Filipino American Immigrants' Trauma Of Dispossession: On Carlos Bulosan's America Is In The Heart

Bulosan was a prolific Filipino writer and protective organizer of labor movement in America. He was best remembered for his famous novel, America is in the Heart, which depicted his harsh childhood in the Philippines and years of bitterness, starvation, discrimination and degradation as a criminal in America. This novel had been used in American Ethnic Studies to illustrate Filipino immigrants in the predicament to struggle for survival in America during the 1930s and 40s. He submitted many works to a number of well-known and influential magazines and journals in that time, including the Saturday Evening Post, New Yorker, Poetry and so on. He edited The New Tide, a bimonthly radical literary publication which brought Bulosan into wider contact with prominent Filipino writers in America. He was commissioned by President Franklin Roosevelt to write an essay "Freedom from Want" for his speech on "Four Freedoms". This essay and its illustration were honorably displayed in the exhibition room of the Federal Building in San Francisco. In order to improve wages and working conditions of Filipino laborers, he became an activist in the labor movement.Some of the critics in bit or pieces mentioned phenomenon of dispossession in America is in the Heart. However, they did not give a systematical and profound analysis on the issue of dispossession. They did not center upon the topic of dispossession but only scattered pieces of dispossession information fragmentally around their own specific themes and discussions. Furthermore, few had paid much attention to the long-term psychological impact of Filipino immigrants'experiences of dispossession.This dissertation mainly applies psychoanalytic theory and socio-historical contexts to offer a fresh analysis on America is in the Heart, presenting new insight about the representation of dispossession of trauma in this work and the significance of this study. The trauma of dispossession gave Bulosan a feeling of something uncanny similar to that of being castrated which attached to the fact of being dispossessed of land, of Philippine sovereignty, and of cultural heritage and identity. People's fixation of their past traumatic experiences will cause the consequent return of the repressed. Some of the repressed elements were irreducibly preserved in the unconscious. The constant recurrence of dispossession piled up Bulosan's repetitive trauma through the return of the repressed. Subject formation after recovery is a dynamic process that mainly involves with two aspects:the ethnic American Bildungsroman and reclamation of Americanness and Filipinoness. The study of trauma and recovery from trauma could help us have a better understanding of the difficult life and psychological trauma of ethnic minority immigrant in that special era.