Race and the Martial Imaginary in U.S. Literature and Culture, World War II to the Post-9/11 Period
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Race and the Martial Imaginary in U.S. Literature and Culture, World War II to the Post-9/11 Period Mai-Linh Khanh Hong Staunton, Virginia J.D., University of Virginia School of Law, 2008 M.A., Columbia University, 2008 B.A., Yale University, 2000 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Language and Literature University of Virginia August, 2015 Committee: Jennifer Wicke, Co-Director Marlon Ross, Co-Director Anna Brickhouse, Reader Risa Goluboff, External Reader Abstract My dissertation, Race and the Martial Imaginary in U.S. Literature and Culture since World War II, explores the expansive, historically rooted conceptions of war, militarism, and political violence that circulate in ethnic minority literature and performance, and in doing so challenges certain ideas and values that have subtended postwar U.S. foreign policy. I demonstrate that for communities of color, war and its externalities have long been a constant feature of civilian experience, as U.S. military power expressed itself not only abroad, but also at home, in occupation-like policing of black neighborhoods, environmental devastation of Native lands by nuclear weapons development, surveillance and detention of U.S. citizens deemed “enemy aliens,” and other conditions of postwar minority life. In order to address the ubiquity of martial violence in American ethnic minority literatures, my project sets aside the conventional rubric of “war literature,” which tends to reify an exception-based understanding of war while privileging white, masculine perspectives. I introduce instead a conceptual frame I call the martial imaginary: the evolving field of images, affects, narratives, and myths that structure representations of organized violence. This frame not only highlights popular war stories that pervade U.S. political and media discourses—raced, gendered stories of self-defense, homeland security, and Third-World liberation—but also makes visible less familiar, discredited, and seemingly non-war-related narratives that expose the vital roles of state violence in contemporary democratic life. The dissertation looks to Kaiko haiku poetry produced by Japanese Americans in WWII-era internment camps, the Black Panther Party’s performative gun-rights demonstrations in the 1960s, Thanhha Lai’s recent children’s novel Inside Out & Back Again (about a Vietnamese child’s refugee passage), and diverse other texts in order to reveal how imagination and narrative have sustained both militarism (the belief that violence is crucial to achieving political aims) and its detractors in a rapidly militarizing postwar America. What emerges is an account of contemporary American culture in which the ongoing militarization of state power— which troubles ideologically constructed boundaries between wartime and peacetime, civilians and combatants, domestic and foreign policy—both arises from and reinforces deeply rooted hierarchies of race, gender, class, and religion, even amid globalization and increasing diversity. Acknowledgments I am extremely privileged and grateful to have a brilliant, wise, and generous committee. Jennifer Wicke and Marlon Ross have together been the core of my intellectual and professional development during graduate school, and they gifted me with wide-ranging ideas and questions that pushed my work in directions I could not have foreseen. Anna Brickhouse and Risa Goluboff have both offered me their insights, advice, and encouragement since my law school days, and have been wonderful intellectual and pedagogical role models. I am grateful to my committee for their guidance and steadfast support, and I hope each member will be happy to recognize his or her unique influence in these pages. At various stages of this project I also received valuable feedback and advice from Mrinalini Chakravorty and Bruce Holsinger; members of the multi-disciplinary Working Group on Racial Inequality at U.Va., particularly Kim Forde-Mazrui and Claudrena Harold; and the American Studies faculty of the University of Göttingen in Germany, led by Frank Kelleter and Bärbel Tischleder. Sincere thanks also belong to many graduate school and summer program colleagues for generative conversations, critique, and friendship, most of all Claire Eager, Shermaine Jones, H. Timothy Lovelace, Audrey Golden, Madigan Haley, Christopher Walker, Lauren Hauser, and Michael Pickard. Elana Solon kindly gave assistance with editing and Japanese–English translation, along with her abiding friendship, for which I am grateful. The U.Va. English Department provided summer grants that enabled me to develop my dissertation while studying with Sianne Ngai of the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University; Alan Nadel and Andy Doolen of the Futures of American Studies Institute at Dartmouth University; and the faculty of the Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law, led by Peter Schneck, at the University of Osnabrück in Germany. I also received research grants from U.Va. that funded archival research at Stanford University Library and at the California State Archive in Sacramento. Most of all, I am thankful to my parents, Binh Tran and Nguyen Hong, for their love and extreme sacrifices, which they repeatedly gave under difficult circumstances; and to Brian Utter for his companionship and support. For my parents Contents Introduction ................................................................................................... 1 Imagining War, Imagining the Nation ............................................................................ 1 A Note on Methods, or, What Is “Law and Literature”? .............................................. 18 Chapter 1: Freestyle Poetic Justice: Japanese-American Internment and the Kaiko Haiku Movement ....................................................................... 22 Histories of American Haiku ........................................................................................ 22 Japanese and American Haiku before World War II .................................................... 33 Doing Time: Evacuation, Internment, and Kaiko Haiku .............................................. 50 Recovering Lost Time: Resistance and Reparations .................................................... 72 Interlude ....................................................................................................... 89 Chapter 2: Defensible Selves: The Black Panther Party and the Right to Bear Arms ....................................................................................................96 “We Are the Revolutionaries” ...................................................................................... 96 The Right to Bear Arms in Law and Myth ................................................................. 101 Self-Defense and the Defensible Self ......................................................................... 111 Performing the Defensible Self: The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense .............. 123 Coda: Yesterday’s News ............................................................................................. 146 Chapter 3: New Literary Iconographies of the Vietnam War .............. 152 Producing the Sentimental Rescue: NPR’s USS Kirk Series ...................................... 155 Reframing Rescue and Gratitude: Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out & Back Again ............. 171 Conclusion: Old Narratives, New Refugees ............................................................... 185 Coda: Imagining Ground Zero(s) ............................................................ 188 Works Cited and Consulted ..................................................................... 197 Hong 1 Introduction “The question is not what common imagination exists, but what common imagination is forged.” —Don Mitchell (269) Imagining War, Imagining the Nation On March 20, 2003, President George W. Bush addressed the American people to explain why he had just launched missile strikes on Iraq: Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, which terrorists could one day acquire, threatening American lives and interests. In keeping with the United States’ new foreign policy of “preemptive self-defense,”1 the President declared, “We will meet that threat now with our army, air force, navy, coast guard and marines so that we do not have to meet it later with armies of firefighters and police and doctors on the streets of our cities.” With his careful parsing of military combatants and civilian first responders, Bush invoked a certain nostalgia that has appeared frequently in American public discourse since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. It was a nostalgia not so much for a peaceful !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 While different definitions exist for the “Bush Doctrine” of preemptive self-defense, I refer to the basic ideas laid out in the White House document The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, released in September 2002 likely with an eye toward justifying the intended invasion of Iraq. The document outlines emerging threats posed by terrorism, and states that, “as a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed. We cannot defend America and our friends by hoping for the best. So we must be prepared to defeat our enemies’ plans, using the best intelligence and proceeding with deliberation.