Sketches of Filipino Life Under U.S. Occupation "The Laughter of My Father" by Carlos Bulosan, First Edition 1944

Carlos Bulosan

First Edition

[Asian American][Filipino][Literature] Carlos Bulosan’s The Laughter of My Father (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1944) stands as a defining work of Filipino American literature and an essential text for understanding Asian American identity under U.S. imperialism. Offering a series of interlinked vignettes centered on Bulosan’s family in rural Luzon, the work presents intimate, often humorous portraits that illuminate the contradictions of Filipino life shaped by American colonial rule. These stories, many of which first appeared in The New Yorker, articulate a diasporic Filipino voice grounded in working class experience, anti colonial critique, and the persistence of cultural identity. Bulosan’s treatment of his father’s legal entanglements, political misadventures, and encounters with colonial authority reveals humor as a mode of resistance, one that coexists with the structural violence of land dispossession, the legacy of the Decena Trágica, and the broader disruptions of war and occupation.

First edition, 1944, issued in the publisher’s original binding and retaining the original illustrated dust jacket with wraparound village scene depicting life in the Philippines. The text is comprised of episodic narratives that together form a cohesive portrait of family, authority, and survival under colonial modernity. As Bulosan’s second book and the work that solidified his national reputation, The Laughter of My Father occupies a central place in mid twentieth century Asian American literary production, particularly for its role in bringing Filipino American perspectives into mainstream American periodical and publishing spaces during the wartime era.

Dust jacket is price clipped with minor chipping at the spine ends and some darkening to the covers; volume remains well preserved; overall very good in very good dust jacket. A cornerstone of Asian American literature and an increasingly scarce wartime first edition, of particular importance to institutional collections focused on Filipino American history, diaspora studies, labor and migration, and literature of U.S. empire.

Item #22703

Price: $380.00

Status: On Hold