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Abstract

In his article "Ironic Appropriation of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls in Bulosan's The Cry and the Dedication" Robert Brown discusses Carlos Bulosan's The Cry and the Dedication and Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. Brown claims that Bulosan's appropriation of For Whom borders on plagiarism and that this in part defines The Cry as a postcolonial text. Brown maintains that E. San Juan Jr.'s otherwise comprehensive introduction to The Cry ignores Hemingway's text in favor of a Filipino author, Luis Taruc, with an implicit argument that Bulosan used Taruc to make his novel a more emphatic example of Filipino determinacy. San Juan negates his potential to describe Filipino determinacy in his negation of Hemingway and in so doing, San Juan echoes Bulosan's earlier dismissal of source materials in ironic ways, revealing a trans-historical habit of publicly diminishing an identity in the process of trying to reveal it in a positive light. Brown uses Homi Bhabha's "Of Mimicry and Man" to examine identity, postcolonialism, and geopolitics and details the ways in which all of Bulosan's appropriations — and mimicries — adds to The Cry's critical value.

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