Identity Reconstruction In Japanese American Mobility Narratives

Mobility has been a key element for the collective life of Japanese Americans since Japanese immigrated to America.Japanese Americans as an ethnic group in the United Stated roughly went through three periods of mobility with unique ethnic color: the collectively forced evacuation and relocation in internment camps during World War II,travel around the inland to seek opportunities to re-root in the resettlement period as migrant workers,and transnational mobility in the era of globalization after the rise of Japanese economy.Mobility,to Japanese Americans,is out of necessity because of their ethnic backgrounds that incur exclusion and oppression.Hence,the mobile subjects are often consumed by negative affects which reflect their survival and identity predicaments.Using cultural politics of negative affect,this dissertation will discuss three negative affects experienced by these mobile subjects in three different periods.Negative affects here are read as loaded with positive dynamics for their diagnostic power,agency of animating subjectivity,and making social resistance and reparation.Thus,in this dissertation three chapters are dedicated to examining respectively mobility narratives about Japanese mobile subjects during World War II,in the resettlement years,and in the era of globalization.In each chapter,the social structure that shapes these affects,and how these affects drive the mobile subjects to subvert hegemony and reconstruct their identities will be delved into successively.In chapter one,the shame of mobile Nisei who are excluded from national framework around World War II is explored,and the work chosen to analyze is Nisei Daughter.After Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor,being labeled as enemy aliens,evacuated and interned intensify their racial shame which already overwhelmed them before the war when they were stigmatized as perpetual aliens and excluded systemically from the mainstream society that was dominated by Americanization and Orientalist discourse.Shame pushes Nisei to Americanize themselves zealously and temper the autobiography's indictment of racism.Yet in driving crazily to Americanization,mobility narrative discussed here obeys the Americanization narrative so faithfully that it exposes the unfair treatments they suffered from.Thus,Japanese American racial shame is transformed into American national shame.In chapter two,fear of the traumatized Sansei families who are excluded from homes in the resettlement period is examined,and the work chosen to analyze is The Floating World.The traumatic past of being interned intruding the present of homelessness caused by occupational racism makes the migrant subjects in the 1950 s and 1960 s fearful.Fear drives them to settle down.The rise of white bourgeois suburban households intensifies their urge to re-root.Yet in identifying with the white,the middle-class household that the dispersed mobile subjects in the Jim Crow South make looks uncanny when the male,female,family and ethnic community are all riddled with problems.Fear drives the Sansei to run away from the white middle-class household and identification.By being homeless,the Sansei reclaims the autonomy of her female body and transforms her ethnic trauma into ethnic empowerment.In embracing the ethnic heritage,the Sansei gains her sense of home and rebuilds her hybrid identity.In chapter three,disgust felt by the new generation of mobile subjects in transnational corporations is discussed,and the work chosen to analyze is My Year of Meats.The capital,cultural and political exchanges between American and Japan generate a new generation of transnational mobile subjects.These mobile subjects are capitalized on for their economic values by transnational institutions on the one hand,yet they,together with other minoritized subjects are regarded as disgusting things by transnational institutions and their agents that internalize American hegemonic ideology which is intensified by Japan's desire for American modernity.Disgust circulates from the powerful to the mobile subjects who,driven by disgust,use the attraction and reparativity of disgusting things to allure the privileged to restore humanity,and take advantage of the openness to the disgusting people of the disgusted to erode the hegemonic order and make becoming-minorities possible.In subverting various hegemonies,the Japanese Americans become cosmopolitans and contribute to minor transnational alliance.All in all,Japanese American mobility in three different periods records their sociopolitical and economical immobility as an ethnic group.However,vertically,the space they can inhabit grows bigger,the intentionality of their negative affects expands gradually,the agency activated by negative affects to subvert hegemony grows stronger and the identity they can choose becomes more various.From the wartime dominated by Americanization when the ethnic cultural identity is misread as national identity,to resettlement periods when traumatic ethnic history constitutes a burden too fearful to shoulder,to the globalized era prevailed over by neoliberalism and multiculturalism when ethnic cultural identity is exploited by transnational capital,Japanese American mobile subjects' identity dilemmas in three different mobility periods epitomize three levels of identity predicament faced by Asian Americans,and are affected by AmericaJapan geopolitics and global capital economics.Driven by negative affects,from disavowing ethnic self and claiming readily American national identity,to embracing the tragic ethnic cultural heritage to reshape ethnic cultural identity and homebuilding,to reconstructing a cosmopolitan identity,Japanese American mobile subjects are not only indicting the injustice they suffered,but also calling upon cohabitation and ethical linkages with others.