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" Crossed Wires: "
Kennedy, Mika
Najita, Susan Y.
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1114269
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| Doc. No
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TLpq2405598961
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| Main Entry
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Kennedy, Mika
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Najita, Susan Y.
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| Title & Author
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Crossed Wires:\ Kennedy, MikaNajita, Susan Y.
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| College
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University of Michigan
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| Date
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2020
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| student score
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2020
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Page No
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195
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| Abstract
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Crossed Wires: Japanese American Incarceration and the Environmental Frontier focuses on the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. From this historical vantage point, I draw on ecocritical and settler colonial frameworks to theorize the relationship between immigrant and indigenous populations in the United States as they are produced by relations to land and acts of environmental transformation. My project intervenes in discourses of the U.S. carceral state, racialized policing, and border consolidation, and is additionally informed by a growing body of incarceration work in the fields of environmental history and geography. In this dissertation, I posit environmental transformation as a core element of Japanese American incarceration, examining the way the War Relocation Authority's agricultural projects rhetorically and materially sought to reclaim the "frontier" West for the U.S. (white) settler state. I examine how the stakes of the incarceration shift when it becomes not only an act of racial exclusion and war hysteria, but also a conscious reiteration of the settler colonial frontier—a frontier which, in the confines of an incarceration camp, is quickly denuded of its fantasies of a free West. In turn, I explore the ways Japanese Americans narrated their own relationship to their camp environments, imaginatively traversing geologic time, as in Rea Tajiri’s History and Memory; performing cowboy outlaw, as in Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine; and confronting the Native erasures that subtend every frontier “success story.” My project’s primary intervention lies in its ecocritical approach to narratives of Japanese American incarceration, which illuminates the ways that Japanese Americans’ imaginative encounters with their environment express alternative ways of being and belonging in a place. These ways of being foreground Japanese Americans' relation to Native peoples, as guests on their land and as potential allies and accomplices against the U.S. settler colonial state. When U.S. military spaces like Fort Sill can serve as a prison to Native warriors during the nineteenth century, to Japanese Americans in the twentieth, and to border crossers in the twenty-first, examining the intersections between Asian American, Native, and environmental studies is more crucial than ever to imagining radically different futures.
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American literature
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Environmental history
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Japanese American incarceration
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Settler colonialism
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Western history
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World War II
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