ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation: REPRESENTATIONS OF THE MILITARY IN 20TH CENTURY ETHNIC AMERICAN LITERATURE Kara Parks Fontenot, Doctor of Philosophy, 2018 Dissertation Directed by: Professor Zita Nunes Department of English In 20th century ethnic American literature, writers deploy representations of the US military to expose the operations of American hegemony, articulate relations of power, reveal how they are maintained, identify contradictions in the rhetoric of American nationalism and imagine not yet manifest possibilities for social justice coalitions that cross racial, ethnic, and national lines. As a national institution controlled by the US government and consuming labor in the form of military service from citizens of all classes, races and ethnicities in ways that reflect existing relations of power in American society at large, the US military presents a unique and powerful site for articulation of relationships between nation, race, and class. As evidence, this dissertation explores six American novels, all published in the 20th century and taking as their subject matter US military involvement in declared and undeclared military conflicts of that era. Close readings of these novels bring our attention to three specific examples of political projects for which representations of the US military in literature have been deployed: to question constructions of American nationalism by highlighting contradictions and inconsistencies, to consider the military’s institutionalized labor practices in order to explore relationships between race and class as well as imagine means of struggling for social justice, and to critique US foreign policy and military operations overseas. These writers individually and collectively refuse to examine race and/or ethnicity in isolation but instead consider these aspects of subjectivity in the context of national identity, class relations, immigration, globalization, and other social forces. While the relationship between ethnicity and military service has been addressed in other disciplines, such as history, political science, and social science, I argue that literature is a medium especially well-suited for this exploration as it not only allows for the articulation of existing social relations but also for the imagination of not yet manifest possibilities for social justice coalitions that cross racial, ethnic, and national lines. REPRESENTATIONS OF THE MILITARY IN 20TH CENTURY ETHNIC AMERICAN LITERATURE by Kara Parks Fontenot Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2018 Advisory Committee: Professor Zita Nunes, Chair Professor Elsa Barkley Brown Professor Randy Ontiveros Professor Barry Pearson Professor Mary Helen Washington  Copyright by Kara Parks Fontenot 2018 All rights reserved. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Over ten years of doctoral work, the list of those to whom I owe thanks has continuously grown and reveals the truth that I could never have finished this work without an elaborate network of support. . . . My first thanks go to Lt Col Morris “Moose” Fontenot, my husband for 18 years and friend for 22 years, who always supported my career ambitions. He encouraged me to apply to PhD programs in 2006 at a time in our life together when we had two young children, he had a demanding military career, and I was teaching part-time, handling most of the household responsibilities, and actively supporting his military career. I thought I was too busy to handle a doctoral program at the time and planned to postpone my dream of pursuing a PhD for “someday,” but he said: “Babe, you should go ahead and apply. We’ll make it work.” If I hadn’t applied to PhD programs then, I may have never applied at all and almost surely would not have been accepted if I had applied later. I will always be grateful for his encouragement and moral support as well as for his financial support of our family over the years. We were a team and always shared our career successes, and this one is definitely partially his. His legacy lives on. My second thanks go to my children. To my older daughters, Natalie and Nicole Fontenot, who were six and eight years old when I started this PhD program and are now sixteen and eighteen years old as I complete it, I am grateful for your ceaseless understanding and respect during the times when mom was unavailable because I was studying or teaching. I was in either a master’s degree or PhD program as well as teaching for most of your childhood years, yet I was also very present in your everyday lives. I hope in your memories that the times I was there for you outnumber the times that I wasn’t. To my youngest daughter, Marjorie Parks Vander Salm, at one year old, you will not remember the period of your mother’s doctoral work, but you will bear witness to my ongoing career as scholar and teacher in the years to come. I hope all three of you always know that you are more important to me than my professional work. However, as a woman, I also hope my commitment to balancing family and career has encouraged you, my daughters, to pursue your own dreams in both domestic and public spaces and find the balance that works best for you. It is for you more than for myself that I will travel to College Park to don the doctoral gown, cap, and hood in order to be photographed with my daughters on the occasion of my graduation. No words are adequate to thank my parents, Gregory and Stephanie Parks, for their infinite support that began in my infancy and has continued throughout my life. With respect to this doctoral program, I especially thank my father, Gregory, for moving to Okinawa, Japan for four months in 2010 to care for my children and support my husband while I completed the last of my teaching fellowship, my coursework, and my comprehensive exams in College Park, Maryland. I also especially thank my mother, Stephanie, for the many times she provided childcare for my children and helped with my household responsibilities while I pursued conferences, research, writing and other academic endeavors and also for her willingness to live without my father for four months. To both of my parents, your commitment to your children and grandchildren is exceeded by none. ii The patience, support and encouragement of my dissertation advisor, Zita Nunes, will never be forgotten nor will the support of the other members of my dissertation committee, Mary Helen Washington, Barry Pearson, Randy Ontiveros, and Elsa Barkley Brown. I am humbled that you all took time from your busy schedules to offer your insightful and valuable feedback on my work. When you initially agreed to serve on my dissertation committee, none of us anticipated what a long-term commitment that would be. I will never forget that you stood by me as I weathered the death of my husband as well as a number of smaller challenges and continued to support me until I was finally able to finish. I am also grateful for the mentorship, friendship, and support of Kandice Chuh, Jonathan Auerbach, Theresa Coletti, Linda Macri, Kara Morillo, Sharon Higby, Scott Eklund, and Manju Suri, also from the University of Maryland-College Park community. Credit is due also to my master’s degree instructors and thesis committee at University of Central Florida who supported my work and encouraged me to apply to PhD programs, especially Lynn Casmier-Paz, my thesis advisor, as well as Kevin Meehan and Cecelia Rodríguez Milanés, who served on my committee. I thank also my other professional colleagues around the United States who encouraged me through the labors of my dissertation. I am particularly grateful to my dean, department chair, and colleagues at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University: Jim Schultz, Terri Maue, Kelly George, Debra Bourdeau, Ann Ade, Ron Serra, Maryam El-Shall, Alex Rister and Stephanie Gilli-Sanfilippo. I also thank Shaila Mehra, Amy Benson Brown, Maria Bellamy Rice, Erika Koss, Margaret Pylanth and Katie Griggs for their encouragement and support. To my students, past, present, and future—you are the reason my work has meaning. I learn with you and from you as much as you learn with and from me. Ancora Imparo. My friends who were not directly involved with my academic work but who provided the moral support that enabled me to continue pursuing the PhD despite many challenges and obstacles are priceless. I am particularly grateful to my best friend/sister, Dawn Whitehurst, for her love and support. We have been there for each other through it all since our high school years regardless of what havoc life brings or how frequently or infrequently we are able to see each other or talk. I also thank all of my wise sister- friends who were close enough and loving enough to give me a firm but gentle nudge to “go ahead and finish already”: Denise Edwards, Elizabeth Kovacs, and Lois Brabson. I thank also my many friends who always understood when I studied or worked instead of socializing and who offered their unconditional support through the worst of times, particularly the members of the USAF F-15 Eagle communities in Japan, Massachusetts and around the world. I also recognize and appreciate the women whose labor freed mine to pursue an academic career by caring for my children, cleaning our home, and sometimes even cooking our meals at different periods of time over the years. These tasks were performed for money but also with love, which cannot be purchased, most particularly by Lilian Andrade, Manika Makhijani, Jillian Bergstrom, and Nadia Ruby although there were also others iii who helped, as well. There were times when I felt like I was drowning in work and household responsibilities, and these women kept me afloat. The labor of these women was purchased largely with money earned by my husband in order to free my some of my time to pursue my own career outside the home. That arrangement is another entire dissertation waiting to be written. My final thanks go to my partner, James Parker Vander Salm, whose keen intellect and ethical integrity are a combination rarely found. Thank you, Jamie, for your encouragement to finish my dissertation at last, your detailed feedback on my work, and your love and care for our daughter, Marjorie. Although our time together began only during the final stages of this endeavor, I joyfully anticipate sharing the life of the mind, the pleasures of the flesh and the comfort of companionship with you for years to come. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................ ii INTRODUCTION ...............................................................................................................1 CHAPTER ONE Troubled Representations of Ethnic American Military Service .......................................23 CHAPTER TWO Race and the Management of Labor in the US Military ....................................................91 CHAPTER THREE Self-Addressed Envelopes: The Empire Writes Back from Home ..................................157 EPILOGUE ......................................................................................................................193 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................202 v INTRODUCTION Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States. – Frederick Douglass On July 6, 1863, Frederick Douglass called for black men to enlist in the US military, fighting on the side of the Union in the Civil War.1 In the quotation above, Douglass deploys synecdoche in order to fuse the African American and the US military as a way to access citizenship. The elements of the US military uniform—the brass letters and eagle-emblazoned button—represent the nation. The instruments of war—the musket and the bullets—represent the will to fight and possibly die for that nation. Taken as a whole, Douglass metaphorically transforms the African American into the US citizen by means of US military service. In this way, Douglass introduces rhetorical strategies which later ethnic American writers continue to draw upon to address issues of citizenship. In 20th century ethnic American literature, writers deploy representations of the US military to expose the operations of American hegemony, articulate relations of power, reveal how they are maintained, identify contradictions in the rhetoric of American nationalism and imagine not yet manifest possibilities for social justice coalitions that cross racial, ethnic, and national lines. The US military is a national institution controlled by the US government, and it consumes labor in the form of 1 Douglass’s call to arms was heeded by his own sons, Charles and Lewis, who lived with him in Washington DC but traveled to Massachusetts to join the 54th Infantry, a segregated unit of African American enlisted men commanded by white officers, in April 1863 (“Black Soldiers”). 1 military service from citizens of all classes, races, and ethnicities.2 Because these institutionalized relations of power in the military reflect relations of power in American society at large, the US military presents a unique and powerful site for articulation of relationships between nation, race, and class. As evidence, this dissertation explores six American novels,3 all published in the 20th century and taking as their subject matter US military involvement in declared and undeclared military conflicts of that era. These writers exemplify a range of representations of the military in US multi-ethnic literature and use their works to question constructions of American nationalism by highlighting contradictions and inconsistencies, to consider the military’s institutionalized labor practices in order to explore relationships between race and class as well as imagine means of struggling for social justice, and to critique US foreign policy and military operations overseas. These writers individually and collectively refuse to examine race and/or ethnicity in isolation but instead consider these aspects of subjectivity in the context of national identity, class relations, immigration, globalization, and other social 2 The Department of Defense’s Office of Diversity Management and Equal Opportunity monitors military demographics to promote diversity and inclusion in response to President Barack Obama’s Executive Order 13583, which called for a government-wide initiative to promote diversity and inclusion in the federal workforce (“Total Force”). 3 As I began my research, first, I read very broadly. I searched for and read as many texts from ethnic American literary canons with representations of the US military as I could find. As I read, I took note of the political projects of these novels and the narrative strategies they incorporated. I paid special attention to narrative strategies and themes that appeared and reappeared in multiple ethnic canons. As I began to explore, catalog and analyze these powerful representations of the US military, I became overwhelmed by the magnitude of the material I was discovering and realized that I needed to narrow the scope of my project. One way I did this was by limiting my research and arguments to novels although there are many other genres that also contain significant and interesting representations of the US military, including but not limited to memoirs, newspaper articles, oral narratives and poetry, I abandoned those genres for this dissertation but may return to them for future projects. 2 forces. While the relationship between ethnicity and military service has been addressed in other disciplines, such as history, political science, and social science, I argue that literature is a medium especially well-suited for this exploration. Literature allows readers and writers to explore ambiguities and understand that history and representations are not neat. Additionally, literature not only allows for the articulation of existing social relations but also for the imagination of not yet manifest possibilities for social justice coalitions that cross racial, ethnic, and national lines. The narrative strategies and literary devices used to construct these texts reveal the power of the US military in the American imagination. The US military has long been vital to the ways in which the relationships of individuals, groups, and nations to the US nation-state have been imagined. In fact, “willingness to die for one’s country” has been the traditional measure of one’s commitment to the nation.4 Correspondingly, military service has historically been one of the paths to legal citizenship in the United States, presented as a way of metaphorically fighting one’s way into the national body.5 Segregated units in both World Wars provide an example of this. At times, military service has also been asserted as a privilege denied to certain groups of US citizens, such as African Americans during the US Civil War or Japanese Americans at the beginning of World War II. This has been an especially 4 Arjun Appadurai argues for this correlation between citizens’ “willingness to die” and the health of the nation-state in his 1993 argument for the postnational imaginary. 5 Andreas Fahrmeir, in his book Citizenship: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Concept (2007) argues that the state’s need for soldiers requires it to grant rights in exchange for military service. 3 powerful message internally and externally since the US military has served as the face of America overseas and, therefore, linked to fostering a view of (white) US power. Experiences of military force and military service have long characterized racial and ethnic minority life in the United States. US military force has been deployed against every major ethnic minority group in the nation. In various, complex, historically specific situations, the US military has served as a tool to kill, terrorize, oppress, imprison and seize land and/or property from Native Americans, Mexican Americans, African Americans and Asian Americans.6 Members of these ethnic American groups historically excluded from full citizenship have, nevertheless, proudly served in the US military since the American Revolution, earlier in small numbers within integrated enlisted ranks, then in large segregated units during World War II, and later in disproportionately large numbers during the Vietnam War and other wars fought primarily by soldiers drafted or 6 The Department of Indian Affairs was assigned to the War Department after it was established in 1789 as the United States pursued a policy of expansion to the West after the Revolutionary War. Indian Affairs remained assigned to the War Department until 1849 when Indian Affairs was transferred to the Department of the Interior. During the early 19th century, following the signing of the Indian Removal Act (1830), the US Army relocated Native Americans off of their land and toward the West in order to open the land up for white settlement. Conflicts between the US Army and Native Americans continued throughout the 19th century. This is described in Francis Paul Prucha’s The Great Father: The United States Government and The American Indians (1984). The US Army fought against Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the US-Mexico War from 1846-1848 as described in John S. D. Eisenhower’s So Far from God: The U.S. War with Mexico 1846-1848 (1989). The most noteworthy incidence of US military force deployed against Asian Americans is the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II following the bombing of Pearl Harbor as described in Wendy Ng’s Japanese American Internment During World War II: A History and Reference Guide (2002). The US government has repeatedly deployed military troops to quell African American riots during periods of civil unrest, for example during the Detroit riots in July 1967; the Chicago, Washington DC and Baltimore riots of April 1968 (following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr); and the Los Angeles riots of 1992 (following the Rodney King verdict) as described in Walter Rucker and James Nathaniel Upton’s Encyclopedia of American Race Riots (2007). 4 recruited from the American working-class. For many members of ethnic minority groups, US military service has been an avenue for socio-economic mobility and a path to legal citizenship in the US nation-state. It is no wonder then, considering the complex history of ethnic Americans with the US military, that representations of the US military in ethnic American literature are also complex and embark on a wide variety of political projects. Most surprising is that no book-length examination of representations of the US military across multiple ethnic American literary canons has yet been published. A Brief Review of 20th Century US Military Operations A brief review of major US military operations during the 20th century offers historical context for the literary productions I will examine. The United States has been involved in war during almost every decade of the 20th century: World War I (1914- 1918), World War II (1939-1945), The Korean War (1950-1953), Vietnam (1955-1975), The Gulf War (1990-1991). These wars, along with undeclared wars and military interventions,7 have spanned the globe from Europe to the Middle East to East Asia and have resulted in loss of life and other kinds of physical, psychological, and emotional devastation for Americans and, even more so, for people in other nations all around the world. The publicly stated objective of most of America’s 20th century conflicts has been to preserve democracy by stopping the spread of fascism, communism, or terrorism. Economic interests, however, have also undoubtedly influenced the decision-making 7 In 2009, the Congressional Research Service compiled a report that lists undeclared wars and military interventions from 1798-2008 (“Instances”). 