RE-SIGNED SUBJECTS: WOMEN, WORK, AND WORLD IN THE FICTION OF CARLOS BULOSAN AND HISAYE YAMAMOTO

Bulosan's conflicted representations of female subjectivity result in double-voiced narratives of women's lives that are frequently at odds with each other. On one hand, we have one-dimensional figures who conform to the whore/virgin dichotomy. This reiteration of patriarchal stereotypes is symptomatic of the text's anxieties around female sexuality, anxieties due in large part to the sexualization of anti-Filipino discourses (in which Pinoys prey upon white women). We can read Bulosan as addressing such racist conceptions by employing a poetics of silence to represent the "problem" of sexuality. For example, the material realities of prostitution are absent from the text as a result of the fear and disgust Allos exhibits toward women's sexuality. Thus, even as Allos's repudiation of sex challenges racist stereotypes, it leaves the patriarchal component of these stereotypes intact: women are no longer virginal prey but whorish predators; either way, they are not political subjects as men are.

Nonetheless, it is also through this poetics of silence that Bulosan breaks out of the whore/virgin binary by recentering Asian women within Asian America and representing the empowerment of the first-world female intellectual. The story "Homecoming" thematizes silence in order to name prostitution as a form of women's exploitation. At the same time, Bulosan's recognition of the prostitute as laboring subject is also misrecognition, since sexual subordination is simply equated with economic exploitation. Within America itself, strong female characters emerge from and repudiate the caricatures of womanhood that populate the narrative. Meteria and Alice Odell, for example, are not simply saintly mothers but also historical agents for whom experiences of oppression have dialectically engendered modes of resistance-Meteria's trading business, Alice's writing. Consequently, they lay the foundations for Allos's politicization not as hyper-feminized caregivers/nurturers/teachers but as women who contest the ideologies of imperialism and patriarchy in their daily lives.

IV. IN ARTICULATION: YAMAMOTO AND BULOSAN

Although Yamamoto and Bulosan would seem to be more different than similar in their aesthetics and political visions, both writers interrogate the opposition between readerly and writerly texts. Yamamoto's open-ended, polyvocal work enacts a critique of patriarchy and capitalism, while Bulosan's social realism is ridden with historically conditioned contradictions around sexual equality that disrupt the closed and authoritarian narrative of brotherhood. In both Yamamoto's and Bulosan's fiction we find the poetics of articulate silence that represents the gendered and racialized subjects of imperialism. The silences of "marginal" characters such as Yamamoto's Pinoy fieldhand and Bulosan's third-world women are central to these textual engagements with mutually constitutive systems of racial, sexual, and economic oppression. Furthermore, in linking the cultural and political interests of Asian and working-class America and in demanding that the U.S. institute at home the democracy for which it waged war abroad, Yamamoto and Bulosan helped to extend the relevance of Popular Front multiculturalism beyond the thirties. Because these authors advocate inter-ethnic and interracial forms of solidarity in their fiction, demanding more than formal equality to include the redistribution of resources, their works presage what has been called "radical multiculturalism" today.