‘This Is My Own!’: Negotiating Canadian Citizenship in Joy Kogawa’s Novels

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.