Joy Kogawa Research Articles

Trauma at the Intersection of Precarity and the Politics of Language: Exploring Memory and Manipulation in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan

Trauma at the Intersection of Precarity and the Politics of Language: Exploring Memory and Manipulation in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan

Surface and Depth: Reading Photographs in Obasan and The Invention of Solitude

Since its invention, photography has been imbued with the promise of providing a sense of fullness and has been believed to possess the unique capacity to capture the entirety of a moment. On the other hand, such assumed potentiality to capture all is yet found subject to the surface, and photography turns out to be a sort of art that lacks depth. This paper intends to focus on the tension between surface and depth in the representation of photographs in literature, a topic that is often neglected in literary studies. Through the theoretical lens of Walter Benjamin’s and Roland Barthes’s discourses on photography, this paper examines Joy Kogawa’s Obasan and Paul Auster’s The Invention of Solitude, both of which expose the discrepancy between what is visible on the surface and what lies beneath, as well as between what is within the frame and what exists beyond it. This paper is divided into two parts. The first part discusses how Benjamin’s and Barthes’s discourses on photography lead to the discussion of the surface and depth issues. The second part deals with the photographs in the two literary works, exploring how theoretical concepts of photography, including Benjamin’s “the optical unconscious” and Barthes’s “punctum,” will help shed light on them. By juxtaposing critical discourses on photography with these literary works, this paper concludes that their representation of photographs grapples with the tension between surface and depth and resonates with Benjamin’s and Barthes’s notions on photography.

Making a Difference: Canadian Women Writers and the Fiction of Social Change

In January 1944, when the influential Toronto critic William Arthur Deacon lamented the absence of a Canadian “equivalent of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’” because Canadians are “still pioneering, still afraid of ourselves intellectually and emotionally,”[1] little did he know that a significant candidate was on the horizon. Gwethalyn Graham’s second novel, Earth and High Heaven, which appeared later that year, launched an analysis of anti-Semitism that was quickly embraced by cultural arbiters and the general public in both Canada and the United States. This essay situates the production and reception history of Graham’s book in relation to other novels by English-Canadian women writers that advocated for social change, and offers cases studies of the three most widely disseminated works that used the power of fiction to marshal empathy: Marshall Saunders’s Beautiful Joe (1894), Graham’s Earth and High Heaven (1944) and Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981). [1]W.A. Deacon, “Gearing the Arts in Canada to Postwar Nation-Building,” Globe and Mail, 1 January 1944: 13.

Reconsidering the Past

Those in power often use carefully constructed historical narratives to justify past injustices. Nevertheless, with the rise of postmodern literature, including historiographic metafictions, fiction authors have challenged traditional historicism while problematizing historical justifications for past injustices. Joy Kogawa uses postmodernist literary devices in her novel Obasan, presenting her novel as a work of historiographic metafiction. However, the political, social, and historical contexts in which Kogawa uses such devices reveal that Obasan’s historiographic metafictional qualities self-reflexively evoke a reconsideration of the official historical accounts that attempted to justify Japanese Canadian internment.