5 process. Throughout the 20th century America’s military-industrial complex has dominated the national economy and shaped public policy. Robert W. DeGrasse. Jr, in his book, Military Expansion, Economic Decline: The Impact of Military Spending on U.S. Economic Performance, describes the military as the single largest purchaser of goods and services in the United States and military spending as a method the government uses to stimulate the economy (7). He adds that many US companies are heavily dependent upon military spending: “As a result, defense-dependent companies and industries have a significant interest in preventing reductions in the Defense Department budget. They pursue this interest vigorously through special-interest lobbying and large campaign contributions” (11). US economic interests have also influenced military operations overseas. Although its acquisition of territorial possessions has slackened since the late 19th century, the United States has militarily occupied many other nations throughout the 20th century, prompting Harvard historian Niall Ferguson to maintain that an American empire still exists in all but name and that the US military’s regional combatant commanders around the globe serve in the same capacity as did proconsuls for more traditional Western empires by serving in policy-making and administrative roles in occupied countries: “The United States has few formal colonies, but it possesses a great many small areas of territory within notionally sovereign states that serve as bases for its armed services. Before the deployment of troops for the invasion of Iraq, the US military had around 752 military installations located in more than 130 countries” (Ferguson). Due to new technologies, the way America fights wars has changed over the 20th century, advancing from the trench warfare associated with the Western Front during 6 World War I to the armed and unarmed drones that have been integrated into US military operations during the post-9/11 era.8 These changes in military technology have changed the relationship between American military members and enemy combatants as warfare has become increasingly depersonalized. Many American military members never make human contact with enemy combatants; more American soldiers have been killed in the Middle East by snipers and IEDs than in direct combat. As traditional warfare has been supplanted by guerilla warfare and acts of terrorism, it has become more difficult to distinguish between military and civilian populations. During the nineteenth century, America’s ethnic minorities were frequently barred from the military or forced to serve in segregated units. This was generally true for colored soldiers, such as African-American soldiers, but occasionally also true for ethnic whites (Evans 6-8).9 However, most whites served in ethnically integrated and diverse units, particularly as casualties resulted in attrition and reorganization (9). Therefore, restrictions on military labor roles and opportunities and inequities with regard to supplies, equipment and training were largely distributed along racial lines. During World War I (1914-1918), the US military expanded from 500,000 to over 3.5 million military members (15). Congress passed the Selective Service Act in May 8 As noted by Shawn Kay, in Global Security in The Twenty-First Century: The Quest for Power and the Search for Peace (2006), “As technology makes war more precise, the use of war as a policy option might appear to be a painless exercise, perhaps making it more likely . . . Because technology allows military power to be projected from far-off platforms and the appearance of minimum casualties is established among public opinion, war might be more likely” (174). 9 One example of segregated white ethnic units is the 39th New York Infantry Regiment during the Civil War with eleven companies of men of different nationalities: German, Hungarian, Swiss, Italian, French, Spanish and Portuguese. 7 1917 and began a military draft. This demand for additional military manpower required the service of many members of America’s ethnic minority groups. However, most colored soldiers served in segregated military units, particularly African American soldiers.10 Native Americans, however, served in integrated units and were disproportionately active in the military with over 12,000 of the adult male population serving even though many were not US citizens at the beginning of the war (Krouse 5). Native American military service was rewarded with citizenship conferred on Native American veterans in 1919 and then to all Native Americans in 1924 (Evans 25). During World War I, there was even some consternation about the military service of white ethnic immigrants due to anti-immigrant sentiment of the time (16-19). However, overall, inequities in opportunities, equipment, supplies and training disproportionately affected America’s non-white ethnic minorities. During World War II (1939-1945) all US citizens, regardless of race or nationality, were equally subject to the draft, all military members received the same pay by rank, and all military members were eligible for the GI Bill and other veterans’ benefits. While this was an improvement from previous conflicts, segregation of military units in all branches of the service continued. African-American soldiers were still almost entirely banned from fighting in combat on front lines except for emergencies or shortages and experienced extreme discrimination: worse training and worse equipment, supplies and quarters (Astor 189). African American soldiers also experienced discrimination regarding awards and honors, 10 For example, the 92d and 93d Army divisions were African American combat units created in 1917 in response to protests by blacks about being limited to service in labor battalions. 8 promotions, and advancement. Working in tandem with the discrimination within the military were the Jim Crow laws in the off-base communities at Southern duty stations enforced by local white-supremacist police forces (183). While very limited opportunities existed for blacks to serve in more desirable military roles, these opportunities were rare exceptions.11 Ongoing discrimination against black military members led to the Double- V campaign in which African Americans simultaneously struggled for victory against fascism overseas and victory against racism in the United States (Nalty 142-42). Before Pearl Harbor, racial segregation in the US military was mostly a two-tier system with African Americans in segregated units and all other white and ethnic American soldiers in integrated units. However, Japanese-Americans found themselves in a unique and untenable situation following the attack on Pearl Harbor. First, they were classified as enemy aliens, herded into internment camps, and denied the opportunity to serve in the military (Evans 28). However, later in the war, beginning in January 1944, they were drafted into compulsory military service, even from internment camps, and placed into segregated units. Even then there was ongoing skepticism about the loyalty of Japanese-American military members although Japanese-American units, such as the 100th Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team were highly decorated and accomplished (31). In addition, there were extremely high rates of Japanese-American volunteerism from Hawaii (31). Interestingly, perhaps benefiting from anti-Japanese sentiments, Chinese-American soldiers were not segregated, served alongside white soldiers, and benefitted socially from this experience of military service, moving from 11 One example of these exceptional opportunities is the historically unprecedented presence of black pilots who served as Tuskegee Airmen. 9 Jim Crow-style segregation and denial of citizenship before the war to being allowed to earn citizenship in 1943 (although with a restrictive yearly quota of 105 Chinese). Additionally, after the war, Chinese workers’ wives and children could immigrate for the first time (32-33). Latinos, mostly Mexican-American or Puerto Rican, and Native Americans mostly served alongside whites in integrated units although they did continue to experience racial discrimination, specifically regard to enlistments, assignments, and promotions (Townsend 87). Native Americans again and more extensively served as code-talkers and socio-economically benefitted greatly from their military service and from the war. Native Americans were the only minority population to have 100% registration for the draft and had a higher per capita rate of service than any other ethnic group (Evans 33). Many Native Americans who were not in the military got jobs in the defense industries and thus the average income of Native American households increased by 250% between 1940-1944 (34). Between World War II and the Korean War, black civil rights activists continued to demand equal rights in society and the end of segregation in US military service. Finally, in 1948 President Harry S. Truman issued Executive Order 9981 desegregating the US military;12 however, the change was implemented slowly and segregation continued through the Korean War (Nalty 242, 251). During the Korean War (1950-1953), the demand for manpower accelerated quickly. In 1950, a draft was initiated, and the size of the Army doubled in five months 12 Executive Order 9981 came one year after President Truman’s Presidential Committee on Civil Rights issued a report condemning segregation and advocating for civil rights legislation. 10 (Evans 41). This demand for manpower led to many all-black units serving in the war with gradual shift toward integration; however, desegregation did not mean equal job placement and career advancement. Black demands for civil rights inspired other minority groups to demand equal rights as well. At this point, the military struggle for civil rights had shifted from a demand for the privilege to serve to a demand for equal administrative treatment with regard to matters such as pay and promotions. Unlike Japanese-Americans, who were initially denied the opportunity for service and then placed into segregated units during World War II, Korean Americans served alongside whites in integrated units during the Korean War (41). During Vietnam (1955-1975) Americans of all races and nationalities served together in integrated military units. However, racial tensions still ran high both within and outside the military. Desegregation of military service did not result in racial equality, and off-duty self-segregation largely continued. The government initiated a military draft, and there was great controversy over deferments, particularly student deferments, which favored whites and resulted in a disproportional number of minorities in military service and even more so in the most hazardous combat situations (Nalty 334). Widespread race riots across the United States during the 1960s were mirrored with smaller race riots on military installations (333). The government did, however, apply pressure to end off-base discrimination, especially of housing and recreational facilities, by banning military funds and military members from establishments that fostered racial inequality (Evans 43). The Department of Defense implemented race relations programming and research and began to interpret the existence of racial disparity in 11 selected benchmarks (occupational breakdown, pay grades, promotions & officer/enlisted ratios) as evidence of institutional racial discrimination (47). The Gulf Wars (1990-1991) were fought by all-volunteer integrated military forces. Around the turn of the 21st century, minorities compromised approximately 40% of the US military, and the official Department of Defense policy was zero tolerance of racism (48). However, among minority groups, there was still a disproportionate number of enlisted members to officers, yet the percentage doubled from 1977 to 1997 (7 to 15.3%), demonstrating remarkable progress (49). While there are still isolated incidents of racism within the military, the US military has largely eradicated overt institutionalized racism. This brief history of the racialized experiences of military service of ethnic Americans provides historical context for this dissertation’s exploration of ethnic American war literature. The Politics of Representations of the Military In 1995, General Colin