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

9 See especially Rachel Lee's discussion of America. More thoroughly than critics have done heretofore, Lee's feminist intervention within scholarship on America elucidates the ways that the text naturalizes female subordination in the process of imagining revolutionary communities.

10 Michael Denning makes a similar argument but does not explore its implications for the configuration of female subjectivity in America: "The alliance of brothers provokes a profound ambivalence: if it marks the narrative's moments of Utopian solidarity, it is haunted by sexual aggression and anxiety" (275).

11 In addition to San Juan's numerous writings on Bulosan, see Slotkin, "Igorots and Indians: Racial Hierarchies and Conceptions of the Savage in Carlos Bulosan's Fiction of the Philippines" and Campomanes, "Two Letters from America: Carlos Bulosan and the Act of Writing." As Campomanes shows, a fuller reading of the first section of America entails looking beyond the book itself and attending to the wide range of Bulosan's work, which gets overlooked as a result of America's canonical status within Asian American letters. Timothy Libretti's dissertation chapter on The Power of the People, Bulosan's novel on the Huk rebellion, is another important example of scholarship that examines the centrality of Filipino history and culture to Bulosan's revolutionary imagination.

12 Between 1906 and 1934 the already disproportionate number of Filipino men to Filipino women in Hawaii grew increasingly lopsided; the Third Wave of Filipino immigration (1930-34) comprised 13,488 men and 610 women (Cordova 29). According to Carey McWilliams, "from 1920 to 1930, some 1395 Filipino males entered California for every 100 Filipino females, giving an excess male population of 39,328" (Brothers 236).

"Pinoy" and "Pinay" are colloquial Tagalog terms for Filipino men and women, respectively.

11 That said, I understand Lee's caution against conflating a transnational framework with feminist analysis. For example, drawing on Julia Kristeva's notion of "woman's time," San Juan has commented upon what he sees as America's most original feature: its juxtaposition of realism with "[c]omedy and the flows/flights of the unconscious" (145), a feature that redefines "the earth, the soil, and the maternal psyche/habitus as the ground of meaning and identity" (144). While I would agree with San Juan's theorization of the narrator's motivation and its influence on the formal properties of the text, he ignores the traces of the material conditions of women's work that the narrative renders. For a critique of Bulosan's simultaneously maternalized and sexualized envisioning of the earth, see Wong 120 and 132.

14 Cordova periodizes the First Wave of Filipino emigrants to Hawaii as lasting from 1906-19 (29). Allos tells us that he "must have been live years old" when Leon comes home, and it we assume that this is somewhat autobiographical, Leon's return would date around 1918, which makes sense given that he is returning from World War I. Elizabeth Uy Eviota asserts that "[b]y 1932, there were 125,000 Filipinos employed in Hawaii, most of them Ilocanos and most of them men" (72).