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Part 2
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l l Part 2 Previous chapters examined the ways in which discourses of black citizenship from the mid- to late nineteenth century deployed American Orientalism to negotiate the vulnerable political status of black Americans . Part 2 inverts this analytical trajectory to examine how processes of black racialization are variously represented in Asian American novels that produce narratives of national belonging during the World War II period. This shift to fiction enables us to examine how Asian American national identity could be imagined or narrativized when the notion of the Asian as an American citizen was both paradoxical and legally negated. We can understand World War II as a period when black racial exclusion became a political contradiction for the U.S. state, whereas the expulsion of Japanese Americans from the national citizenry did not pose a similar crisis of legitimation. For instance, A. Philip Randolph’s threat of a black “march on Washington” succeeded in pressuring President Franklin D. Roosevelt to sign Executive Order 8802, ordering the desegregation of industrial labor in all plants with federal contracts. The political expedience of expanding black civil rights at this historical conjuncture was discontinuous with the wartime internment of Japanese Americans, whose claims to U.S. citizenship did not similarly resonate when racially defined as a national threat. This relationship between the expansion of civil rights and U.S. war in Asia was sustained throughout the twentieth century as racial liberalism became critical to U.S. geopolitical legitimacy in the fight against fascism and the cold war. The increasing political legitimacy of black claims to full inclusion during the mid-twentieth century registers in Asian American cultural production through imaginings that agency, racial recalcitrance, and even national belonging are in the domain of blackness. The relationship between mass culture and U.S. national identity was also a critical dimension of discourses of citizenship in this period. The ascendance of radio and film after the 1920s constituted new technolo- x Part 2 gies in the making of U.S. national consciousness and identity, and the immediacy of President Roosevelt’s radio “fireside chats” produced a new subjective experience in the making of the citizen-subject. Commercial entertainment programs were even more important to the national culture , and blackface was at the center of these emergent cultural institutions . From Amos ’n Andy, to D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, to the wildly popular Al Jolson films, American national identity incorporated white ethnic difference and was consolidated through mass cultural consumption of performative disavowals of black racial difference. The following chapters examine how two Asian American novels variously represent black subjects and black social space in an effort to redress the exclusion of Asian Americans from the national citizenry during the World War II period. Gendered discourses of black urban pathology are a central feature of No-No Boy and Clay Walls, functioning as an ambivalent form of Asian American cultural politics that negotiates the state demand for assimilation. John Okada, a nisei (second-generation Japanese American) who served in the U.S. Army during World War II, sets his novel No-No Boy in the Central district of downtown Seattle where he was born and raised in the multiracial ghetto before and after his family’s internment. Ronyoung Kim’s novel, Clay Walls, could be characterized as autobiographical fiction, recounting the experiences of her Korean American family in Los Angeles between the 1920s and 1940s. Kim, who was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles, writes in a manner that is similarly characterized by a textured familiarity with the nonwhite urban neighborhood that is the setting of the novel. The novels’ publication dates are not determining factors in the following chapters, as my analysis is not predicated on a periodization of Asian American literary production. Rather, I focus on how Asian American authors narrate their national formations in the particular racialized sociopolitical context of ghettoized urban space in the World War II period. These novels negotiate Asian American racialization and respond to the violent mandate of assimilation by constructing ambivalent relationships of both disavowal of and longing for black urban space and black working-class culture. ...