英文摘要 |
This article considers the articulation of a pioneer identity in the Japanese American internment narrative as part of an eco-critical practice amid the genre’s antiracist and decolonization efforts. It first probes into the underpinning of the internees’ pioneer identity through their claim to an Asian American agricultural citizenship, thereby delineating an understudied Asian American frontier history that recounts Japanese Americans’ representation as colonial farmers who destabilize the racial norms and hierarchy of the twentieth-century US setter state. Specifically, this article approaches Cynthia Kadohata’s 2006 novel Weedflower as an exemplary interracial narrative, which highlights the tension and juxtaposition between the history of Japanese internment and that of Indian Removal. Thus, rather than merely a location of confinement, the internment houses become a site for the official-national mobilization of agricultural force for the purpose of renovating the desert land and creating a diverse society out of the colonial frontiers. In this way, the work of Japanese internees idealizes the myth of “democracy” at the cadre of US settler colonialism that seeks to translate minority capital into political capital. Furthermore, this article draws upon several US settler colonialism critics, including Candace Fujikane, Iyko Day, and Jodi Byrd to rethink the formation of Japanese subjects as the historical embodiment of “settlers of color” who engaged in colonial plantation economy and triangulate the relationships among the white master, Asian alien, and Native people. It complicates Weedflower as any easy national allegory aiming for economically including yet politically excluding ethnic minority into US national body. Ultimately, the novel’s representation of Japanese internees’ propensity to agrarian work problematizes the idea of their inclusion, and their identification with the land enables a cultural as well as economic shaping of their subjectivity, which transforms them into indigenized citizens and anticipates an environmentalist shaping of Japanese-Indigenous connectivity, further opening up the space for cross-racial dialogues and anti-colonial solidarities between Japanese Americans and American Indians in global contexts of American national remaking. |