"Living words": Tracing processes of national subject formation and racialization in Japanese Canadian life writing
Date
1999
Authors
Quirt, Maggie
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Abstract
ln the process of being constituted as subjects, individuals respond to a variety of coterminous interpellations. Identification along lines of national affiliation is encouraged, in part, through diverse pedagogical strategies, while identification based on racial categories is developed through a process of racialization characterized by porous temporal boundaries. Both forms of identification are ambivalent; while they may be mobilizing processes, they can also serve to contain individuals within limiting fields of association.
In the World War II Japanese Canadian internment, identification based on national and racial affiliation became of paramount importance to displaced individuals. Japanese Canadian life writing narratives chronicling this event provide first-hand evidence of how such forms of identification operate. By exploring the discursive formation and content of these texts, 1 suggest that national subject formation and racialization can be understood as ongoing processes. This, in turn, invites us to re-visit and theorize anew the history of the internment.