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Children's Literature in Education

, Volume 49, Issue 4, pp 413–429 | Cite as

Reading Civil Disobedience, Disaffection, and Racialized Trauma in John Okada’s No-No Boy: Lessons Learned 75 Years After Executive Order 9066

  • Rachel Endo
Original Paper
First Online:

Abstract

The year 2017 will mark the 75th anniversary when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 or EO 9066 on February 19, 1942. EO 9066 led to the mass incarceration of approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans into ten racially segregated concentration camps throughout the U.S. This article discusses the educational and literary value of Japanese American author John Okada’s classic novel No-No Boy (1957) with a specific focus on implications for adolescent/young adult readers and teachers of English. Specifically, No-No Boy, as a classic oppositional text, defies the master narrative that Japanese Americans blindly accepted their fate during World War II and were thus able to rapidly assimilate into an accepting and benevolent White-dominated society after the war. Instead, Okada offers a somber critique of the World War II incarceration including how life in detainment destroyed the Japanese American community and families. Implications are provided including highlighting multiple avenues for students and teachers to critically explore the connections between America’s racially contested past and present around the themes of civil disobedience, disaffection, and racialized trauma.

Keywords

Asian American young adult literature Japanese American young adult literature Multicultural literature for youth 
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© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2017

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.University of Washington TacomaTacomaUSA

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