Ethnic Vistas: Minorities, the Environment, and the Welfare State by Janice Naoko Tanemura A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Abdul R. JanMohamed, Chair Professor Hertha Sweet Wong Professor Sau-ling Cynthia Wong Fall 2010 1 Abstract Ethnic Vistas: Minorities, the Environment, and the Welfare State by Janice Naoko Tanemura Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Abdul R. JanMohamed, Chair This dissertation examines the relationship between race and the environment through three intersecting critical lenses: literature, environmental criticism, and political theory. While minority discourse has traditionally been defined by the experience of negation, I argue that as power becomes increasingly progressive and globalized in the twentieth century, there is a need to revise our geopolitical understanding of racial scapegoating and racial stereotyping. Due to the popularity of the model minority thesis that defined Japanese American exceptionalism against African American delinquency, I focus on a comparative analysis of African American and Japanese American literature that engages the technique of cognitive mapping in order to represent the function of racial minorities in relation to the expansion of the welfare state. Using Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics as a theoretical framework, I examine how positive and negative racial stereotypes circulated in cultural discourse concerning the future of liberal democracy in the twentieth century. I argue that racial minorities have often functioned to manage the tension within liberal democracy, or the conflict between the centrifugal force of liberal individualism and the centripetal force of democratic communitarianism. Japanese Americans and African Americans have historically been positioned ambiguously as both internal and external to the state, and objectified and subjectified by liberal capitalism. My analysis of what I call minority environmental discourse brings into relief a new critique of the state that differs from traditional right and left critiques that both imagine the state as a threat to civil society; it is not that the state is either enabling or disciplinary, but that it fails to protect and manage the productive potential within marginalized populations. Excavating the point of view of marginalized populations, minority environmental discourse brings into view “fall out” experiences that suggest how the experiences of minorities significantly render visible a critique of the limits within biopolitics, or control that is enforced through what Foucault calls the “optimization of life” that is achieved through passive environmental controls. I examine the aesthetic forms and forms of personhood that are imagined through minority literature’s cognitive mapping of the environment as being invested with both energies for resistance to and participation within a globalized progressive social totality. i Table of Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................................. ii Introduction..........................................................................................................................................iii Chapter One ‘Seeing Like a State’: Sentimentalism, Prosthesis, and Organicism in Booker T. Washington’s New South ................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter Two Race, Bioregion, Biopolitics: Nisei Regional Literature ........................................................42 Chapter Three ‘Dead Aliveness’: Welfare and Environmental Control in John Okada’s No­No Boy.....85 Chapter Four Black Feminism, the Environment, and ‘The Care of the Self’.......................................... 128 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................................... 167 ii Acknowledgements I would like to thank Abdul R. JanMohamed, Hertha Sweet Wong, and Sau-ling Cynthia Wong for providing me with their steadfast support. I would also like to thank Carlo Arreglo, Melissa Fabros, Marguerite Nguyen, and Jeff Ow for helping me navigate life as a graduate student and Marian Okamura for offering crucial guidance and mentorship on many different levels. The University of California’s Graduate Opportunity Fellowship provided funding that allowed me to pursue my studies. The amazing students that I have had the privilege of teaching while at Berkeley and Davis were a constant source of inspiration. I would like to thank Stella Ebner, Linda Kikunaga, Mi Sun Lim, and Rachael Payne for being disarmingly present and teaching me the meaning of true friendship. My deepest thanks go to my family: to my mother and father, Sachiko and Tetsuo Dick Tanemura, for doing everything they possibly could to support me, always; to my grandmother, Kay Tanemura, for claiming this country and reminding me that we all have a right to be here; to my brother Kenny, for arguing with me and pushing me to pursue my dreams with integrity. I would like to thank the Fernandes family for graciously extending their hospitality and support during the summer months. Lastly, I would like to express my gratitude to Luís Lomelino Fernandes, my best friend and the love of my life, for walking this path with me. A previous version of the chapter “Race, Bioregion, Biopower: Nisei Regional Literature” originally appeared as “Race, Regionalism, and Biopower in Yokohama, California,” in Discourse, 29.2-3, Special issue “Race, Environment, and Representation” [Mark B. Feldman and Hsuan L. Hsu]: 303-329. iii Introduction In their introduction to the edited anthology, The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse (1990), Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd assert that, “Given such a historically sustained negation of minority voices, we must realize that minority discourse is, in the first instance, the product of damage—damage more or less systematically inflicted on cultures produced as minorities by the dominant culture”; damage comes in the form of economic and cultural destruction, which results in the “eradication” of minoritized peoples.1 My dissertation, “Ethnic Vistas: Minorities, the Environment, and the Welfare State,” draws from JanMohamed and Lloyd’s basic thesis that minority discourse must be examined through the point of view of damage. I therefore explore the relationship between racial damage and environmental damage in twentieth-century minority literature through the theoretical lens of what Michel Foucault calls (neo)liberal biopolitics, which is an art of government structured through the framing of life itself as the avoidance of damage—economic damage, bodily damage, and social damage. My analysis differs from JanMohamed and Loyd’s approach to minority discourse in that I argue racial minorities also serve a positive constitutive function in the expansion of liberal democracy in the twentieth century. Which is to suggest that rather than being abolished by damage, racial minorities are constituted through an engagement with damage and function as a tool of progressive politics, which is how I generally define biopolitics in its attempt to manage life based on the liberal economic principles of freedom and security. Rather than limiting damage to minority populations that are externalized by the state, I approach the problem of damage as a general phenomenon that is endemic to capitalist expansion in processes such as the creative destruction of space examined most intensely by cultural geographers. Whereas much prior analysis has focused attention on the damaging ideological impact of nationalism and citizenship on racialized minorities, I engage the problem from the perspective of the progressive state, which necessitates an examination of the material infrastructure and spatial production that the nation-state facilitates in corroboration with global capitalist expansion. What has been overlooked by both right and left critiques of the state is an engagement with minoritized populations and environments that “fall out” of its increasingly progressive institutions and infrastructure that seek to assimilate and include minoritized populations. The term “fall out” is inspired by Neferti Tadiar’s project of analyzing the neo- colonial Philippines “from the perspective of historical experiences that ‘fall away’ from global capitalist and nation-state narratives of development as well as from social movement narratives of liberation”; the value in Tadiar’s concept is in the basic premise that in global capitalism, the most powerful critique emerges from the understanding that “the historical potential of experience as a social activity lies in its creative character.”2 The aim of “Ethnic Vistas” is to examine the “creative character” of minority experiences that fall out of the biopolitical “optimization” of life. It argues that minorities, even as they are assimilated into the nation-state, continue to form a population whose “creative character,” what Foucault calls “human capital,” ends up falling out of the “apparatuses of capture minted by capital and state powers to 1 Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd, “Toward a Theory of Minority Discourse,” in The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, eds. Abdul R. JanMohamed