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Interiorized Imperialism in Native American and Japanese American World War II Narratives

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Mobility, Spatiality, and Resistance in Literary and Political Discourse

Part of the book series: Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies ((GSLS))

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Abstract

N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1966) and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977) feature protagonists who have recently returned to the reservation after serving in the U.S. military during World War II. Their experiences strikingly align with those of the internee-turned-veteran characters in two influential narratives authored by Japanese Americans: Jeanne Wakatsuki’s memoir Farewell to Manzanar (1973) and John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957). This chapter explores the construction of spaces of interiorized imperialism and their transformative effects upon the postwar identities of Japanese Americans and Native Americans. An analysis of these texts invites a consideration of comparative multicultural American literature as a genre that can transcend the constructed and divisive boundaries of ethnic grouping to facilitate a more holistic understanding of often-overlooked moments in America’s imperialist history.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Jennifer James, A Freedom Bought with Blood: African American War Literature from the Civil War to World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 2.

  2. 2.

    Sabine Sielke, “Multiculturalism in the United States and Canada,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative North American Literature, ed. Reingard Nischik (London: Palgrave, 2014), 51.

  3. 3.

    In Space and Place (1977), Yu-Fi Tuan distinguishes between the two concepts by asserting that “‘space’ is more abstract than ‘place.’ What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.” Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), 6. Later, he insists that “enclosed and humanized space is place.” Tuan, Space and Place, 54. I interpret the internment camps and reservations as Tuanian “places” because they are indeed endowed with value—with the value of community by the Japanese Americans and Native Americans who lived there, and with the value of a subordinate colony by the American government who used the space as an outpost of interiorized imperialism. Furthermore, these places are “enclosed” both literally and metaphorically, as I discuss later in my analysis of their confined nature.

  4. 4.

    Tony Lack, “An Interview with Yu Fi Tuan, Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin-Madison,” Interdisciplinary Humanities 32, no. 3(2015): 8.

  5. 5.

    Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 305.

  6. 6.

    Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 188.

  7. 7.

    Silko, Ceremony, 74.

  8. 8.

    Silko, Ceremony, 187.

  9. 9.

    Silko, Ceremony, 188–189.

  10. 10.

    Silko, Ceremony, 126.

  11. 11.

    Sharon Holm, “The ‘Lie’ of the Land: Native Sovereignty, Indian Literary Nationalism, and Early Indigenism in Silko’s Ceremony,” American Indian Quarterly 32, no. 3(2008): 258.

  12. 12.

    Michelle Satterlee, “Landscape Imagery and Memory in the Narrative of Trauma: A Closer Look at Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 13, no. 2(2006): 74.

  13. 13.

    Silko, Ceremony, 51.

  14. 14.

    Silko, Ceremony, 51.

  15. 15.

    Silko, Ceremony, 102.

  16. 16.

    Silko, Ceremony, 127.

  17. 17.

    Silko, Ceremony, 204.

  18. 18.

    Holm, “The ‘Lie’ of the Land,” 243.

  19. 19.

    Silko, Ceremony, 43.

  20. 20.

    Silko, Ceremony, 165.

  21. 21.

    Silko, Ceremony, 29.

  22. 22.

    M. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2010), 8.

  23. 23.

    Silko, Ceremony, 43.

  24. 24.

    Silko, Ceremony, 253.

  25. 25.

    Christopher Douglas, “The Flawed Design: American Imperialism in N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian,” Critique 45, no. 1(2003): 4.

  26. 26.

    Guillermo Bartelt, “Hegemonic Registers in Momaday’s House Made of Dawn,” Style 39, no. 4(Winter 2005): 473.

  27. 27.

    “hand, n,” OED Online, accessed November 12, 2020, https://www.oed.com

  28. 28.

    Momaday, House Made of Dawn, 73.

  29. 29.

    Momaday, House Made of Dawn, 73.

  30. 30.

    Momaday, House Made of Dawn, 74.

  31. 31.

    Momaday, House Made of Dawn, 153.

  32. 32.

    Momaday, House Made of Dawn, 153.

  33. 33.

    Momaday, House Made of Dawn, 161.

  34. 34.

    Momaday, House Made of Dawn, 113.

  35. 35.

    Momaday, House Made of Dawn, 11.

  36. 36.

    Momaday, House Made of Dawn, 92.

  37. 37.

    Peter Beidler, “Bloody Mud, Rifle Butts, and Barbed Wire: Transforming the Bataan Death March in Silko’s Ceremony,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 28, no. 1(2004): 23–33.

  38. 38.

    Silko, Ceremony, 7.

  39. 39.

