scispace - formally typeset
Search or ask a question
Author

Josephine Park

Bio: Josephine Park is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Emperor. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 7 citations.
Topics: Emperor

Papers
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This article explored a recent reimagination of Japanese internment in order to suggest a way of understanding Asian American subjects as something more than immigrants: they are enemies, defined as enemies.
Abstract: This essay explores a recent reimagination of Japanese internment in order to suggest a way of understanding Asian American subjects as something more than immigrants: they are enemies Julie Otsuka’s 2002 novel When the Emperor Was Divine subjects an unnamed, typical American family to military detention, evacuation, and forced incarceration Compelled to identify with Enemy Japan, the members of the family transform into alien, treacherous beings My reading focuses on small expressions of allegiance to Emperor Hirohito, who becomes a dangerous and tantalizing figure of desire in the novel

7 citations


Cited by
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Daniel McKay1
TL;DR: Among the items of military equipment associated with the ground or naval engagements of World War II, few resonate as strongly as the airplane does for the air war (Leahy and Dechow 315).
Abstract: Among the items of military equipment associated with the ground or naval engagements of World War II, few resonate as strongly as the airplane does for the air war (Leahy and Dechow 315). Its iconic status pervades the boyish adventurism of British author Jack Higgins, the biting satire of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), the numbed silences of German critic W. G. Sebald, and the nostalgic turn taken in Japanese film director Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises (2013). Across any number of different forms and media, the airplane retains its distinctive allure, sometimes tinged with menacing or polemical undertones (Grayling 76; Beevor, Bishop, Grayling, and Overy) but more often erring toward a hagiographic turn. When the latter holds true, standard fare involves accentuating the war record of aviators on one’s own side while leaving the identities and motivations of enemy pilots and flight crews largely unaddressed, a trend that reprises the one-sidedness of wartime propaganda (Hase 2-3). Needless to say, this neglect of enemy subjectivity is present in depictions of personnel across every service branch, and yet the post-war years have seen noteworthy attempts to depict enemy ground troops sympathetically. As early as 1948, for example, American author Irwin Shaw paid close attention to the life experiences of Nazi soldiers in his novel The Young Lions, the South African author Laurens van der Post was uncommonly sympathetic to Japanese prison guards in his 1963 novella The Seed and the Sower, and British author Louis de Bernieres’s novel Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (1994) has made life in the Italian army appear almost bucolic.

10 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: This paper analyzed the relationship between Otsuka's When the Emperor was Divine and life writing, memory, and the present, and found that the novel's relationship with life writing and memory is similar to ours.
Abstract: Reading Julie Otsuka's, When the Emperor was Divine, this article analyses the novel's relationship with life writing, memory and the present. Blurring the line between fact and fiction, Otsuka's n...

10 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The authors examines how Otsuka's use of the first-person plural "we" narration and self-mimicry locates Japanese American femininity and agency at the historical confluence of imperialist and assimilationist dynamics, and argues that the novel's stylistics make visible not only a collective minority consciousness, but also the complex subjectivity of picture brides in a transnational space of diasporic negotiation, social masking and situational coalition.
Abstract: ABSTRACT Julie Otsuka’s 2011 novel The Buddha in the Attic politicizes the first-person plural “we” narration to recuperate the silenced voices of Japanese American picture brides. The novel’s unconventional narrative style, however, has been criticized for reducing picture brides to “lists” and reproducing stories that deprive Japanese Americans of individuality. This article examines how Otsuka’s use of the “we” narration and self-mimicry locates Japanese American femininity and agency at the historical confluence of imperialist and assimilationist dynamics. It contends that the novel’s stylistics make visible not only a collective minority consciousness, but also the complex subjectivity of picture brides in a transnational space of diasporic negotiation, social masking, and situational coalition. In doing so, the novel questions not only a lack of individuality, but individuality itself. That is, it demonstrates how ethnic and diasporic literature can ethically comment on a universal notion of political individuality and revise it with multiple and contingent perspectives.

3 citations

Book ChapterDOI
01 Jan 2020
TL;DR: This paper examined the impact of the emergent present, including the post-9/11 situations, on the reconstruction and rethinking of Japanese American internment; the transnational perspective of internment history and interracial relationships; and the postmemory of the generation born after WWII.
Abstract: This chapter studies the Japanese American internment narratives published in the early twenty-first century as “neo-internment narratives.” I use the hyphenated term “neo-internment” to highlight both the continuity and disjunction of narratives that challenge the historiography of internment while revisiting and reworking the representation of internment in earlier periods. I examine the works of both well-known and new writers’ first internment novels, focusing on Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine, Perry Miyake’s 21st Century Manzanar, and Cynthia Kadohata’s Weedflower. The three novels revitalize internment narratives by engaging in the following aspects: (1) the impact of the emergent present, including the post-9/11 situations, on the reconstruction and rethinking of Japanese American internment; (2) the transnational perspective of internment history and interracial relationships; and (3) the postmemory of the generation born after WWII. I probe into the post-9/11 and post-redress internment memories that are reconstructed or invoked by these narratives using a critical lens attentive to the dynamics of memory at the intersection of the past and the present. In doing so, I contend that Otsuka, Miyake, and Kadohata’s neo-internment narratives illuminate cross-racial and intergenerational memories of Japanese American internment, as well as other events of mass racial violence in American history.

1 citations