“Carlos Bulosan, Socialist?” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 9.1 (2023): 64–69.
Abstract Carlos Bulosan (1914–56)—Filipino American, journalist, poet, migrant worker. But also, socialist? Some have insisted that Bulosan is “a proletarian novelist of a decidedly Marxist cast.” Yet the post-1970s recovery of his writings in the United States has tended to reduce his literary radicalism into an expression of a specifically ethnic, rather than an international, Filipino American consciousness. Focusing on America Is in the Heart and The Cry and the Dedication, this essay argues that the retroactive categorization of Bulosan as a “Filipino American” writer has obscured how his long prose works, when read in concert, project an internationalist horizon of Asian socialist futurity.
︎Download: “Carlos Bulosan, Socialist” is available as part of the Verge dossier on “Left Internationalisms in Nationalist Times,”︎ [PDF] edited by Andrew Way Leong and Darwin H. Tsen.