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American Imperialism and Sentimentalism
Cross-Cultural Studies
2019,
54(), pp.1-18
DOI : 10.21049/ccs.2019.54..1
Publisher : Center for Cross Culture Studies
Research Area : Literature
DOI : 10.21049/ccs.2019.54..1
Publisher : Center for Cross Culture Studies
Research Area : Literature
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This essay explores the way in which American imperial policy and its counter discourse appropriate the nineteenth century American sentimental literature. I consider Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and its reception in the colonial context of the Philippines. In doing so, my essay critiques imperialistic impulses embedded in the politics of racialized domesticity advanced by Stowe's text. This essay then queries Carols Bulosan's semi-autobiographical novel, America Is in the Heart, in order to trace the trajectory of the discourse of American imperial domesticity in the early twentieth-century Philippines and the United States. Looking closely at Bulosan's portrayal of the Filipino colonial subject's negotiation with the discourse of “benevolent assimilation,” I read his novel as a cultural space in which the imperative of the racialized domesticity is endorsed or questioned. This essay concludes that America Is in the Heart offers a serious critique of racist and classed assumption of the imperial domesticity.
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