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2 results

  • Chapter 18 - A Little Bit of Form Goes a Long Way

  • from Part II - Transitions Approached through Authors, Texts, Concepts, and History
  • Edited by Victor Bascara, University of California, Los Angeles, Josephine Nock-Hee Park, University of Pennsylvania
  • Book:
    Asian American Literature in Transition, 1930–1965
    Published online:
    27 May 2021
    Print publication:
    17 June 2021, pp 314-331

  • Summary

    This chapter contributes to the new scholarship on Asian American literary form by considering the novel No-No Boy by John Okada, a foundational text for Asian American literature. A mixed critical reception has resulted from the novel’s vexed relationship to form. Early reviewers rejected it as aesthetically flawed, its original audience ignored it, and, despite its canonical status today, its formal activity has yet to receive sustained scholarly attention. Arguing that this trend may have something to do with the type of form exhibited in the novel – one that is both minimal and unfamiliar – the chapter identifies one such example, designating it as a “formal situation” in which a Japanese American male character is interrupted in the act of speaking for himself. By tracking this “formal situation” in three crucial places in the novel – the internment camp, the colony, the reservation – the chapter demonstrates how the work of literary form, even one that appears barely discernible, can reveal a larger critique of American empire articulating itself as an act of speaking for oneself.

  • 17 - Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and the Impact of Theory

  • from Part IV - Canons
  • Edited by Rajini Srikanth, University of Massachusetts, Boston, Min Hyoung Song, Boston College, Massachusetts
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of Asian American Literature
    Published online:
    05 December 2015
    Print publication:
    01 December 2015, pp 306-323

  • Summary

    There is a rich history of incarceration literature produced by Niseis (second-generation, American-born), some of which appeared very shortly after the end of the war. This chapter focuses on selected representative texts written by Niseis, and published up through the 1970s. This body of work represents varied and deeply felt responses that are often coded critiques of the Japanese American incarceration. Three of the most foundational texts about the incarceration appeared within eight years of its official end: Miné Okubo's Citizen 13660, Hisaye Yamamoto's The Legend of Miss Sasagawara, and Monica Sone's Nisei Daughter. Notable in all three texts is an overt description or narrative of camp life and a covert critique of the racism and failure of an espoused U.S. democracy. As a dissenting text, John Okada's No-No Boy was direct in its depiction of the cost wrought by the war, incarceration, and reductive, racist notions of citizenship.