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"Okada, John"
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The National Body: Gender, Race, and Disability in John Okada’s No-No Boy
To counteract the meagre critical attention paid to the subject of disability in John Okada’s No-No Boy, this article first explores how the dis/abled characters’ bodies and minds are besieged by ableist ideologies and how the book’s ableist body politic sacrifices racial affinities between first-generation Issei and second-generation Nisei. While the protagonist’s journey of redemption or rehabilitation climaxes in a tragic yet hopeful ending, this hope resides in ableist prerequisites and is located in two points in time—either a reconstructed, idealized past or an anticipated, promising future. No-No Boy ultimately ends up submitting to rather than challenging structural ablenationalism since Okada insists on the ableist myth of wholeness and does not recognize that we are always already disabled. As an alternative, this article views disability as necessary and internal to both the self and Other. Disability is constitutive of the subject in the radical sense that the subject does not pre-exist its disability but emerges through it. When we reorient ourselves to the ontological truth that disability is an internal and pre-existent division, we decrease the narcissistic investment in the ideal image of self and create the possibility of the subject’s disinvestment from ableist culture.
Journal Article
Homo Amens: Epistemological Thanatopolitics and the Postcolonial Zombie
This study identifies a recurring yet overlooked figure in global ethnic and diasporic literature that I term homo amens. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben's concept of homo sacer and the postcolonial zombie, I argue that homo amens (\"the man without a mind\") is a powerful symbol of biopolitical violence that transgresses against immaterial bodies of knowledge—including indigenous cultural, familial, and scientific structures—instead of the material body. By focusing on the \"epistemological zombie\" in Erna Brodber's Myal (1988), John Okada's No-No Boy (1957), and Jonny Steinberg's Sizwe's Test (2008), I foreground the preservation of traditional knowledge as a political right and make the case for global ethnic literature as an instrument of epistemological equality.
Journal Article
Aiiieeeee!
In the eyes of mid-twentieth-century white America, \"Aiiieeeee!\" was the one-dimensional cry from Asian Americans, their singular expression of all emotions-it signified and perpetuated the idea of Asian Americans as inscrutable, foreign, self-hating, undesirable, and obedient. In this anthology first published in 1974, Frank Chin, Jeffery Chan, Lawson Inada, and Shawn Wong reclaimed that shout, outlining the history of Asian American literature and boldly drawing the boundaries for what was truly Asian American and what was white puppetry. Showcasing fourteen uncompromising works from authors such as Carlos Bulosan and John Okada, the editors introduced readers to a variety of daring voices.Forty-five years later the radical collection continues to spark controversy. While in the seventies it helped establish Asian American literature as a serious and distinct literary tradition, today the editors' forceful voices reverberate in contemporary discussions about American literary traditions. Now back in print with a new foreword by literary scholar Tara Fickle, this third edition reminds us how Asian Americans fought for-and seized-their place in the American literary canon.
eBook
On John Okada's 'What Can I Do?'
Floyd Cheung introduces John Okada's \"What Can I Do?\" and, through it, John Okada himself. Cheung examines how Okada's life—being held in WWII incarceration camps and then choosing to serve in the US Military Intelligence Service—are reflected in both \"What Can I Do?\" as well as in No-No Boy, Okada's only novel, which depicted the return of a draft resister to his community from prison. In the story, Jiro, a homeless man with an old leg injury, jumps off a boxcar train in a new town, looking for something to eat. He works out an uneasy deal with a cook at a small cafe to work in exchange for food.
Journal Article
Exception(al): Apprehending the Unexpected in Japanese American Internment Literature
At its heart, Japanese American internment is a product of the sovereign exception, a decision--not a norm--concerning what constitutes public order and security. And the decision to intern, stands outside the normally valid legal system while belonging to it because the sovereign maintains the ability to suspend the very legal system that bestows rights--along with notions of belonging and identity--to Japanese Americans. Both within and outside the legal system, executive power commands a strange relation between constitutional and extra-constitutional realms: what is within the legal order also maintains an outside that can produce law not based on law. Given this, how can Japanese American internment literature's essential role in interrogating state power can be reassessed while being mindful of the instability of such concepts as belonging, citizenship, and identity--concepts that are subject to the capriciousness of those in powerful positions? Certainly, the large volume of scholarship on internment literature serves as an essential foundation for understanding Japanese American literary and cultural responses. Here, Shiu argues people witness vigilant and imaginative interventions committed to challenging common interpretive strategies.
Journal Article
Shattering the Binary: Teaching Critical Thinking Through John Okada's No-No Boy
Cannon shares the philosophical stance that she has developed in relationship to her teaching of US Ethnic Literature and examines the rewards and pitfalls of this path by reflecting on her own experiences teaching John Okada's No-No Boy in undergraduate American literature courses. By illuminating why texts (especially texts by Ethnic American authors) matter intellectually, emotionally, and politically, this discussion will provide a model for critical and self-reflexive pedagogy at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Journal Article
