“How Lucky I Was to Be Free and Safe at Home”: Reading Humor in Miné Okubo’sCitizen 13660

Abstract

AbstractMine Okubo’s Citizen 13660 is praised for its unique visual and textual depiction of the Japanese internment camps during the Second World War. However, it has also been found lacking for its failure to conform to readerly expectations of resistance. In this article I read Okubo’s use of humor in light of Avery F. Gordon’s description of the prisoner’s curse. If Japanese internment was intended not only to isolate a potentially dangerous “enemy race” but to refine and reinforce Japanese Americans’ cultural citizenship, I demonstrate that Okubo traces the perverse contours and effects of internment’s pedagogy. Examining Okubo’s representations of nonnormative gender presentations, depictions of unsanctioned nonfamilial attachments, and her own impulse to engage in surveillance, I argue that Okubo’s humor challenges critical conceptions of resistance and even of politics. I suggest that critics take this humor seriously and not ignore it in favor of a truer depth of sorrow that we imagine lies benea...