L. Powell, one of the most famous African-American members of the US military in history, published a memoir entitled, My American Journey. The text is marketed as a variation on two traditional American tropes: the rags- to-riches success story and the “becoming American” immigrant narrative. In the preface, Powell ties the upward trajectory of his military career to his faith in and love for America: Mine is the story of a black kid of no early promise from an immigrant family of limited means who was raised in the South Bronx and somehow rose to become the National Security Advisor to the President of the United States and then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It is a story of hard work and good luck, of occasional rough times, but mostly good times. It is the story of service and soldiering. It is a story about the people who helped make me what I am. It is a 12 story of my benefiting from opportunities created by the sacrifice of those who went before me and maybe my benefiting those who will follow. It is a story of faith—faith in myself, and faith in America. Above all it’s a love story: love of family, of friends, of the Army, and of my country. It is a story that could only have happened in America. (Powell ix-x) Although Powell occasionally acknowledges incidents racism of throughout the text, he does so in the same way his glossing over the “occasional rough times” above suggests he will. He presents those incidents as pesky obstacles easily overcome with a good attitude and a good work ethic. There is little emphasis in the text on Powell’s personal experiences of racism, institutionalized racism within the US Army, or the racial tensions that continue to plague America at the time of his memoir’s publication. There is also no mention of the relationship between race and US military operations overseas. However, during one key passage in the narrative that describes his time at the Command and General Staff College in Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, during the late 1960s, Powell makes a subtle reference to the climate of white supremacy in America and in the US Army: “In class and in formal situations, the college was completely integrated. Informally, however, black officers hung out together. We had our own parties, put on soul food nights, and played Aretha Franklin records. Nevertheless, we had made it this far up the ladder precisely because we had the ability to shift back into the white dominated world on Monday morning” (120). This startling passage leaves the reader wondering what that “shift” entailed for the black officers. What did those officers have to say and do, or alternatively, not say or do to continue moving “up the ladder”? What in the climate and culture of the US Army demanded this shift? However, Powell’s narrative continues by glossing over the required shift and celebrating the opportunity to assimilate, “This was exactly the kind of integration we had been fighting for, to be permitted our blackness and also be able to make it in a mostly white world” (120). The 13 idea of “making it” seems to reference the socio-economic opportunities available through the US military’s institutionalized promotion system with its corresponding pay increases, which pave the way for the achievement of the American Dream of accruing material wealth. The narrative is untroubled by the fact that one’s blackness had to be reserved for off-duty occasions. Towards the end of the memoir, Powell acknowledges one cost of his success: “During my service in both military and civilian national security posts, I studiously avoided doing or saying anything political, and it has taken me a while to shed the lifetime habits of a soldier” (590). This line suggests that Powell feels he has, at the time of the book’s publication in 1995, shed the habit of avoiding politics; however, as he continues to provide a general summary of his personal politics, he still largely declines to comment on American race relations and uses very superficial rhetoric typically associated with moderate Republicans. Powell offers tepid, vague, and qualified support for affirmative action and mild condemnation of “the class and racial undertones” of the far-right, which is followed immediately with equal condemnation of “patronizing liberals who claim to know what is best for society but devote little thought to who will eventually pay the bills” (592). Powell closes his memoir by briefly mentioning the (never-fulfilled) possibility that he will enter the 1996 US Presidential election race. The reader finishes the book still uncertain of Powell’s thoughts about the “white-dominated world” he briefly acknowledges earlier in the text and with the feeling that Powell may still not have shed the habit of studiously avoiding doing or saying anything political. Powell’s relatively apolitical memoir stands in stark contrast to the six novels selected as objects of study for this dissertation: John Okada’s No-No Boy (1956), John 14 Williams’s Captain Blackman (1972), John Killens’s And Then We Heard the Thunder (1963), Joe Rodriguez’s The Oddsplayer (1989), Mario Bencastro’s Odyssey to the North (1998), and Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters (1990). While Powell writes about his own military service in the form of a memoir, the texts that are the subject matter for this dissertation are instead novels, and the authors of each of these six novels use representations of the US military for overtly political purposes, demonstrating the metaphorical value of this American institution as site at which to consider narratives of nation, ethnicity, and race. In Chapter One, I analyze John Okada’s No-No Boy (1956) and John Williams’s Captain Blackman (1972) to explore the ways these novels critique existing configurations of US national identity and citizenship by considering the relationship of individuals and ethnic groups to the US military. I argue that Okada’s novel ultimately maintains a conciliatory tone and validates American nationalism while simultaneously insisting it should be more inclusive. I argue that, in contrast, Williams’s novel maintains an angry tone and calls into question the validity of American nationalism altogether. By examining these two novels in conjunction with each other, we also note that Williams’s total rejection of American nationalism corresponds with a shift away from realism and modernism and toward the experimental forms of postmodernism while Okada’s more tentative troubling of American nationalism retains the more conventional forms of realism with some relatively conservative forays into modernist narrative strategies. In Chapter Two, I examine John Killens’s And Then We Heard the Thunder (1971) and Joe Rodriguez’s The Oddsplayer (1989) to explore the ways these novels articulate relationships between race and class in the struggle for social justice by 15 focusing on institutionalized labor practices within the US military. I argue that both novels ultimately suggest interracial, transnational antiracist coalitions as an alternative to ethnic nationalism for freedom struggles. By examining these two novels in conjunction with each other, we note that both novels link American minority experience of US military service with political awakening and greater ability and desire to engage in domestic freedom struggles, perhaps suggesting that first-hand experience of the military lays bare relations of power and the ways institutions create and uphold those relations of social and economic inequality. Likewise, we observe that both novels gesture towards a transnational freedom struggle that allies American racial and ethnic minorities with citizens of third-world nations. However, both novels also observe that although lacking in hegemonic power and privilege, racial and ethnic minorities are capable of racism and ethnic nationalism. With regard to matters of form, we may note that while maintaining almost exclusively realist narratives (with the exception of Perez’s colonial imaginings in Oddsplayer) both novels feature apocalyptic conclusions (similar to that of Captain Blackman) as if unable to imagine a resolution to American racial animosity within existing institutions. In Chapter Three, I expand my geographical focus to explore the ways Mario Bencastro’s Odyssey to the North (1998) and Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters (1990) use representations of the US military to critique US foreign policy and its effects on the people of the authors’ native countries. I argue that both novels use the US military as a metaphor to question the legitimacy of the modern nation-state and its attendant institutions. In addition, we are able to contrast Hagedorn’s focus on US military actions primarily remains geographically outside the United States in her native country while 16 Bencastro instead represents the effects of US military intervention both in El Salvador and in the United States by linking US foreign policy with undocumented immigration to the United States. When these two novels are read in conjunction with each other, we are able to more clearly see the effectiveness of the postmodern strategies of narrative fragmentation and incorporation of multiple genres for representing the border crossings of people and cultures. Background and Methodology I arrived at this project because it relates to interests and experiences that have long been woven into the fabric of my personal life. My interest in ethnic American literature began with reading in the field of African American literature when I was a teenager as I continued to grapple with what race and ethnicity meant to me both privately and publicly as the daughter of a black father and a white mother. I was working to answer for myself questions about identity that peers had asked me for years, often with somewhat skeptical expressions, “What are you?” and “Are you black?” Eventually, my quest to understand race and how it operates lead me to read literature from other ethnic American canons and critical race theory, as well. As I read broadly across ethnic American literary canons, both in my personal reading and in academic reading during my graduate degree programs, I noticed that representations of the US military appeared again and again. Perhaps one reason why these representations were noteworthy to me is because of my family’s history of involvement with the US military. Both of my grandfathers served in the US Army during World War II (1939-1945). My mother’s father, my white grandfather, whose parents had immigrated from Czechoslovakia, served as an officer in 17 integrated units, while my father’s father, my black grandfather, served as an enlisted man in all-black segregated units. Interestingly, my two grandfathers shared approximately the same skin tone. Following the end of World War II and their military service, my white grandfather was hired by the Florida Department of Fish and Wildlife as a chemist and established a middle-class household while my black grandfather, who had driven trucks in the Army, was rejected by the Teamsters union due to his race and struggled to find employment. My father served in the US Marine Corps during Vietnam (1955-1975). He participated in the mandatory ROTC during his first two years of college at Eastern Michigan University,13 enlisted in the Marine Corps during his last two years of college, completing Officer Candidate School between his junior and senior years, and was commissioned as a Marine Corps infantry officer immediately upon college graduation. He was the only black officer in his company, battalion, and regiment despite the high percentage of black enlisted men. For my father, military service was part of his story of socioeconomic mobility.14 He was only two generations removed from a family of Alabama sharecroppers and grew up in inner city Detroit, Michigan in a poor black family that received welfare. He separated from the US Marine Corps as a captain before he married and had children, but his military service provided him with middle- class employment when he graduated from college, funded his graduate education with the GI Bill and opened the door to a career with the Federal Bureau of Prisons that allowed him to support our family in a middle-class lifestyle and retire as a relatively 13 Compulsory ROTC ended in the early 1970s around the same time the US military shifted from conscription to an all-volunteer force. 