution in 1937 celebrated the "Four Freedoms" (religion, speech, press, assembly) in the First Amendment.  President Franklin Roosevelt used a different list in his State of the Union Address of 1941 -- Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear.  The 1943 publication of the four famous paintings by Norman Rockwell in The Saturday Evening Post gave "the Four Freedoms" a strong public boost, and they became shorthand for the war aims of the Allies.  Essays by Booth Tarkington, Stephen Vincent Benet, Carlos Bulosan, and Will Durant were published with the paintings.  The Office of War Information used the paintings in domestic and international information campaigns.  Vasily Gatov wrote that during the Cold War the U.S. "'personality' was based around the concept of freedom" and the Four Freedoms were the "roots of this freedom narrative."

Embracing the Other: Addressing Xenophobia in the New English Literatures. Ed. Dunja M. Mohr, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008.
(341 pages)

In the wake of addressing multiculturalism, transculturalism, racism, and ethnicity, the issue of xenophobia and xenophilia has been somewhat marginalized. From a variety of angles, the present collection seeks to investigate the relations between Self and Other in the New Literatures in English. How do we register differences and what does an embrace signify for both Self and Other? The contributors deal with a variety of topics, ranging from theoretical reflections on xenophobia, its exploration in terms of intertextuality and New Zealand/Maori historiography, to analyses of migrant and border narratives, and issues of transitionality, authenticity, and racism in Canada and South Africa. Others negotiate identity and alterity in Nigerian, Malaysian, Australian, Indian, Canadian, and Caribbean texts, or reflect on diaspora and orientalism in Australian--Asian and West Indian contexts.


Contributors
Vera Alexander, David La Breche, Haike Frank, Martin Genetsch, Jörg Heinke, Sissy Helff, Susan N. Kiguli, Mary E. Modupe Kolawole, Natividad Martínez Marín, Danilo Victorino Manarpaac, Raihanah M. M., Mala Pandurang, Judith Dell Panny, Sandhya Patel, Jochen Petzold, Ginny Ratsoy, Dipli Saikia, Henning Schäfer, Edwin Thumboo, Virginia Richter, Laurenz Volkmann, Russell West--Pavlov

American liberalism after the Second World War turned against the legacies of the New Deal era. Rather than extending the reforms of the 1930s, many expressions of postwar liberal thought recast organizational politics as enfeebling, alienating, or tyrannical. Land of Tomorrow examines the ideas and cultural sensibilities that caused this radical shift in the tenor of American liberalism.

To account for these changes in American liberal sentiment, Benjamin Mangrum looks to some of the most influential writers, critics, and intellectuals of the postwar decades--including Ralph Ellison, Vladimir Nabokov, Lionel Trilling, Hannah Arendt, Flannery O'Connor, and Saul Bellow, as well as the American reception of Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, and many other European thinkers. By revising established accounts of this body of cultural work, Mangrum charts the legitimization of new political sensibilities within the nation's intellectual life. These sensibilities opposed a social democratic order and unleashed a new kind of liberalism, one which centered on ideas about authenticity, alienation, self-management, psychological templates for societal problems, and private judgments of value. This confluence of literary, intellectual, and political history gives us a window onto the basic assumptions and key conceptual terrain of liberal thought after 1945. Land of Tomorrow thus offers a provocative cultural prehistory of political thinking's forms that remain with us today.

Isang posibilidad ng bagong daigdig ang ihinahapag sa atin ng buhay at panulat ni Carlos Bulosan. Pinatunayan niya na may buhay sa labas ng kinasanayan nating mundo. Sa mundong iyon, walang pagsasamantala ng tao sa tao at ang fokus ng mga pagsisikap ay ang pagyabong ng bawat indibidwal tungo sa pagyabong ng lahat. Salungat ang bagong daigdig na iyon sa kasalukuyang lipunan natin na ang pangunahing konsern ay pagkamal ng tubo, na ang buhay ay ginagabayan ng batas na matira ang matibay. Sa daigdig na iyon, walang estadong tatagpas sa mga kamay ng lumilikha ng yaman; walang estadong bubusal sa mga bibig ng umaawit ng kalayaan. Mahigit limampung taon nang namayapa si Carlos Bulosan at umaalingawngaw pa rin ang kaniyang tinig. Ang bisyon niya ng daigdig at panitikan ay palatandaang hindi natin maaaring isantabi sa pagnanais makaahon sa samu't saring trahedyang kinalulugmukan ng ating bansa. Sa pagnanais nating makamit ang tunay na kasaganaan at kapayapaan.Tinatalakay ng sanaysay kung...