Finished Projects!

2. Finished Projects! • First: Congrats! • Second: If you could go back and do one thing differently (process-wise) what would it be? What are the big “take-aways” from this experience?

3. Finals • Send me an electronic copy tonight!

4. Continuing the “family narrative” • Simpson’s analysis of Citizen 13660 and the Life article on Tule Lake gives us other examples of how domesticity was utilized in a variety of political narratives. “The combined erosion of gender differences and of paternal, heteronormative hierarchies is repeatedly invoked… the absence of heteronormative family arrangements in particular seems to be a source of anxiety and resignation, the ultimate sign of the loss of democratic recognition” (Simpson 30). “…the story of the instability of national identification is repeatedly comprehended as the forced breakup of the Japanese American family” (30). “…the [Life] article represents the ascension to middle class domesticity as the hope for a future for Japanese Americans, because through such domesticity they agreed to transcend the rigid, ethnic past…” (33).

5. Continuing the family narrative • New family narratives • Taro and Ichiro • Kenji and his father • Emi and her husband • How do these examples make use of a logic of domesticity to narrate issues of citizenship and national belonging? • How do these examples challenge or otherwise run against the uses of family outlined by Simpson’s argument?

6. No-No Boy as “Counter Site” “It is through the terrain of national culture that the individual subject is politically formed as the American citizen… It is by passing by way of this terrain of culture that the subject is immersed in the repertoire of American memories, events, narratives and comes to articulate itself in the domain of language, social hierarchy, law, and ultimately political representation. In being represented as citizen within the political sphere, however, the subject is ‘split off’ from the unrepresentable histories of situated embodiment that contradict the abstract form of citizenship” (Lowe 2). • Lowe is interested in “Asian American cultural productions as countersites to U.S. memory and national culture” (2). • In what ways is No-No Boy a “counter-narrative” to national memory and culture in the post-war era? What forms of “splitting off” does it bring to the forefront? What kinds of “forgotten” histories does it narrate and to what end?

7. Example: Citizenship and Family • Last Monday, we discussed how the novel stages various examples of family breakup notto illustrate the problems of exclusion (as Simpson’s examples do) but to represent the forms of psychic “splitting” that accompany citizenship for the Japanese American. • Serves as a “counter” to the narratives which figure the nuclear family as the unmarked norm of U.S. citizenship and the index of its health. • The immigrant narrative itself, full of first generation figures that have always planned to return to Japan, is itself not “representable” within the nationalist scripting of the immigrant experience of “freedom.”

8. Cold War “Racial Formation” • “And Kenji thought about these things and tried to organize them in his mind so that the pattern could be seen and studies and the answers deduced therefrom. And there was no answer because there was no pattern…” • Race is (dis)organized by multiple conflicting “uses” and sites…

9. Cold War “Racial Formation” • Cold War Nationalism • Growing a new American exceptionalism (exceptionalism is a way of “reading” history) • Created a need to narrate the U.S. as the exemplar of freedom and equality, new narratives of racial “progress” • Simpson’s argument is about how dominant (anti)racial and nationalist discourses sought to (and failed to) “contain” the story of internment. • “These obstacles, like the Japanese American body whose manifest history of trauma is constantly effaced but remains as a “faint” presence anyway, finally overwhelm the possibility of narrative closure, which, in turn, inverts the liberal assumption of historical developmentalism on which American exceptionalism occurs” (36).