59 lines
3.3 KiB
Markdown
59 lines
3.3 KiB
Markdown
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# Week 2
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## Lecture 1 (10/07)
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- America is in the Heart -> What is the life that Bulosan is living as he's
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producing the book?
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- 1950s/1960s -> series of radical changes (CRM, Brown v. Board, CRA, Voting
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Rights Act, Immigration and Nationality Act)
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- Asians from Assimilation -> Model Minority
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- Compliance, emasculated -> in contrast to "loudness" of African Americans /
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Latinos (in fighting for civil rights) -> Model way to be minority is to be
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silent
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- Supposed _cultural_ traits -> better at math, stronger family structures
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- Asian American literary response -> "claiming America for Asian Americas"
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- Community -> desire to remain "others" but by defining our own "otherness" ->
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resistance to domination
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- History of Asian America is also a history of how race works in United States
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-> there is a particular history of race in America which is understood by
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looking at the Asian American history, cannot be understood solely by looking
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at history of other groups
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- Liminal Asian America -> simultaneously included and excluded
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- AA living between America and "origins" -> transnational to achieve something
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that is quintessentially American
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- How are our writers expressing the notion of being included and excluded
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- Bulosan is telling his own story from the POV of an older, wiser person
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- Using Spanish words -> showing people that they have a whole separate POV,
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distinct group of people
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- Bulosan's aesthetic eyes fall on the natural land -> repeatedly talks about
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how beautiful his home was -> his way of explaining ("translating") life in
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Phillipines -> a certain "transcendence to nature" -> same in one place to
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another
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- Once Bulosan leaves America, never comes back -> act of writing is nostalgic
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- 1899-1902: American-Phillipine War -> 1907-1924 approx. 52,000 Filipinos
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immigrate to US -> 1946 Phillipines gains independences -> Bulosan arrives in
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between
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- Context between Bulosan's arrival in 1930 and publication of book in 1946:
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The Great Gatsby -> Emblematic of Roaring Twenties; not a huge hit immediately
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-> Fitzgerald explores the life of striving outsider -> critique of American
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promise (upwards mobility, second chances)
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- Context 2: The Good Earth -> American born Pearl S. Buck, daughter of
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Chinese, grew up in China, Wrote her most famous novel about inhabitants of a
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Chinese village. Shaped ways in which Americans viewed Chinese in America
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- Greatest connection: Grapes of Wrath
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- First few pages of Bulosan -> Nature, Bulosan's location, translating
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Filipino reality for Western audience, split between young and older/wiser
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Bulosan
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- What is Bulosan doing besides just talking about nature? Why is he
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concentrating on it? -> in conversation with specific type of literary style ->
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the "pastoral"
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- The pastoral is a literary tradition -> traditionally, poems about shepherds
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-> beauty of life, waking up early, farming, etc -> idealized lives of the poor
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-> tension between cultivated author and low born subjects -> Bulosan
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deconstructs pastoral through realism
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- Social Realism -> unvarnished and unfiltered economic racial injustice ->
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working class figure as hero -> scrutinizing ills of society -> reality without
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illusion -> one problem: emphasis on collective vs. individual
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- Do for Filipinos in America what Lange tried to do for working class -> book
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as work of pastoral social realism
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