ABSTRACT
The dialectical perspective explains the irrepressible centrality of Carlos Bulosan's oeuvre in the shaping of an emergent pan-Filipino literary tradition affiliating the United States (US) scene of writing. In effect, writing becomes for the Filipino diaspora the transitional agency of self-recovery. Reinscribed into the context of differential power relations, the Filipino imagination thus acquires its fated vocation of disrupting the economy of "humanist" incorporation by transgressing willy-nilly the boundaries of interdicted times and tabooed spaces. Despite the Philippines' formal independence, the texts of the Filipino interrogation of US hegemony remain virtually unread and therefore unappreciated for their "fertilizing" critical force. Elaine Kim might be chiefly responsible for the defusion of Bulosan's insurrectionary aesthetics by ignoring the vicious subjugation of the Filipino masses. In 1946, 6,000 Filipino workers were imported to Hawaii to counter the industrywide strike—proof once more that the Philippines is an "inside" factor in the US imperial polity.
