# Week 2

## Lecture 1 (10/07)

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