Notes on Mira Shimabukuro, Relocating Authority

Shimabukuro, Mira. Relocating Authority: Japanese Americans Writing to Redress Mass Incarceration. University Press of Colorado, 2015. 

I read this book to see whether it would be good for the comparative rhetoric/"rhetorics in contact" course I'm developing. At first, I was thinking of just finding a chapter that I could use from it, but after reading the book, I think I'd be more interested in assigning the whole book. It's good for students to see how the author develops an overall argument or perspective as she works out the implications of her study, and I appreciate especially how reflective Shimabukuro is about her research and how the topic of her book connects to various aspects of her life. 

A few other thoughts about the book that I think recommend it for my course (or for others to read it!):

• There's the exemplary way that she uses Japanese rhetorics/concepts together with rhetorics of Americanness in analyzing the rhetorical/literacy practices of the Japanese American internees. For instance, in chapter 6, she describes the writing/rewriting of a petition made by Japanese mothers to suspend the conscription of their Japanese American sons. (At the time, as Shimabukuro explains, the Issei, or first-generation, mothers were not allowed to become US citizens, but their sons, who were Nissei, or second-generation, were American citizens.) Shimabukuro shows how the mothers' petition combines the rhetoric of the "dutiful wife, intelligent mother" (ryosai-kenbo) that had become an important gender discourse during the Meiji era with rhetorics of American citizenship (and even what she calls "proto-model minority" rhetoric) to argue that the Japanese mothers had raised good American sons who deserved better than to be incarcerated in the "internment camps," only to be called up to fight for a country that didn't give them or their families the rights due American citizens. I like how Shimabukuro shows the nuance of the rhetorics in contact here, even showing how the idea of ryosai-kenbo is not some sort of timeless Japanese concept, but that it was a more recent phenomenon itself--and that it connected to the problematic "nation-unifying and empire-building efforts taking place in Japan" (180). 
  
  
• I also like the way that Shimabukuro shows that the effects of these literacy activities stretch across time and intertwine with other literacy activities and rhetorical practices. As she points out, much of the writing that she discusses wasn't "successful" in the immediate sense of changing the mind of the US government. In the case of the mothers' petition, their Japanese American sons were still drafted, and the mothers only received a perfunctory response from Eleanor Roosevelt. (Oh, how you have gone down in my estimation, Mrs. Roosevelt!) In the case of the Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee's "Manifesto," in which they stated that they would refuse induction, the writers ended up in prison. But Shimabukuro demonstrates how these and other writings, including "private" writings such as poems written by internees, resurfaced or were brought back to the surface years later and served as models or inspiration for latter-day Asian American civil rights activists. She sees the recirculation of these texts as a kind of "relocated literacy" (196, emphasis in original), where there's a "reactivation of that rhetorical-activist force by Japanese American activist-descendants operating in contexts in which the Nikkei community has grown stronger" (196, emphasis in original).
  
  
• Shimabukuro also brings up the concept of "resistant capital," citing Tara Yosso--it's meant to be considered in opposition to Bourdieu's idea of "cultural capital," and it signifies "knowledges and skills fostered through oppositional behavior that challenges inequality" (Yosso 80, qtd. in Shimabukuro 199). It appears that Yosso primarily has in mind communities of color in the US, but I wonder if it could apply in other places, too, such as (of course) Taiwan.  
  
  
• Part of the book is a narrative of Shimabukuro's family's (particularly her father's) involvement in Japanese American activism, and by extension it traces the author's own process of developing her research project. I think this makes it more accessible for undergraduates who can thereby see how she did the research rather than just reading the results of that research. It also shows that you can be passionate about your topic and that it can grow from your own experiences, so perhaps it's an angle on doing academic work that they might not be familiar with. 

So I think I've talked myself into using this book in my course, if I get to teach it. It can also tie into a possible archival project I plan to have students do in the course. Coincidentally, Northeastern's Asian American Studies program is hosting a symposium called "Remember! Asian Americans and the Archive" on November 17, which I've signed up to attend.

Notes on Chu Yu-hsun (朱宥勳), When They Were Not Writing Novels 【他們沒在寫小說的時候】

朱宥勳 (Chu Yu-hsun). 【他們沒在寫小說的時候：戒嚴台灣小說家群像】When They Were Not Writing Novels: Portraits of Novelists from Taiwan Under Martial Law. 2nd. ed. 大塊文化, 2023.

Note: This isn't going to be a complete discussion of the book--to do that would probably involve writing a post as long as the book itself!