In Praise of José Watanabe

In Praise of José Watanabe Marco Katz Montiel (bio) "… home is where our stories are, and that's not just a question of ethnicity or even country …" —Joy Kogawa, Itsuka Alberto Fujimori caught the world's attention in 1990 by becoming the first person of Japanese descent elected to lead Peru—or any nation outside of Japan. His extravagant campaign and unexpected accension caused the world to notice the vast number of nikkei, immigrants from Japan and their descendants, in the country he now governed. According to the Japanese Peruvian Association in Lima, this group numbered over fifty thousand people and included a disproportionate number of artists, musicians, and writers who, along with large populations of nikkei in Brazil and Mexico, employed appealing fusions of Asia and Latin America in their creative activity. Among these was playwright, screenwriter, and poet José Watanabe Varas (1945-2007). By the time of his passing, anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists, and interdisciplinary scholars had begun to create interest in Watanabe's works. Volumes of his poetry appeared throughout the Spanish-speaking world and translations began to appear that made his work available to native English speakers and the even larger number of readers who employ English as a second language. When Peruvian cinephiles submitted Watanabe's Alias 'La Gringa' to the Academy Awards, the addition of English subtitles increased the potential audience for that film. Since then, scholarly works on Watanabe's oeuvre have appeared in Peru and as chapters of anthologies dealing generally with Asians in Latin America, in England, and the United States. While all of these provide useful ways of looking at his varied creative production, a comprehensive appreciation of his work remains undone. Reading Watanabe as a Japanese Peruvian author only begins to explain his writing. Although many of his verses do not blatantly announce a paternal heritage, there are moments in which his poetry [End Page 240] shows an immigrant father fusing elements from his home country with those of his adopted land. A subtle example appears in "This Scent, Its Other" from a 1994 collection translated as Natural History in 2022 by Michelle Har Kim (Georgia Review Books). The scene opens with the narrator's older sister chopping parsley with the seemingly "congenital" ability of someone born in Peru, where that condiment predominates. "Parsley would announce that my father, Don Harumi," continues the poem, "awaited his frugal soup. Thanks to this country:a Japanese man who would never forgivethe local secret's absence at the table!I think you folded that secret into another one greaterto compose the beauty of your ordered home that blendedfamily and savvy and knacks of this land. Up to this point suggestive of the ways in which the issei (Japanese immigrant) brings his customs together with practices from his adopted land, the verses turn to what has been lost along the way: Children of your old environs we are lone diners todaydivided as tithesand we eat dinner on Day of the Dead scatteringparsley in our soup. The herbs are but seasoning now, aroma without powerOur houses, Don Harumi, are fallen. Like the father, the son narrating this scene feels othered, but in different ways. This contextualization forestalls any temptation to reify by demonstrating the process through which children from all backgrounds, especially those mindful of how they fit into their surroundings, never stop coming into being. Looking at the way in which the father's identity, Japanese as well as Peruvian, continually comes into being provides insight into the son, who becomes a poet. Unlike many of his compatriots, who fled [End Page 241] their homeland out of economic desperation, Harumi Watanabe abandoned art studies at a university and his parents' stable home in Okayama to escape the traditional arranged marriage they had prepared for him. His emigration took place twenty years after the 1899 arrival of 790 issei men who sailed on the Sakura Maru as replacements for nineteenth-century Chinese immigrants previously engaged in hard labor on the eastern shores of the Pacific Ocean. Harumi differed in other ways from the thousands of expectant laborers who followed that first boatload of economic refugees. Many of...

Poetological dominants of historical memory in works of asian immigrant writers in Canada

Poetological dominants of historical memory in works of asian immigrant writers in Canada
 The paper highlights the development of literature related to the historical memory concept of Canadian immigrants from Asian countries. It covers the period of the late 20th ― first decades of the 21st century. The complex of problems, analyzed and structured within the semantic field of the modern historical memory concept, is often applicable both to Canada and Ukraine. The research broadens the knowledge of Canadian literature introducing the names of researchers and writers new to Ukrainian literary studies. The paper overviews the interpretations of Canadian Asian immigrants’ dispositions within the paradigm of modern arts and humanities. The focus is on the issues of double identity, the coherence of ethnic and North American mentality. The researcher generalizes the poetical aspects of the works by Ying Chen, Kim Thui, Joy Kogawa, Michael Ondaatje. Attention has been paid to the definition of discursive parameters, which allow shaping the concept of historical memory in ‘mosaic’ Canadian society; the issues of identities; the main markers of Canadian historical strategies; and versatile patterns of literary texts.
 The participation of Canada in the global dialog, which involves its culture and literature, plays probably the most important role in the debate on Canadian polyethnic literature. Regional, national, and international features demand some combined definition. The research explicates modern historical memory strategies in the context of conventional territory with its specific spatial and temporal characteristics. The author demonstrates the main local views on peculiarities of the Canadian literary process of the 2nd half of the 20th ― early 21st century and analyzes literary texts. All the novels show profound connection between representatives of Canadian literature, who may seem essentially different but manifest temporal and subjective similarity.
 The paper lists the names of authors working within the ‘double vision’ formula suggested by N. Frye. This approach focuses on the elements of North American culture pertaining to Canadian multicultural world structure as well as traditional cultures of the writers’ ancestral homelands. The paper also considers the generation paradigm, structured on the basis of social and historical algorithms and psychological markers. The types of generational modes (Kim Thuy, Michael Ondaatje) in literature were combined through a common denominator ― canadianness ― based on a double identity.