    Silko, Ceremony, 7.

  40. 40.

    Silko, Ceremony, 43.

  41. 41.

    Silko, Ceremony, 124.

  42. 42.

    Silko, Ceremony, 115.

  43. 43.

    Joe Kolb, “Gallup Stood Firm Against US Government in 1942,” Gallup Independent, February 1, 2003.

  44. 44.

    Ron Warnick, “Gallup bucked the system during World War II,” Route 66 News, May 9, 2014.

  45. 45.

    Silko, Ceremony, 18.

  46. 46.

    Silko, Ceremony, 18.

  47. 47.

    Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, Farewell to Manzanar (New York: Random House, 2007), 206.

  48. 48.

    Wakatsuki Houston, Farewell to Manzanar, xvii.

  49. 49.

    Wakatsuki Houston, Farewell to Manzanar, 19.

  50. 50.

    Wakatsuki Houston, Farewell to Manzanar, 20.

  51. 51.

    Wakatsuki Houston, Farewell to Manzanar, 28.

  52. 52.

    Wakatsuki Houston, Farewell to Manzanar, 21–22.

  53. 53.

    Wakatsuki Houston, Farewell to Manzanar, 100.

  54. 54.

    Wakatsuki Houston, Farewell to Manzanar, 100.

  55. 55.

    Wakatsuki Houston, Farewell to Manzanar, 139.

  56. 56.

    Wakatsuki Houston, Farewell to Manzanar, 163.

  57. 57.

    Wakatsuki Houston, Farewell to Manzanar, 164.

  58. 58.

    Wakatsuki Houston, Farewell to Manzanar, 185.

  59. 59.

    Wakatsuki Houston, Farewell to Manzanar, 158.

  60. 60.

    Wakatsuki Houston, Farewell to Manzanar, 171.

  61. 61.

    Wakatsuki Houston, Farewell to Manzanar, 45.

  62. 62.

    Wakatsuki Houston, Farewell to Manzanar, 47.

  63. 63.

    Wakatsuki Houston, Farewell to Manzanar, 8.

  64. 64.

    Wakatsuki Houston, Farewell to Manzanar, 71.

  65. 65.

    Wakatsuki Houston, Farewell to Manzanar, 72.

  66. 66.

    Wakatsuki Houston, Farewell to Manzanar, 83.

  67. 67.

    Wakatsuki Houston, Farewell to Manzanar, 85.

  68. 68.

    Wakatsuki Houston, Farewell to Manzanar, 81.

  69. 69.

    John Okada, No-No Boy (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998), 40.

  70. 70.

    Okada, No-No Boy, 3.

  71. 71.

    Okada, No-No Boy, 6.

  72. 72.

    Okada, No-No Boy, 25.

  73. 73.

    Okada, No-No Boy, 228.

  74. 74.

    Okada, No-No Boy, 1.

  75. 75.

    Okada, No-No Boy, 52.

  76. 76.

    Okada, No-No Boy, 73.

  77. 77.

    Okada, No-No Boy, 121.

  78. 78.

    Okada, No-No Boy, 104.

  79. 79.

    Okada, No-No Boy, viii.

  80. 80.

    Okada, No-No Boy, ix.

  81. 81.

    Okada, No-No Boy, x–xi.

  82. 82.

    Okada, No-No Boy, 31.

  83. 83.

    Seongho Yoon, “‘No Place in Particular’: Inhabiting Postinternment America, Articulating Postinternment Anxieties in John Okada’s No-No Boy,” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 43, no. 1(2012): 60.

Work Cited

  • Bartelt, Guillermo. “Hegemonic Registers in Momaday’s House Made of Dawn.”Style 39, no. 4 (Winter 2005): 469–78.

    Google Scholar 

  • Beidler, Peter G. “Bloody Mud, Rifle Butts, and Barbed Wire: Transforming the Bataan Death March in Silko’s Ceremony.”American Indian Culture and Research Journal 28, no. 1 (2004): 23–33.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Douglas, Christopher. “The Flawed Design: American Imperialism in N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.”Critique 45, no. 1 (2003): 3–24.

    Google Scholar 

  • “hand, n.”OED Online. Accessed November 12, 2020. http://www.oed.com

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    Article  Google Scholar 

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    Google Scholar 

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    Article  Google Scholar 

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  1. University of Memphis, Memphis, TN, USA

    Olivia Hulsey

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  1. University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA

    Christian Beck

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Hulsey, O. (2021). Interiorized Imperialism in Native American and Japanese American World War II Narratives. In: Beck, C. (eds) Mobility, Spatiality, and Resistance in Literary and Political Discourse. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83477-7_7

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