This chapter approaches Carlos Bulosan’s oeuvre, and specifically America Is in the Heart, through the framework of postcolonial ecocriticism. It provides an overview of Bulosan’s life, works, and critical reception. Additionally, the chapter presents the history of US empire as a crucial context shaping Bulosan’s writing. It argues that Bulosan’s environmental imaginary is central to his political critique and identifies the postcolonial pastoral, described by Rob Nixon as a form of “environmental double-consciousness,” as central to Bulosan’s depiction of the Philippines in America Is in the Heart. This environmental double-consciousness emerges in America Is in the Heart not only in depictions of the ongoing consequences of dispossession and colonialism in the Philippines, but also in representations of US landscapes as themselves haunted by the USA’s colonial investment in the Philippines.

The landmark texts of Asian American literature from the mid-twentieth century have often been classified as realist. Presenting “real-life” depictions of Japanese American incarceration during World War II and the immigrant experience, for instance, Asian American writing of the time is known for its referentiality to historical events. Recently, however, literary critics have sought to redefine the genre of realism, which has also led to a reconsideration of how canonical Asian American literature represented the deeper structure of Asian American life from 1930 to 1965. This chapter traces how Asian American literary critics have offered a more theoretically complex approach to realism in order to help draw out richer understandings of the way Asian American literature has articulated Asian American social experience. In addition, this entry provides brief readings of classic Asian American texts, notably John Okada’s No-No Boy and Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart, through a realist frame.

This chapter examines twentieth and twenty-first century US farmworker literature. It argues that US farmworker literature distinguishes itself from the Jeffersonian agrarianism dominant in literary and cultural representations of US farmers by not only exposing the systems of power and privilege through which farmworkers are exploited, but also positioning farmworkers as key conveyors of environmental knowledge. And it shows how farmworker epistemologies in US literature and culture offer a critical vantage point on both the industrial food system and the larger systems of colonialism, capitalism, and racism upon which the industrial food system relies. The chapter considers Sanora Babb’s Whose Names Are Unknown (1939), Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart (1946), and Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) as examples of farmworker literature that both address the conditions of exploitation facing farm laborers in the industrial food system, including economic and environmental violence, and foreground farmworkers’ environmental knowledge.