Unsettled Solidarities: Asian and Indigenous Cross-Representations in the Américas by Quynh Nhu Le

Reviewed by: Unsettled Solidarities: Asian and Indigenous Cross-Representations in the Américas by Quynh Nhu Le Xu Peng (bio) Unsettled Solidarities: Asian and Indigenous Cross-Representations in the Américas, by Quynh Nhu Le. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019. Xiii + 250 pp. $39.95 paper. ISBN: 978-1-4399-1627-8. Starting with a poem that connects the Sand Creek massacre in Colorado (1864) to the massacre of Vietnamese people in My Lai (1968), Quynh Nhu Le's book Unsettled Solidarities: Asian and Indigenous Cross-Representations in the Américas presents an alternative reading of the lived experience of Asian and Indigenous peoples in the Americas. Responding to the vast corpus of scholarship in ethnic studies, Asian American studies, and Indigenous studies that tends to treat Asian and Indigenous peoples as two separate subjects or objects, Le pioneers the effort in bringing these two different yet interlaced experiences together, and confronts this crossing with regard to the imposition of settler colonialism and liberal ideology. By employing a comparative approach to reading the literary representation ranging from the United States and Canada to Mexico and Brazil, she argues that Asian and Indigenous encounters have revealed the structure and the nuanced forms of "settler racial hegemonies" through "settle racial tense" (4–5). At the same time, however, the antiracial and anticolonial narratives produced by these two groups in turn are complicit in the construction and the domination of settler racial hegemonies. Le's book consists of four chapters. The first one, "Historiographical Tensions," invites us to read Maxine Hong Kingston's China Men (1980) and Gerald Vizenor's Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 (2003). Through these two historiographies, Le examines the heroic and warrior traditions in U.S. Asian American and Indigenous historical narratives, which are easily integrated as the "rememorialization of their stories" (57) into "the formation and maintenance of U.S. settler colonial power" (29). Even if these stories aim to resist U.S. hegemony, they still end up obscuring "the violence on and incorporation of Asian and Indigenous peoples in U.S. settler colonial and imperial processes" (27). On [End Page 514] the other hand, by delving into the feelings and memories of the characters produced and circulated in both narratives, Le locates the "affective ruptures" (28) from which the solidarities between these two groups may develop. Chapter two shifts its attention from historical to "Legal/Juridical Tensions," and from the U.S. to the Canadian context. By reflecting upon the public apologies of two Canadian prime ministers, Brian Mulroney in 1988 and Stephen Harper in 2008, in light of Joy Kogawa's novel Obasan (1981) and Marie Clements's play Burning Vision (2012), Le calls attention to the movements and narratives of redress and reconciliation. Public apologies, in this case, provoke and justify "settler racial structures of feeling" (62) among Asian and Indigenous peoples, and eventually turn their voices into a settlement with the settler racial state, which is also shown in other literary and theatrical representations reminding us of the settler colonial grammars. In the meantime, the shared emotion of grief and grievances between these two groups are metaphorically depicted to "reveal the instabilities in settler racial hegemonies" (94). Moving from British settler colonialism to that of the Spanish and Portuguese, Le unpacks another history and presence, focusing on "Economic Tensions" in chapter three. She first refers back to José Vasconcelos's and Gilberto Freyre's critiques of mestizaje/mestiçagem discourse in Mexico and Brazil, respectively, in order to contextualize the "representations of critical resistance to global capitalist encroachment in Latin America" (96), featured in Karen Tei Yamashita's Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990), and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead (1991). Through her readings, she discloses how "co-constitutive representations of Indigenous and Asian peoples" (105), in their dialogue with economic changes and global capitalism, rearticulate settler and racial legacies of discourses on mestizaje/mestiçagem. Thus, the narrative of racial mixture is limited in the sense that it fails to theoretically exhaust the tension as well as the intimacy shared by these two groups. The last chapter, "Biopolitical Tensions," strongly resonating with the lived experiences of Asian and Indigenous...

