Abstract
The role of the nation-state in citizenship debates is increasingly contested, but it remains a privileged locus of identification and addressee of rights’ claims. Joy Kogawa’s novels Obasan (1981), Itsuka (1992), and Itsuka’s revised version on Japanese Canadian internment and the struggle for redress, Emily Kato (2005), criticize the Canadian nation for its treatment of citizens during World War II and its long-lasting refusal to recognize this treatment as a violation of citizens’ rights. Yet, this chapter argues that they also affirm Canadian national ideals and citizenship. They seek to inscribe Japanese Canadians into the national narrative and, by redirecting the focus from the internment experience to the struggle for redress, shift attention from questions of citizens’ rights violations to citizens’ activism. They thus not only address Japanese Canadian national citizenship as co-actorship, but also function as forms of cultural citizenship as co-authorship.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Obasan has generated a substantial body of criticism since its publication, Itsuka and Emily Kato much less so; only more recently have critics such as Glenn Deer (2011) or Benjamin Authers (2016) turned to readings of the two novels that do not focus on an (negative) aesthetic comparison with Obasan. I will address the question of reception in more detail below.
- 2.
However, as John Porter in his monumental 1965 study The Vertical Mosaic has already shown, while Asians were to be excluded as a matter of course, non-English European immigrants were not necessarily welcome, either. Porter quotes the writer and professor of economics Stephen Leacock to make this point, and the quote sheds light on Leacock’s understanding of both citizenship and the parameters of inclusion and exclusion: ‘Learning English and living under the British flag may make a British subject in the legal sense, but not in the real sense, in the light of national history and continuity. … I am not saying that we should absolutely shut out and debar the European foreigner, as we should and do shut out the Oriental. But we should in no way facilitate his coming’ (Leacock 1930 quoted in Porter 2015, p. 67; emphasis mine). While this quote illustrates a general anti-immigrant sentiment, it also highlights the specific position Asian immigrants occupied in this imagery of national coherence as ‘white.’
- 3.
It needs to be pointed out again that formally, there was no Canadian citizenship before 1947. This legal situation notwithstanding, the debates nevertheless made constant use of the term ‘citizenship.’
- 4.
The retitling of the earlier Itsuka as Emily Kato in 2005 is of course indicative of the prominent role of this character.
- 5.
While the cooperation of the newspaper with the British Columbia Security Commission during World War II (see, e.g., Miki 2005, p. 69) clearly raises the question to what extent The New Canadian can be read as representative of the Nisei public during the time of internment, it remained the only Japanese Canadian public forum at the time that created and maintained an idea of community. For a more detailed debate of The New Canadian and its policies, see Miki (1985, 2005), Sarkowsky (2008).
- 6.
I thank Mita Banerjee for alerting me to this irony, which can be read as an appropriation of the family metaphor to extend the scope of the ‘Canadian family’ to include Japanese Americans.
- 7.
For a more detailed discussion of this and other political cartoons published in The New Canadian, see Sarkowsky (2008).
- 8.
At the time of Obasan’s publication, Kitagawa’s text was not publicly accessible but archived at the University of British Columbia, so Kogawa had worked with the archived letters and essays; Roy Miki published them as part of Letters to Wes and other Writings in 1985. For the significance of this archival material for Kogawa’s writing process of Obasan, see Sywenky (2009, p. 351).
- 9.
The text was written in 1946/1947 when the actual internment was over, yet Japanese Canadians continued to be barred from British Columbia and many were even deported to Japan.
- 10.
For a more detailed analysis of this aspect, see Sarkowsky (2008, pp. 37–38).
- 11.
The sentiment voiced by Dan in this passage is one of the many direct references to the historical event to be found in Kogawa’s redress novels. The sentence “I feel that I’ve just had a tumor removed” was uttered after the ceremony by Canada’s ‘Judo King,’ Mas Takahashi (Kogawa, n.d.).
- 12.
For a detailed discussion and critique of the reception, see Miki (1998, pp. 142–45).
References
Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
Authers, Benjamin. 2016. A Culture of Rights: Law, Literature, and Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Banerjee, Mita. 2014. “Naturalization and Citizenship in North America.” In The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative North American Literature, edited by Reingard M. Nischik, 103–25. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Bangarth, Stephanie. 2008. Voices Raised in Protest: Defending North American Citizens of Japanese Ancestry, 1942–1949. Vancouver: UBC Press.
Cho, Lily. 2007a. “Diasporic Citizenship: Inhabiting Contradictions and Challenging Exclusions.” American Quarterly 59 (2): 467–78.
———. 2007b. “Diasporic Citizenship: Contradictions and Possibilities for Canadian Literature.” In Trans.Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature, edited by Smaro Kamboureli and Roy Miki, 93–109. Ottawa, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Coulthard, Glen Sean. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Deer, Glenn. 2011. “Revising the Activist Figure in the Novels of Joy Kogawa.” In Joy Kogawa: Essays on Her Work, edited by Sheena Wilson, 43–70. Toronto: Guernica.
Henderson, Jennifer, and Pauline Wakeham. 2009. “Colonial Reckoning, National Reconciliation? Aboriginal Peoples and the Culture of Redress in Canada.” English Studies in Canada 35 (1): 1–26.
Honneth, Axel. 2003. “Redistribution as Recognition: A Response to Nancy Fraser.” In Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange, by Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, translated by Joel Golb, James Ingram, and Christiane Wilke, 110–97. London: Verso.
Hutcheon, Linda. 1988. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge.
Isin, Engin F. 2002. Being Political: Genealogies of Citizenship. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
———. 2008. “Theorizing Acts of Citizenship.” In Acts of Citizenship, edited by Engin F. Isin and Greg M. Nielsen, 15–43. London: Zed Books.
