Chronopoetics: Race, Time, and Narrative in Carlos Bulosan’s 'America Is in the Heart'

Abstract

The essay examines the politics and poetics of time—specifically, the relationship between race, time, and narrative in Carlos Bulosan’s semi-autobiographical work America Is in the Heart. Through a reading of this text, I pursue both a more generalized discussion of the relationship between time and narrative (in the writing of both fiction and history) and the more specific ways in which processes of racialization inflect or rearticulate that relationship. At issue here is the formal challenge, or problem, of representing difference. How does reflecting on temporality tell us something about the limits and possibilities of representational forms? How, for example, has an historical repertoire of temporal constructions of racial otherness (predicated on a discourse of )evolutionary hierarchies) come to bear formally or ideologically on developmental narratives of subject formation?