14 Robert J. Sampson and John H. Laub argue that military service plays a key role in the long-term socioeconomic advancement of lower class Americans. 18 high-ranking federal government employee. As I was graduating from high school in the early 1990s, I searched for a way to fund my own college education and, inspired by my father, pursued military service. I received an appointment to the US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and in 1996 I graduated, received a commission as an officer in the US Air Force and served on active duty and then in the reserves for a total of eight years, separating as a captain. The military provided me with middle class income and paid for my first master’s degree while I was on active duty. I married one of my Air Force Academy classmates, who was a first-generation college student from a working class white family, and I remained involved in the military community as his spouse for a total of 18 years until my husband died in an F-15 fighter jet crash three years ago in 2014. My brother, who is four years younger than I am, graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point in the class of 2004, and is currently a major in the US Army. The Army has provided him with a middle-class income, paid for his master’s degree and will be sending him to earn a PhD in Fall 2018 after which he will return to West Point to teach. My oldest daughter, Natalie, graduated from high school earlier this year, and she is currently at the Air Force Academy Preparatory School with plans to graduate from the Air Force Academy in the class of 2022 and commission as an officer in the US Air Force.15 So, it is both coming from a multiracial family and my family’s experiences with the US military that caused me to especially attend to the political power of these 15 The US Air Force Academy and the US Military Academy are two of the nation’s five service academies. The others are the US Naval Academy, the US Coast Guard Academy, and the US Merchant Marine Academy. All five are federal academies for the undergraduate education and training of commissioned officers for the US Armed Forces. 19 representations of military service within 20th century ethnic American literature and the narrative strategies with which they are deployed. As I began to explore, catalog, and analyze these powerful representations of the US military, I formulated the two primary research questions that would guide my inquiry: What political work are representations of the military doing in 20th century ethnic American literature? How do these texts use representations of the military to articulate relationships between nation, race, and ethnicity? My research confirms that there is a gap in existing critical literature. There is no other book-length critical project that explores literary representations of the military comparatively across ethnic American canons, and there are few book-length projects that explore literary representations of the military even within a single ethnic American canon. Some noteworthy exceptions are Aztlán and Viet Nam: Chicano and Chicana Experiences of the War by George Mariscal (1999), A Freedom Bought with Blood: African American War Literature from the Civil War to World War II by Jennifer C. James (2007), These Truly Are the Brave: An Anthology of African American Writings on War and Citizenship by A Yęmisi Jimoh and Françoise N. Hamlin (2015),16 and, just published, Bodies at War: Genealogies of Militarism in Chicana Literature and Culture by Belinda Linn Rincón (2017). Mariscal’s book is actually not a book-length critical text but rather an anthology of Chicano/a works by both veterans and activists that is limited in scope to focus on the war in Viet Nam. Despite this book’s limited critical content, Mariscal includes a literary genealogy of Chicano/a writings on the war in Viet Nam, explores a few major themes and provides historical context in the introduction to each of 16 See my review of this anthology in CLA Journal vol. 59, no. 4 (June 2016). 20 the two sections of the book. Both Mariscal and I include discussion of Joe Rodriguez’s The Oddsplayer, but Mariscal devotes only one paragraph to discussion of the novel, briefly mentioning the novel’s shift in analysis from race to class, while I provide extensive close reading and analysis of the novel. James’s book of literary criticism focuses exclusively on African American war literature, more specifically works published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Both James and I discuss John Killens’s And Then We Heard the Thunder; however, my focus was on the novel’s representations of military service as labor while James’s focus was more broadly on the novel’s critique of nationalist and imperialist warfare. Jimoh and Hamlin’s book, like Mariscal’s, is not a book-length critical text but rather an anthology of African American writings on war and citizenship. Its collected works span a time period that begins in the mid-19th century and ends at the beginning of the 21st century. It includes an introduction to the text as well as each of its four parts that provide historical context for the collected writings. Finally, Rincón’s book of literary criticism focuses exclusively on Chicana literature published from the early 1970s until the present, focusing on representations of neoliberal militarism. This dissertation differs from all four of these previously published works in that I enrich my analysis by providing comparative readings of works from multiple ethnic canons, in that I draw exclusively from works published between the end of World War II and the end of the twentieth century for close readings, and in that I include analysis of texts not addressed in the books by Mariscal, James, Jimoh and Hamlin and Rincón. My principle of selection for primary texts was that they feature political projects that I saw recurring in multiple texts and across multiple ethnic canons and yield 21 sufficient high-quality material for close reading and analysis related to the themes and ideas I wish to examine. I also chose a comparative approach, pairing two texts from different ethnic canons that addressed the same theme with the goal of enriching my analysis by considering the ways racism in American institutions, specifically in the US military, have defined the minority identities and experiences of multiple groups based on resistance to white domination; I also wanted to explore the ways these representations suggest the possibilities of broad coalitions in resisting such oppression. Again, because there is currently no book-length comparative study of this topic, my principle of selection for secondary texts was to choose those I thought most useful in addressing the themes and primary texts on which I chose to focus. I also incorporated a variety of theoretical frameworks, including theories of citizenship and nation, Marxist theory, postcolonial theory, and critical race theory. I chose an interdisciplinary approach and drew secondary sources from a wide variety of fields–literary studies, ethnic studies, history, and citizenship studies. This project is important because representations of the US military in 20th Century ethnic American literature demonstrate the political power of fictional representations of American institutions for exploring and articulating relationships between nation, class, and race. In the current era of resurgent white nationalism at the highest levels of the government, ethnic American literature and criticism of that literature are valuable tools in the continued struggle against institutionalized white supremacy. 22 CHAPTER ONE Troubled Representations of Ethnic American Military Service It is the love of country that has lighted and that keeps glowing the holy fire of patriotism. – J. Horace McFarland (1859-1948), President of American Civic Association The ruling classes have in their hands the army, money, the schools, the churches and the press. In the schools, they kindle patriotism in the children by means of histories describing their own people as the best of all peoples and always in the right. Among adults they kindle it by spectacles, jubilees, monuments, and by a lying patriotic press. Above all, they inflame patriotism in this way: perpetuating every kind of harshness and injustice against other nations, they provoke in them enmity towards their own people, and then in turn exploit that enmity to embitter their people against the foreigner. – Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) In annual celebrations of Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day, Americans celebrate martial patriotism and glorify the nation’s military members, especially those who died during active military service. We pay homage to the fallen soldiers at Arlington National Cemetery, including the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and sing patriotic songs, such as the National Anthem and Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to Be an American.” Despite general acceptance of the idea that those who serve in the military have proven their love of country and worthiness of citizenship, America also has a long history of denying equal rights to its minority citizens, even those who are serving in the US military. Therefore, the theme of the US military, as it appears in 20th century ethnic American literature, provides rich terrain for exploring questions of nationality, patriotism and citizenship and the role American institutions play in perpetuating racial inequality. This chapter will explore the particularly revealing ways two twentieth century novels, John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957) and John A. Williams’s Captain Blackman (1972), incorporate representations of the US military to question existing constructions of American nationalism. No-No Boy describes the post-WWII psychological and 23 emotional struggles of a young Japanese American protagonist, Ichiro Yamada, who refuses to serve in the US military after being drafted from imprisonment in an internment camp, and contrasts Ichiro with a foil, another young Japanese American, Kenji Kanno, who voluntarily enlists in the US military. Blackman is a revisionist African American military history delivered through a narrative of the psychological, emotional, and physical struggles of an African-American soldier, Abraham Blackman, who serves in the US Army during the Vietnam War.17 Blackman’s modernist narrative contains many flashbacks that imagine the protagonist as a US soldier in earlier American wars, greatly extending the temporal scope of the novel. Both novels use representations of military service to reveal contradictions in the rhetoric of American nationalism, juxtaposing the claim that military service proves worthiness of citizenship against white nationalist exclusion of racial and ethnic minorities from equal citizenship. Okada’s novel ultimately maintains a conciliatory tone and validates American nationalism while simultaneously insisting it should be more inclusive. In contrast, Williams’s novel maintains an angry tone and calls into question the validity of American nationalism altogether. Simultaneous analysis of these twentieth-century novels allows us to better understand the ways we might critique current rhetoric of American nationalism through writing and reading fictional representations of US military service in order to better understand the logic and illogic of claims the United States makes on its citizens. My analysis of these novels is grounded in scholarship emerging from discourse in the fields of critical race theory, nation studies and ethnic American literature. I 17 A more recently published novel that similarly uses representations of black military service during Vietnam to interrogate configurations of US nationality and citizenship is A Long Way Back (2015) by J. Everett Prewitt. 