Remembering the atrocities of their ancestral lands: reading Korean American “comfort women” novels in Japan

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the significance of reading two Korean American novels which address the issue of Japanese military sexual slavery (known as the “comfort women” system) in the context of Japan: Nora Okja Keller’s Comfort Woman and Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life. I will explore how this act can facilitate the understanding of the militarized sexual violence in the present social and discursive context of Japan, where the issue suffers from a strong backlash. Lee’s A Gesture Life with its critique of multiple militarized imperialisms challenges the Japanese revisionists’ effort to deny the egregious wrongs of Japan’s military sexual slavery; it also responds to popular criticism in Japan that Korean/Americans disregard the practices of Western imperial and military violence and only condemn Japanese war crimes. The paper in turn also reads Keller’s Comfort Woman through the frame of Joy Kogawa’s Obasan, a Japanese Canadian novel which remembers the internment and U.S. atomic bombing of Nagasaki. My aim here is to examine both the risks and possibilities which this reading can generate. While it can help us see the comparable acts of remembering war sufferings from the standpoint of diasporas, it can also erase the non-equivalence between the two histories.

“Peter Pan Syndrome” or Psychological Therapy: Fairy Tales and Self-Maturity in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan

Fairy tale as a special literary genre is gaining much attention in recent decades. Apart from serving as a popular material for postmodern rewriting, it also can be interpreted from the perspective of children’s psychological development. In Joy Kogawa’s novel Obasan, Naomi, a silence Japanese Canadian girl exiled during WWII, is constantly intoxicated in fairy tales and folklores like Momotaro, Peter Rabbit, Snow White, Goldilocks, and Three bear and other stories. By re-narrating the relentless world as a little fairy tale-teller, she once attempted to evade in the imagery bubble when encountering sexual molestation, vicious racial discrimination, identity conundrum and traumatic experiences of evacuation from coastal Vancouver to ghost town Slocan and Baker farm Graton during the WWII. Nevertheless, in each story Naomi absorbs the nutrition from imagination as an alternate facet of reality and experiences self-maturity. Therefore, whether the fairy tale serves as an unrealistic utopia for the escapist “Peter Panner”, or a dose of therapeutic potion to sooth her anxieties and despair rooted in the historical hardships is open to investigating.

Interethnic solidarity in Joy Kogawa’s novels: the faith of Japanese Canadians and First Nations people

Interethnic solidarity in Joy Kogawa’s novels: the faith of Japanese Canadians and First Nations people

Confluence Narratives: Ethnicity, History, and Nation-Making in the Americas

Confluence Narratives: Ethnicity, History, and Nation-Making in the Americas

The Faces of Love: The Curriculum of Loss

My brother was diagnosed with cancer in early July, 2017. He died on August 22, 2017. I have written many poems about growing up with my brother, and now that he has died, I am revisiting the poems I once wrote and writing more because writing is my way of addressing grief. Writing is an integral path in the curriculum of loss, and I trust writing will lead me to the understanding I need to begin each new day with hope, even joy in the midst of loss. Joy Kogawa (2016) sees “the world as an open book embedded with stories” that we can hear “if we have ears to hear” (p. 149). When my brother died, the loss was grievous, but the loss reminded me I am alive and I must keep on telling stories. I am learning to live with the curriculum of loss. As one who is left behind, my calling is to remember my brother and to share stories about him, but my calling is also to explore connections between life and loss, and the possibilities that extend beyond loss. Ultimately the curriculum of loss is a curriculum of hope. I want to be open to learning from my brother. I am not satisfied with remembering or memorializing him. I want to continue in a pedagogic relationship with my brother so that I learn from both memories and loss, as well as from the possibilities that continue.

