Ripples Over the Rim: Narrating Dispossession through Asian Diasporic Formations in Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being

Abstract

Abstract: This article examines the condition of dispossession as a multi-scalar phenomenon by tracing historical continuities between different forms of transpacific displacement to contemplate how Asian American critique can offer the tools to render deterritorialized identities legible as political entities. Using Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for The Time Being , the article illustrates how Asian North American exclusions serve as a heuristic to interpret environmental displacements post-Fukushima as imperial dispossessions that are related and complementary. In showing how Ozeki expends the category of dispossession by politicizing the spaces of alterity, her text reveals the radical promises of planetary interconnectedness. Reading the rōnin , the unwelcome and ostracized subject of modernity, as the emblematic figure of the outsider allows me to present their social alienation alongside Asian North American experiences of dispossessions. In narrating experiences of social and political dispossession alongside environmental displacements, Ozeki expands the category of the rōnin from one of social to ecological dispossession. As such, the figure of rōnin foregrounds the ways in which these experiences of dispossession are interrelated, interlinked, and interwoven. This inextricability in turn allows for a different articulation of dispossession, one not grounded in a singular place but distributed across a series of sites and scales. I name this methodology of tracing Asian dispossessions across planetary geographies as "trash-nationalism."