Jebwab, Jack, and Vic Satzewich. 2015. “Introductory Essay: John Porter’s The Vertical Mosaic, 50 Years Later.” In The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada, 50th Anniversary edited, by John Porter, xvii–xxxviii. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Jones, Manina. 1993. That Art of Difference: ‘Documentary-Collage’ and English-Canadian Writing. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Kamboureli, Smaro. 2007. Preface to Trans.Can.Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature, edited by Smaro Kamboureli and Roy Miki, vii–xv. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Kitagawa, Muriel. 1985. This Is My Own: Letters to Wes and Other Writings on Japanese-Canadians, 1941–1984. Edited by Roy Miki. Vancouver: Talonbooks.
Kiyooka, Roy K. 1997. Pacific Windows: Collected Poems of Roy K. Kiyooka. Edited by Roy Miki. Vancouver: Talonbooks.
Kogawa, Joy. 1981. Obasan. Toronto: Penguin.
———. 1992. Itsuka. Toronto: Penguin.
———. 2005. Emily Kato. Toronto: Penguin.
———. n.d. “I Feel I’ve Just Had a Tumour Removed.” National Association of Japanese Canadians. http://najc.ca/najc-sustaining-fund/. Accessed on May 14, 2018.
Kymlicka, Will. 2007. Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Identity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lo, Marie. 2007. “Passing Recognition: Obasan and the Borders of Asian American and Canadian Literary Criticism.” Comparative American Studies 5 (3): 307–32.
Marshall, T. H. 1950. “Citizenship and Social Class.” In Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays, 1–85. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McAllister, Kirsten Emiko. 1999. “Narrating Japanese Canadians in and Out of the Canadian Nation: A Critique of Realist Forms of Representation.” Canadian Journal of Communication 24 (1). http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/journal/article/view/1083/989. Accessed on August 22, 2008.
McClintock, Anne. 1997. “‘No Longer in a Future Heaven’: Gender, Race, and Nationalism.” In Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, edited by Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat, 89–112. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
McFarlane, Scott. 1995. “Covering Obasan and the Narrative of Internment.” In Privileging Positions: The Sites of Asian American Studies, edited by Gary Y. Okihiro, Marilyn Alquizola, Dorothy Fujita Rony, and K. Scott Wong, 401–11. Pullman: Washington State University Press.
McGonegal, Julie. 2009. Imagining Justice: The Politics of Postcolonial Forgiveness and Reconciliation. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
———. 2011. “The Politics of Redress in Post-9/11 Canada.” In Joy Kogawa: Essays on Her Work, edited by Sheena Wilson, 71–99. Toronto: Guernica.
Miki, Roy. 1985. “Introduction: The Life and Times of Muriel Kitagawa.” In This Is My Own: Letters to Wes and Other Writings on Japanese Canadians, 1941–1948, by Muriel Kitagawa, edited by Roy Miki, 1–64. Vancouver: Talonbooks.
———. 1998. Broken Entries. Race, Subjectivity, Writing. Toronto: Mercury Press.
———. 2005. Redress: Inside the Japanese Canadian Call for Justice. Vancouver: Rainforest Press.
Pennee, Donna Palmateer. 2004. “Literary Citizenship: Culture (Un)Bounded, Culture (Re)Distributed.” In Home-Work: Postcolonialism, Pedagogy, and Canadian Literature, edited by Cynthia Sugars, 75–85. Ottawa, ON: University of Ottawa Press.
Porter, John. 2015. The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada. 50th anniversary ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Redekop, Magdalene. 2004. “Canadian Literary Criticism and the Idea of a National Literature.” In The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature, edited by Eva-Marie Kröller, 263–75. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rosaldo, Renato. 1994. “Cultural Citizenship and Educational Democracy.” Cultural Anthropology 9 (3): 402–11.
Roy, Patricia E. 1981. “Citizens Without Votes: East Asians in British Columbia, 1872–1947.” In Ethnicity, Power, and Politics in Canada, edited by Jorgen Dahlie and Tissa Fernando, 151–71. Toronto: Methuen.
———. 1989. A White Man’s Province: British Columbia Politicians and Chinese and Japanese Immigrants 1858–1914. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press.
———. 2007. The Triumph of Citizenship: The Japanese and Chinese in Canada, 1941–67. Vancouver: UBC Press.
Sarkowsky, Katja. 2008. “Nisei Negotiations: Citizenship and the Nation in Japanese Canadian Writing.” West Coast Line 59: 28–41.
Sontag, Susan. [1978] 2001. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. New York: Picador.
Sunahara, Ann Gomer. [1981] 2000. The Politics of Racism: The Uprooting of Japanese Canadians During the Second World War. Toronto: James Lorimer. Also http://www.japanesecanadianhistory.ca/. Accessed on August 16, 2007.
Sywenky, Irene. 2009. “Recovering the Voice of the Japanese-Canadian Community: History and Private and Public Discourses in Joy Kogawa’s Poetry and Prose.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 36 (3): 344–59.
Tan, Kathy-Ann. 2015. Reconfiguring Citizenship and National Identity in the North American Literary Imagination. Detroit: Wayne State University Press (Kindle edition).
Taylor, Charles. 1994. “The Politics of Recognition.” In Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, edited and introduced by Amy Gutman, 25–73. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press (First published 1992).
Yuval-Davis, Nira. 1997. Gender and Nation. London: Sage.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sarkowsky, K. (2018). ‘This Is My Own!’: Negotiating Canadian Citizenship in Joy Kogawa’s Novels. In: Narrating Citizenship and Belonging in Anglophone Canadian Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96935-0_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96935-0_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-96934-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-96935-0
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)