The Text Of Subversion And Reconstruction--A Critical Analysis Of America Is In The Heart

For many Chinese scholars and teachers who are engaged in the English literature study and teaching, Carlos Bulosan is a totally new writer. As a Filipino American writer who enjoyed a high social fame in American literary field around 1940's, today Bulosan is still considered indisputably one of the most important Asian American writers in America. Many of his works have been classified into canons and compiled into the collections of Asian American literary works. America is in the Heart is the best-known work by Bulosan and has been hailed as one of the fifty most important American books ever published.However, despite the popularity of this book, most American critics and readers have valued America is in the Heart primarily as a personalized social document and a work of one more immigrant's faith in American ideal and they always emphasize the author's affirmative attitude of American system. Few people have perceived the subversive ideas that are going on beneath this literary text. Therefore, in this paper I will highlight an analysis of the power of subversion and reconstruction implied in this novel by applying the postcolonial cultural approach.hi America is in the Heart, Bulosan subverts the white America by revealing the discrepancy between the so-called American ideal of freedom and democracy and the sickening social truth of ruthless discrimination and persecution the Filipinos and other minority groups have suffered in America. Wherefore he puts forward a very prophetic yet bold vision of rebuilding a modern Utopia that is based on the cosmopolitanism and universal fraternity. Besides, in this book Bulosan also advocates a hybridized cultural identity that is rooted in the Philippine national culture meanwhile absorbs the advanced elements of American culture and othercultural forms.The world we are living in today is becoming more global and diverse. Confronting the challenge from the American hegemonic culture, more and more nations as well as individuals are facing the dilemma of cultural identification. So in certain sense, bulosan's exploration of rebuilding a modern utopia based on cosmopolitanism and a hybridized cultural identity has a very realistic and profound significance in our understanding and enhancing the development of the present world.