Performing Race, Speaking the Body

Performing Race, Speaking the Body

Representations of Home in Obasan and Nihonjin: The Issei, Nisei, Sansei of Canada and Brazil

Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981) and Oscar Nakasato’s Nihonjin (2011) are two novels that narrate the lives of Japanese diaspora in Canada and Brazil respectively. Both countries share a rich tradition of Japanese migration during the late 19 th and early 20 th centuries, which, while distinct in important ways, has resulted in a significant body of cultural production. In this article, I examine spatiotemporal treatments of the home space in Obasan and Nihonjin , arguing that this realm serves two primary functions: 1) as a site for the expression and construction of identity 2) as a point of disruption and resistance in the face of cultural, linguistic and national alienation. Examining Japanese migration literature from a comparative lens sheds light on the past as a gateway to the present, while nuancing national discourses around race and ethnicity. Although these two narratives are separated by thousands of miles and thirty years in their publication dates, Japanese migrant tales from Brazil and Canada teach us diverse and intersecting lessons about ethnic heritage and cultural plurality. The domestic space is particularly critical for observing these crossings as its attention to language, food culture and other artifacts reveals a multi-layered experience.

Historical Trauma of Differential Racialization and Diaspora in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan

Historical Trauma of Differential Racialization and Diaspora in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan

The Japanese American Experience Through Literature: Joy Kogawa’s Obasan and Mitsuye Yamada’s Poetry

La comunidad japonesa-americana se ha visto marcada por la experiencia del internamiento en campos de concentración a consecuencia de la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Este hecho histórico demostró que a pesar del carácter multicultural de las sociedades estadounidense y canadiense lo que prevalecía era la noción de la supremacía blanca. Joy Kogawa y Mitsuye Yamada fueron de las primeras voces que rompieron con el silencio de canadienses y estadounidenses de origen japonés. Ambas exploran cómo las políticas racistas de sus respectivos países han afectado no sólo sus vidas, sino también las de sus antepasados y la de las generaciones más jóvenes.Abstract:The Japanese American community has been deeply marked by the internment experience as a result of the Second World War. This historical event demonstrated the fact that, despite the multicultural nature of U.S. and Canadian societies, notions of white supremacy were the ones that prevailed. Joy Kogawa and Mitsuye Yamada were two of the first voices that emerged breaking the silence of Canadian and American citizens of Japanese origin. They explore the ways in which the racist policies of their respective countries had affected not only their own lives, but also that of their ancestors and of the younger generations.

Japanese-Canadian wartime history through Joy Kogawa’s Obasan

This article intends to investigate the narration of historical facts under new perspectives trough the novel Obasan, from the Japanese-Canadian author Joy Kogawa. The choice of the mentioned novel is due to the fact that it enables the observation of the manners the concepts of identity, memory and representation interact to portray new representations of a determined people by the reinterpretation of historical facts. Throughout the article it will be analyzed the varied narrative strategies Joy Kogawa employs to represent new versions of facts related to Japanese Canadians and their internment promoted by Canadian government in inner Canada during World War II. It will also be observed the manners through which fiction can collaborate to a people’s search for redemption with their traumatic past and consequent actions towards improvements for their present.

