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Militarized Friendship Narratives: Enemy Aliens and Indigenous Outsiders in Cynthia Kadohata’s Weedflower
- College Literature
- West Chester University
- Volume 41, Number 1, Winter 2014
- pp. 66-89
- 10.1353/lit.2014.0000
- Article
- Additional Information
Cynthia Kadohata’s 2006 novel Weedflower imagines alternative contact between Japanese Americans and Mohave at the Poston war relocation center during World War II. This contact, though contentious at times, develops into a close friendship between the protagonist Sumiko and Frank, a Mohave boy from the Colorado River Indian Reservation where Poston is located. Kadohata emphasizes militarized friendship narratives—stories about unlikely friendships that develop in the difficult contexts of war—as the catalyst for critiquing US settler colonialism. Kadohata’s focus on these unlikely friendships allows for insights into different ways of seeing US history and understanding social relations as well as the uneven power dynamics between differently raced groups within the American body politic.