24 consider the ways that Okada and Williams both draw from and contribute to this discourse. I also examine the narrative strategies they use to conduct their explorations of nationalism, patriotism, ethnicity, and race through the lens of military service. These narrative strategies include wartime settings, flashbacks of experiences of military service, narrative hooks related to wartime trauma, combat-related plot twists, defamiliarization of the ethnic subject through military service, omniscient narration of the protagonists’ military experiences, stream of consciousness to reveal the protagonists’ thoughts about military service, imagery related to symbolic death and injury, pathos generated by wartime conflicts, situational irony related to ethnic American military service and tragedy related to the protagonists’ reduced personhood in the military environment. While other critics have considered the representations of American nationalism in these novels, none have focused primarily on the significance of the US military and military service in shaping the texts’ narrative strategies as described above. No-No Boy and Captain Blackman are representative of a larger body of ethnic American novels that similarly use representations of military service to reveal contradictions in the rhetoric of American nationalism.18 These other ethnic American novels that feature representations of military service offer rich grounds for similar readings of representations of the US military and military service. 18 This is not intended to be a comprehensive list but instead to give a larger representative sampling of this significant theme in 20th century ethnic American literature. African American: Bombingham (2001) by Anthony Grooms, De Mojo Blues (1985) by A. R. Flowers; Latino/a: The Useless Servants (1993) by Rolando Hinojosa, Gods Go Begging (2000) by Alfredo Véa; Asian American: The Sympathizer (2015) by Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Surrendered (2010) by Chang-Rae Lee; Native American: Ceremony (1977) by Leslie Marmon Silko, Sundown (1934) by John Joseph Matthews. 25 In considering America’s history of racial nationalism, one might start with a contemporary of Okada and Williams. In Race: The History of an Idea in America, published in 1963, Thomas F. Gossett produced a classic scholarly work on the history of racism in America from the colonial period through the civil rights struggles occurring at the time of its publication. The primary achievement of this text was to illuminate the ways that American institutions and culture were built on and continued to incorporate white supremacist racial hierarchies.19 Since Gossett’s book was published between the publication of Okada and Williams’s novels, it provides historical context for their works. Gossett documented America’s long history of racial nationalism, beginning in the 17th century when white colonists began to oppress and enslave Native Americans and Africans and emphasizes a redemptive effort that took place in America during the 1920s, which he calls the “scientific revolt against racism” (423). This intellectual movement was largely influenced by Franz Boas, a leading cultural anthropologist, who, dismissing the 18th and 19th century racial pseudoscience still promoted by historians and social scientists, argued that differences in culture, and not differences in biology, are responsible for mental and temperamental differences between people (423). In addition, Gossett traces the 20th century efforts of American authors, artists, immigrant groups and political organizations to combat racism up to the time of his text’s publication. Gossett closes his text, published in 1963, with an optimism that Okada may have shared in 1957 but John Williams decidedly did not in 1972: “Racism, the most serious threat to the idea of equality before the law and to the individual development of one’s own capabilities, is 19 The continuation of white supremacy in the mid-20th century is also documented in James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963), particularly in his letter to his nephew. 26 now on the defensive as it has never been before” (459). Perhaps it was witnessing the failure of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s to achieve full citizenship for black Americans that inspired the dark pessimism that plays out in Williams’s novel. Sadly, half a century later, American racism both lives on in old forms and new configurations, including resurgent white nationalism and post-racial movements, giving Okada and Williams’s explorations of racial nationalism continued relevance today and, perhaps, proving that of the three men Williams most accurately understood the racial climate in America during the time the men were writing.20 It is this history of institutionalized racism that has caused members of America’s ethnic minority groups to repeatedly ask, “What is my/our relationship to America?” Two well-developed strands of thought appear over and over across America’s ethnic literary canons. The first is a bid to assimilate accompanied by a struggle to expand American national identity, making it more inclusive. This is the trajectory along which Okada’s novel ultimately travels. The second is a devaluation and rejection of American national 20 Many scholarly works published in recent years document the continued institutionalization of American racism. These are just a few examples: In 2001, Gary Gerstle’s American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century discussed the ways that in contrast to civic nationalism, racial nationalism in America has resulted in the country’s minority citizens being “expelled, segregated or subordinated” (5). In 2010, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness presented an argument that institutionalized racism continues to flourish in the US legal system. In 2014, in Racism Without Racists, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva discusses the ways contemporary racism has become subtle and more difficult to prove than Jim Crow era racism while institutional practices and social discrimination continue to perpetuate racial inequality. In 2015, in his book Between the World and Me, Ta- Nehisi Coates writes an open letter to his adolescent son describing his perspective on American race relations—a text in the spirit of the one James Baldwin wrote to his nephew in The Fire Next Time (1963). In this book, Coates describes the ways institutionalized racism continues to plague all classes of African Americans. 27 identity, often accompanied by a move toward an alternate ethnic nationalism or transnationalism. This is the gesture with which Williams’s novel concludes. Considering the positions of these two novels on American nationalism brings us back to this chapter’s project, which is to ask how representations of military service are an effective way of exploring questions of nationalism. Military service has long been considered a duty of citizenship and recognized as the ultimate proof of patriotism. Broadly, patriotism is defined as “love for one’s country.” However, in his essay, “Loyalties,” Andrew Oldenquist describes three different types of patriotism: impartial patriotism, sports patriotism, and loyalty patriotism (33-35). Impartial patriotism is love of one’s country due to certain values the country is founded upon and/or upholds. Impartial patriotism, therefore, isn’t actually love for one’s country at all but instead love for certain values or ideals regardless of which country might hold them. Sports patriotism, on the other hand, would be the love of one’s country for no reason other than that it is one’s own—regardless of the country’s values or ideals. The final type of patriotism, which Oldenquist defends as the only variety of patriotism that deserves to be called such, is loyalty patriotism, which is an attachment that balances one’s loyalty to a country because it is one’s own against the demands of universal moral considerations of the type that might be held by a disinterested international observer. Okada and Williams both explore conceptions of patriotic duty in relation to military service in their respective novels, which we shall explore in more detail later in this chapter, drawing on Oldenquist’s theory of patriotism. Given Oldenquist’s definitions of patriotism, there are several grounds on which a country’s citizens might question the duties they owe to their country. First, if one 28 subscribes to impartial patriotism, and one’s country is not founded upon and/or upholding the values or ideals to which one subscribes, one’s loyalty might be withdrawn. Second, if one subscribes to sports patriotism, one might withhold loyalty if one does not feel a sense of ownership or belonging that allow one to identify the country as one’s own. Third, if one subscribes to loyalty patriotism, one may feel no duty owed if either of the two cases above is true since one must both feel a sense of belonging to the nation and simultaneously confirm the absence of a more compelling universal demand for justice based on higher values or ideals. It is no coincidence then that ethnic American literature should interrogate the demands of patriotism since, as Gosset’s work establishes, white racial nationalism has been foundational in American institutions and culture. Therefore, the citizenship of American minorities has always been contingent and precarious, and minority citizens have had reason to question both whether the nation is upholding the democratic values it professes and whether they actually hold membership in the national body. Fundamental to explorations of patriotism in ethnic American literature are questions of identity and belonging. One path this inquiry follows is tracing citizenship rights to determine who the country identifies as its own. Broadly, what are citizenship rights? Who has them? Who doesn’t? How are distinctions between haves and have-nots made? A second line of inquiry considers the basis of inclusion and exclusion from the national body. In a country founded on white nationalism, this question is directly related to ethnic and racial identity. Are ethnic and racial minorities included in the national body? If so, what are conditions of possibility of this inclusion? How does inclusion and exclusion change over time? These are all questions both Okada and Williams explore. 