The Silence that Will Not Speak: Asian American Women’s Narrative of Resistance in Grace M. Cho’s Haunting the Korean Diaspora (2008) and Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981)

The Silence that Will Not Speak: Asian American Women’s Narrative of Resistance in Grace M. Cho’s Haunting the Korean Diaspora (2008) and Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981)

A Brief History of Speed/Evil Speed

A Brief History of Speed/Evil Speed Glenn Deer (bio) A brief history of speed would emphasize that the core existential problem is the limit of corporeal time: the need for speed would evaporate without memento mori and time’s wingèd chariot hovering near. But think of how the amount of work would expand proportionately if mortality could be indefinitely postponed. The ecological dystopian history of speed is the screaming ninny nanny on the Faustian roller coaster of modernity: you asked the engines of industry to accelerate the Steampunk Armada of glistening fetish objects from the colonies for near instant consumption: dark Satanic Mills, “The City of the End of Things,” Ridley Walker, Modern Times, Paul (oh) Virilio. The Faustian promise of speed now shackles us not with the escape from drudgery or more leisure time but with disordered rest. We are sleep deprived by the demands of the speedy economy of the plugged in screen world. Speed is not the mechanical bride but the expectation that you will be on call 24/7, twittering, texting, or working on your game speed. Speed as the Faustian promise was supposed to be the solution to the problem of human limits and the physical challenges of mastering the boundaries of space. [End Page 6] To vault over that space with the icbm (Gravity’s Rainbow) rather than the English longbow. To accelerate communication, to secure territories, mobilize consensus, to feed the world with the speed of growth, and accelerated farm production. The holder of the profits of speed is advanced capitalism, the captains of industrial production, the speed profiteers who buy time with accumulated wealth. The ecological dystopian history of speed would point out that the non-renewable energy resources, petro-based, are rapidly ruining the planet: that the economic engines of speed, continuing growth, are already out of control. The language of speed as a value in the arena of narrative consumption is fraught with huckster snake oil promises: speed-reading can be taught, but what will you remember? (What will you remember? What will you remember?) Brain neuroscientists at mit have recently found that the brain can process visual information within thirteen milliseconds.1 (But what will you remember?) That is, you can recognize an object distinctly in less than the blink of an eye. But what use is the rapid barrage of such images if you cannot remember them or act upon them? Too fast and too furious. While the speed of thought is out-computed by the chess-programming computer, the winged foot is a metaphor that still outstrips the supercharged abacus. (But what will you remember?) Allegories of speed tell us that haste makes waste: time-consuming waste management. Speed cannibalizes itself in the allegory of the problems that human speed creates: the sorcerer’s apprentice makes a mess. Speed in literary culture and language study still receives its privileged status: speedy learners, speedy readers, telegrammatic, truncated, Orwell-inspired, terse missives favoured over the indulgent and slowly meandering meditations that luxuriate copiously. Yet the virtue of close reading is that it asks us to slow down and read the form, and not to rush the reading experience but to return, again and again. Not the speed of thought but the thoughtfulness of speed time as a human problem. Critical narrative time reflects back on speed, puts that pulsing squeaking genie back into the bottle, watches that speed genie squirm. Glenn Deer University of British Columbia Glenn Deer Glenn Deer teaches Asian North American literature, Canadian literature, multi-ethnic and mixed race writing, cultural studies, and theory in the English Department at the University of British Columbia. His recent publications include an ebook on George Woodcock (co-edited with Matthew Gruman) and essays on the activist figure in the novels of Joy Kogawa and on allegories of national sacrifice in the novels of Mordecai Richler. In 2012 he was a recipient of a University Killam Teaching Prize, and he is currently an Associate Editor for Canadian Literature. Footnotes 1. Anne Trafton, “In the blink of an eye.” MIT News. MIT. 16 January 2014. Web. 26 June 2015. [End Page 7] Copyright © 2015 Association of Canadian...

“None of Us Escaped the Naming”: Reclaiming Identities and Space in Joy Kogawa’s Obasan

Obasan (1981) recalls how stigmatizing labels served to justify the evacuation of the Japanese-Canadian community from British Columbia. As the “renaming” of the community as enemy aliens entailed loss of home, citizenship and a sense of identity, Obasan explores means to reclaim identity. One way to do so is for the narrator to reclaim space as she inscribes the history of her community into the landscape.