ABSTRACT
The internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War neutralized the “enemy” abroad by controlling them at home. The rhetoric of Second World War exclusion characterized “Japanese” in opposition to “American” along “racial strains,” forcing polarized notions of identity onto the minority Japanese Americans in dividing loyal from disloyal, alien from citizen.
In this chapter, I analyze John Okada’s No No Boy (1957), a novel about the residual effects of Japanese internment in the United States after the Second World War, and Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981), a novel about retrospective recollections of the Japanese evacuation in Canada. These works complicate any unified representation of the Japanese American internment experience. The contradictions within and between each artistic narrative encourage readers to define their own meanings or closures, positioning Japanese Americans not as a unitary alien body inassimilable to the nation, but as citizens with whom to engage and understand.
The lack of resolution in the internment texts I analyze suggests that the project of narrating Japanese Americans from national exclusion to inclusion recurs in a discursive process.
The experience of internment symbolizes the continued shuttling between national exclusion and inclusion that influences the formation of Japanese American identity.