29 With regard to patriotism and military service, one might ask how the aesthetics of nationalism play out with regard to military uniforms, American flags and ceremonies, such as the pledge of allegiance and military parades. What is the emotional and psychological effect of these spectacles?21 When do the trappings of nationalism mitigate the penalties imposed on those stigmatized for ethnic or racial identity and when is the cloak of nation insufficient to protect its wearer?22 Both Okada and Williams use military service as a paradigm for considering ways America sees its minority citizens and the ways its minority citizens perceive themselves. Ann Laura Stoler discusses the shapeshifting qualities of racism in her essay, “Racial Histories and Their Regimes of Truth:” It is neither somatics nor essentialism that gives racisms their force. It is rather the always ambiguous relationship between the two and the interpretive space that ambiguity affords that confers on racial discourse its dynamic motility. A notion of essence does not necessarily rest on immovable parts but on the strategic inclusion of different attributes, of a changing constellation of features and a changing weighing of them. (385) By representing specific historical moments and actors and their relationships to the US military, Okada and Williams are able to examine the features, weight and practices of racism in operation at specific points in time. 21 Martha Nussbaum argues that political emotion related to American national identity undermines the possibility of a shared transnational cosmopolitan identity (157). She calls into question Richard Rorty’s assertion that the alternative to patriotism and national identity is a “politics of difference” and asserts that transnational cosmopolitan identity is another possibility (156). 22 Joane Nagel emphasizes the ways ethnicity is constantly undergoing redefinition and reconstruction based on interplay between ethnic groups and larger society (154). She specifically describes the ways military events during World War II, the Iranian Revolution and the Gulf Wars shaped American ethnic identities. 30 As Okada and Williams explore relationships among national identity, ethnic identity and class, they represent ways that white privilege is preserved by the American patriarchy. In 2006, George Lipsitz, in The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics, argues that American nationalism and patriotism have served the function of repressing class differences for white males as “the site where class antagonisms between men could be reconciled in national and patriotic antagonisms against foreign foes and internal enemies” (73). Lipsitz notes that, despite their military service, this imagined national homogeneity has not extended to minority males—except perhaps on Hollywood screens: “The dangers overcome in Vietnam by Chicano, black, Native American and Asian American soldiers have not persuaded Anglo Americans to root out racism from the body politic and recognize the ways in which ‘American’ unity is threatened by the differential distribution of power, wealth and life chances across racial lines” (87).23 Lipsitz goes further to make a connection between this history of white male privilege in American institutions and the politics of the twenty- first century: “By disguising the social crises of our time as assaults on white male heterosexual power and privilege, the new patriotism has fanned the flames of white supremacy, homophobia, and anti-immigrant hatred” (98). Lipstiz’s claim about the continued relevance of the nation’s history of white nationalism again underscores the point that Okada and Williams’s work is as timely today as it was at the time of its publication as it poses the questions “When and how does military service mitigate minority ethnic identity?” and “When and how does it fail to do so?” 23 As a contemporary example, Hannah Gurman criticized Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s recent documentary The Vietnam War (2017) arguing that Burns “overlooks the deep racism inextricably intertwined with the US war effort.” 31 No-No Boy and Representations of the US Military: The Long Wait for Justice In John Okada’s No-No Boy, the US military becomes a site at which to consider the ways institutionalized state power determines subjectivities and identities, specifically those of Japanese Americans during and immediately after World War II. The novel is saturated with narrative strategies directly related to military service, settings in World War II and immediately post-World War II; juxtaposition of the protagonist, who refuses US military service, with a foil who volunteers; multiple military veteran characters; flashbacks to wartime military experiences; defamiliarization of ethnic subjects through military service; omniscient narration of experiences of military service; stream of consciousness narration to reveal the protagonist’s thoughts about military service; symbolism and pathos related to combat-related injury and death; and situational irony related to ethnic American military service. The novel’s representations of US military service reveal contradictions in the rhetoric of American nationalism and make concrete the power of the abstract state and its interpellation of its citizen-subjects. Despite ongoing disagreement among literary critics as to whether or not the narrative is assimilationist, I argue that the novel maintains a conciliatory tone and validates American nationalism while simultaneously insisting it should be more inclusive.24 24 The majority of literary critics, such as Yoon, Sokolowski, Amoko, Entin, Ling and Canon, argue that the text’s politics of national identity are ambiguous. Jun specifically argues that the novel’s representations of black racial exclusion “uneasily contradict the developmental narrative of assimilation” but adds that “the narrative is hardly a systemic critique of the U.S. state” (59). Distinguishing herself from other critics, Park reads Ichiro’s hope at the novel’s conclusion as the harkening of ethnic solidarity in the formation of Asian America (240). However, there are still a few other critics who agree with me that the novel is overwhelmingly positive toward and accepting of American nationalism. Arakawa discusses the text’s representation of the “virtual impossibility of resisting the grand narrative of assimilation” (191). Kim also reads Ichiro as an agent of 32 Assessing the politics of Okada’s novel requires consideration of its publication and critical histories. In her 1998 book, Narrating Nationalisms: Ideology and Form in Asian American Literature, Jinqi Ling reviews the critical history of No-No Boy up to the turn of the twenty-first century (32). As noted by Ling, the novel received very little notice when it was first published in 1957, and its initial run of 1,500 copies had still not sold out when the text was rediscovered in the 1970s by the Asian American writers who would eventually form the Combined Asian-American Resources Project and reissue the novel in paperback in 1976. Ling notes increased critical interest in the last three decades of the twentieth century. However, critical attention to the novel actually peaks after the publication of Ling’s book, during the first decade of the twenty-first century and still continues to appear regularly. As Wenxin Li observes, most of the twentieth century criticism focuses on Ichiro’s quest for a new identity while most twenty-first century criticism focuses on more specific issues, such as gender, cultural production, pedagogy, etc. (82). As of the writing of this dissertation in 2017, there are at least thirty-seven peer- reviewed journal articles or book chapters analyzing the novel. None of these critics, however, focus primarily on the text’s representations of the US military, which is somewhat astonishing considering that without the US military and its relationship to the Japanese American characters of novel, the narrative would not be possible. The exposition of Okada’s novel introduces its protagonist, Ichiro Yamada, a Japanese American man in his mid-20s who, along with over 120,000 other Japanese American citizens, was imprisoned in an internment camp during World War II after national integration (67). Additionally, Li says the novel suggests the possibility of Ichiro building an assimilationist home with Emi (84). 33 President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, about two months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan.25 While still imprisoned, Ichiro, along with all other adult male Japanese American prisoners, was required to complete Selective Service Form 304A, officially entitled, “Statement of United States Citizen of Japanese Ancestry,” and unofficially known as “the loyalty questionnaire.”26 Two questions on the document were especially controversial: Question 27, “Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty, wherever ordered?” and Question 28, “Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, or any other foreign government, power, or organization?” Japanese Americans who answered “No” to both of those questions became known as “no-no boys.” Ichiro is such a “no-no boy,” and the consequence of his negative answers to the loyalty questionnaire administered in the internment camp is two years in military prison. As Jeanne Sokolowski notes, Ichiro’s crime “is not merely a refusal to proclaim loyalty to the United States, but also a defiance of the culturally appropriate means of demonstrating that loyalty through military service” (85). It is through the lens of military 25 A few examples of the many other novels containing representations of the Japanese American internment are Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet (2009) by Jamie Ford, Farewell to Manzanar (1973) by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, and Nisei Daughter (1953) by Monica Itoi Sone. 26 Japanese American adults in internment camps were required to complete Selective Service Form 304A; however, the form was also required of all Japanese Americans already serving in the US military and all Japanese Americans who were not imprisoned in internment camps but joined the military, voluntarily or by draft. 