In this very readable collection of essays, Chu Yu-hsun focuses on the socio-political contexts in which nine postwar Taiwan novelists lived and worked. I especially like the anecdotes that Chu includes about the writers' experiences (such as this one about Chung Chao-cheng's "bold" decision about paper that I posted earlier). Because the book doesn't focus as much on their actual novels or their writing processes, I get the funny feeling (as I did with A-chin Hsiau's book) that many of these novelists spent more time on other activities than they did on writing novels. Hualing Nieh Engle (聶華苓), for instance, goes from editing a literary column in Free China Journal (自由中國半月刊) to moving to Iowa on the invitation of Paul Engle to join the Iowa Writer's Workshop, which Engle directed, and eventually developing an international writing program at Iowa. (Where did she find time to write her own novels?!) 

Chung Chao-cheng is depicted as spending a lot of time developing a network of Taiwanese writers and helping them get published. He pops up in other people's chapters, too, for example trying unsuccessfully to get Chen Yingzhen (陳映真) to allow his work to be published in an anthology of Taiwanese nativist writers (Chen wasn't interested because he was a pro-unification Taiwanese leftist--in fact, judging from what Chu has to say, Chen wouldn't even accept being called "Taiwanese"). 

Other writers cross paths in the book, like Lin Haiyin (林海音), who helped Chung Chao-cheng and other Taiwanese writers get opportunities to translate Western works from Japanese. According to Chu (and this is, from what I understand, a dominant narrative), writers who grew up during the Japanese era had a lot of trouble writing and getting published after 1945 because Taiwan's literary scene became dominated by exiled Mainlanders who were more experienced writing in Mandarin and who tended to exclude Taiwanese writers from getting published. Lin Haiyin, who edited the influential literary supplement of the United Daily News (聯合報), worked with Taiwanese writers to get them published, even editing their work for them at times. She had to resign from this position in 1963 due to the "Captain Incident" (船長事件), in which a poem she published got the author and her in trouble when the poem was interpreted as being critical of Chiang Kai-shek. 

The book also touches on some important martial law- and Cold War-era issues, such as the CIA's involvement in Iowa's International Writing Program, the US Information Agency's involvement in the shaping of Taiwan's literature (what Chu's teacher, Chen Jianzhong [陳建忠], has called "unattributed power" [隱蔽權力]), and the relationship between the battle of literary modernism versus nativism and the martial law regime's emphasis on "anti-Communist literature" (反共文學). 

I'm not well-read enough in Taiwanese literary history to evaluate Chu's claims about all of these points, though. I feel I should read some of the books he mentions in his afterword to get a better understanding. I also think I should read Sung-sheng Yvonne Chang's Modernism and Nativist Resistance (1993) and perhaps reread A-chin Hsiau's Politics and Cultural Nativism in 1970s Taiwan (2021) to have a better basis for assessing Chu's book. 

One problem I do have with When They Were Not Writing Novels, though, is that Chu doesn't cite sources for a lot of what he writes about. I realize this is not an academic book (probably that's what made it so readable!), but some bibliography at the end where he acknowledges his sources would help a lot in determining what his conclusions are based on. I was also a bit confused by his comment in the afterword to the effect that while most the book's judgements about the authors come from existing research on Taiwanese literature, a small portion are speculative based on Chu's own literary experience ("本書關於作家的種種判斷，大多得益自台灣文學研究的既成果；少部分則是我以自身的文學經驗推想的"). This made me wonder which portions were based on which. I think a more extensive bibliography would go a long way toward reassuring me about Chu's conclusions. In the end, though, I do want to reemphasize that I enjoyed the book, and it makes me want to dive more deeply into Taiwanese literature, if only as an amateur.

"Sabbatical" update

I noticed that I haven't posted anything yet this month, so I thought I should let my reader know that I'm still working on the projects I'm supposed to be doing this semester. I just sent a draft of my paper to my "mentor" (I'm calling him this; not sure he'd agree with the terminology!). The paper is still a bit of a mess--there's too much I want to say in it and a lot I haven't said. But I thought I should get someone else's view of it before I continue working on it.

I also need to work on the proposal for the comparative rhetoric course I'm planning. It has taken the form of a course in "rhetorics in contact" (as in contact zones), where we would look at situations in which two (or more) groups' discursive practices figure into the kinds of interactions those groups have. I have to read more for this to figure out how I might develop a course of this type.

I'm also working on finishing When They Were Not Writing Novels (【他們沒在寫小說的時候】), which I might have something to say about once I've read the last chapter. So stay tuned...