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After the attack on Pearl Harbor, everything changed for Yoshiko Uchida. Desert Exile is her autobiographical account of life before and during World War II. The book does more than relate the day-to-day experience of living in stalls at the Tanforan Racetrack, the assembly center just south of San Francisco, and in the Topaz, Utah, internment camp. It tells the story of the courage and strength displayed by those who were interned. Replaces ISBN 9780295961903

Yamamoto uses the turning of the millennium to discuss race relations in the US. While popular culture would have us believe that we really can just get along, Yamamoto argues that the US has not solved the \"race question\" and that there is much work to be done.

Autobiography is at once one of the most widely used genres in Asian American literature and the most controversial. In a 1985 essay, \"This is Not an Autobiography,\" writer Frank Chin declared that the form is a \"peculiarly Christian literary weapon\" that has \"destroyed knowledge of Chinaman history and culture\" (1985: 109). Chin's objections to the form rest primarily upon two functions of classic Christian autobiography, from which he sees a straight line of descent to the present day: conversion and confession. Conversion, according to Chin, powers what he asserts is an Asian American autobiographical tradition that tells \"the same Cinderella story of rescue from the perverse, the unnatural, and cruel Chinese\" (1985: 110). Confession is the mode through which this storytelling is enacted. While much of what follows in Chin's essay is pocked by misogyny, homophobia, and reductive masculinism, Chin's contention that \"My life is not one of my market commodities\" (1985: 123) might be read as responding to some of the earliest examples of Asian American autobiographical writing. At the same time, reading the body of Asian American autobiography in agonistic relationship to Chin's statement productively highlights the many ways in which these texts self-consciously resist and radically destabilize the notion of a discrete self whose singular \"life\" is com-modifiable or reducible to dominant stereotypes of Asian Americans as exotic foreigners. An examination of the range and variety of Asian American autobiography and memoir puts this group of texts in productive conversation with some of the most important issues in autobiography studies.

This article discusses the positioning of Asian American women in the socialized landscape of the United States. Through an examination of popular culture venues such as fashion spreads and film, I argue that the Asian American woman's body is encoded as a site of spectularized differences that marks the boundaries of normative whiteness and uphold the promises of liberal multiculturalism.

A short story is presented.

In a brief May 1982 letter to artist Miné Okubo, Yoshiko Uchida writes that she is pleased Okubo enjoyed Desert Exile, which had been published a few months earlier. She asks whether Okubo recognized herself in the humorous account of the artist at Tanforan who placed a quarantine sign on her door in order to be left alone to draw and paint. Uchida then continues: It’s hard to believe 40 years have elapsed since those incredible horse stall days! The passage of time and the knowledge now of our gov’t leaders’ betrayal has increased my anger. I’m hoping many young

This study examines the autobiographies, fiction, essays and poetry by Japanese American women writers from the l940's to the present. It argues that the construction of the self as subject for these women is crucially shaped by the intersections of race, gender and national identity. Informed by feminist, postcolonial and cultural studies theories, I contextualize Japanese American women's literary tradition historically and socially, paying particular attention to raced gender constructions, in order to explore formal strategies for creating resistant texts. Because Japanese American women have been consistently conflated with the figure of the infantilized and hyper-feminized figure of the Japanese woman, I begin by exploring, through travel narratives and films, how the Japanese woman has been constructed as a metonymic representative of Japan and the ways in which gender representations are a key element in the West's imperialist ideologies relative to Japan. The prevalence of the \"geisha-izing\" of Japanese American women suggests that any discussion of their subjectivity must address how they both differentiate from and reappropriate Japanese femaleness and the tactics of agency they employ to do so. Within this theoretical context, the second half of this study looks at the textual strategies Japanese American women writers adopt in order to articulate the complex specificities of their subjectivity. I argue that the trope of masking and the multiple signifying possibilities of silence are crucial means through which these writers claim voice and agency, particularly in autobiographical and fictional narratives. I extend this discussion in the final chapter, which focuses on Japanese American women's poetics. Though varying widely in style and content, the three poets I discuss all self-consciously address issues of nationalism, essentialism and sexuality in ways that both contradict and reply to the earlier tradition of Japanese American women's writing.