34 service that the novel ironically juxtaposes a history of institutionalized white supremacy in America with a narrative of Japanese American national pride. The exposition presents Ichiro in medias res disembarking from a bus in his hometown of Seattle after being gone for four years, two years in internment camp followed by two years in military prison. The novel’s plot is structured around this period immediately following Ichiro’s release from military prison at the end of World War II, a time during which Ichiro struggles to reintegrate into his family and American society. In describing Ichiro’s personal emotional, psychological, and social experiences, the novel also grapples with political questions about patriotism, nationalism, racism and citizenship in the historical context of World War II and the years immediately following. The context of World War II reveals the way that national identity expands and contracts as a reaction to specific historical circumstances. Japanese Americans who had thought of themselves as American were suddenly made to realize the extent to which other Americans did not perceive them as members of the national body. Nikhil Pal Singh discusses the “recurring oscillation between the universalizing abstractions of liberal-democracy, in which individuals are considered equal with respect to nationality, and persistent regression, in which the actual individuals and communities who benefit from national belonging are implicitly or explicitly constituted in white supremacist terms” (19-20). It is the US military that, first through internment and then through imprisonment, becomes a concrete manifestation of state power, interpellates Ichiro as a racialized subject and forces him to rethink his relationship to the American nation. The narrator discusses the ejection of Japanese American citizens from the national body on the basis of race: “The indignation, the hatred, the patriotism of the 35 American people shifted into full-throated condemnation of the Japanese who blotted their land. The Japanese who were born Americans and remain Japanese because biology does not know the meaning of patriotism no longer worried about whether they were Japanese-Americans or American-Japanese. They were Japanese, just as were their Japanese mothers and Japanese fathers and Japanese brothers and sisters” (viii). In this way, the narrator differentiates between legal citizenship (“born Americans”) and de facto citizenship (exclusion from American identity); this insistence upon the exclusion of Japanese Americans from the national body on the basis of “biology” reveals racism at work. By referring to “biology,” the narrator refers to the false premise of 19th century racial pseudoscience that race is biological (“biology does not know the meaning of patriotism”). As Thomas Gossett points out, anthropologist Franz Boas debunked this myth at the beginning of the twentieth century by arguing that differences in culture, not biology, are responsible for mental and temperamental differences between groups of people (423). However, racist ideology insists otherwise. In the years since the novel’s publication, Michael Omi and Howard Winant have elaborated on racial differences between people to explain that race is ultimately a sociopolitical construction: “race is a concept which signifies and symbolizes social conflicts and interests by referring to different types of human bodies” (55). In this case, the Japanese American body becomes a visible representation of the threat to America posed by the nation of Japan; in this way, national identity is conflated with racial identity, and Americans direct patriotic indignation toward all people of Japanese ancestry. 36 As noted by Shirley Geok-Lin Lim and Sarita Nyasha Cannon, the novel incorporates a variety of modernist literary techniques to convey Ichiro’s psychological and emotional suffering in the aftermath of his racialized experience of imprisonment by the state. For example, most of the narrative is delivered indirectly from a third person omniscient point of view that focuses primarily on the experiences, thoughts and feelings of the protagonist. Occasionally, this narration slips into stream of consciousness, providing unmediated access to Ichiro’s thoughts. The novel manipulates multiple points of view in order to more effectively explore Ichiro’s relationship to America. For example, in the novel’s preface, the third person narrator explains that World War II reveals the concrete ways in which racist ideology is brought to bear on the Japanese American body: “As of that moment, the Japanese in the United States became, by virtue of their ineradicable brownness and the slant eyes which, upon close inspection, will seldom appear slanty, animals of a different breed” (Okada vii). Thus, the narrator connects the military threat posed by the nation of Japan to the contraction of American national identity, which expels Japanese American citizens on the basis of race. By using words such as “ineradicable” and “animals,” the passage connotes the idea of extermination, a less than subtle allusion to the recently ended Holocaust of the Jews in Germany, thus linking American and Nazi racism. However, at certain points in the novel, this third person omniscient narration shifts into direct interior monologue that more intimately reveals Ichiro’s personal ruminations about his relationship to America. Lim suggests, “Divisions between races and cultures give rise to divisions within the individual. Authorial consciousness of the divided self leads to an increasing interiority of narrative style. . . .” (64). For example, in 37 the following passage, Ichiro’s own thoughts reveal to the reader that, as a subject of institutionalized racial discrimination, he struggles to remember the virtues of America: “Being American is a terribly incomplete thing if one’s face is not white and one’s parents are Japanese of the country Japan which attacked America” (54). In this passage, as in the passage discussed in the previous paragraph, America’s white nationalism becomes concrete in the context of military events in the Pacific; however, this time the reader considers Ichiro’s personal experience directly through his own thoughts. These exterior and interior styles of narration complement each other throughout the novel as Ichiro’s personal trauma is continuously linked to the state-inflicted trauma of all Japanese American citizens as well as other American minorities. America’s exclusion of its Japanese American citizens raises complex questions about the duties of citizenship in the face of national hypocrisy with respect to democratic ideals. What duties does the nation owe its citizens? Correspondingly, what duties do citizens owe the nation? If the nation fails to carry out its duties to the citizen, does the citizen still have duties to the nation? Returning to the idea that patriotism is love of one’s country and willingness to die for one’s country is the ultimate proof of patriotism, the novel examines the significance of Japanese American military service during World War II and asks what duties citizens who have been ejected from the national body and stripped of their citizenship rights have with respect to national military service. Here Oldenquist’s analysis of patriotism, which I summarized in the introduction to this chapter, is helpful. Is patriotism a matter of belonging and feeling like one is part of the nation, or is patriotism a matter of adherence to specific values and a duty only when the nation is 38 founded upon and upholds those values? Are both required? In any of these three cases, the novel suggests, the forced relocation and internment of Japanese Americans provided adequate grounds to call into question their duty to the American nation. In singling out Japanese Americans for denial of citizenship rights and internment, the national body excluded them. Through these acts, the national values enshrined in the Constitution, specifically the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable seizures of self or property and the Fifth Amendment prohibition against punishment without due process (both ratified in 1791), were abandoned. Ichiro’s character represents all Japanese Americans who refuse to serve in the military of a country that does not include Japanese Americans in the national identity nor honor their citizenship rights. The novel asks how/why some Japanese Americans developed and/or retained patriotic feelings despite their exclusion from the national body and explores the development of patriotism in America’s citizens. In her book, To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism, Cecilia Elizabeth O’Leary describes how public schools took on the task of Americanization during the late nineteenth century: “As a captive public, schoolchildren were potentially the easiest constituency to mold into a loyal and disciplined citizenry . . . educators and organized patriots understood that the flag could become the most important emotive ingredient in the repertoire of nationalistic symbolism” (172).27 O’Leary goes on to describe the ways that educators were tasked with developing the morals and politics of American immigrants in order to prevent “divided allegiances” and also describes the “schoolhouse flag movement,” which was specifically designed to use the American flag in ceremonies that would develop 27 See also A Patriotic Primer for The Little Citizen . . . by Wallace Foster (1898). 39 patriotism in students (177). Additionally, some public schools even added military training to their curricula (184). No-No Boy seems to condone this program of Americanization rather uncritically. As an example, when Emi, Ichiro’s romantic interest, tries to convince him that he can still be worthy of national citizenship after refusing to serve in the military, she reminds him of the patriotic emotion invoked by nationalistic pageantry, symbols and traditions: Next time you’re alone, pretend you’re back in school. Make-believe you’re singing the Star-Spangled Banner and see the color guard march out on the stage and say the Pledge of Allegiance with all the other boys and girls. You’ll get that feeling flooding into your chest and making you want to shout with glory. It might even make you feel like crying. That’s how you’ve got to feel, so big that the bigness seems to want to bust out and then you’ll understand why it is that your mistake was no bigger than the mistake your country made. (96) Emi’s narrative reminds us of the role that institutions, schools as well as the military, play in constructing and maintaining national identity. She suggests that institutionalized rituals such as the national anthem and Pledge of Allegiance and symbols such as the American flag generate a patriotic feeling and that one’s capacity for that emotion is the true measure of one’s loyalty to the nation. By suggesting that Ichiro pretend he is back in school, Emi is asking him to return to a state of innocence, a time before the internment of Japanese-Americans and the issuance of the loyalty questionnaire that led to Ichiro’s imprisonment, a time before Ichiro, as an adult, had experienced and witnessed the institutionalized nature of American racism. In essence, by asking Ichiro to mentally and emotionally return to his childhood, Emi is asking Ichiro to forget the racialized trauma to which he has been exposed in order to recapture the patriotic feeling of his youth. In Ichiro’s case, Emi argues that his capacity for patriotic emotion can make him worthy of citizenship despite his refusal of military service. 40 According to Emi, America’s mistake in doubting the allegiance of its Japanese American citizens and stripping them of citizenship rights makes Japanese American refusal of military service understandable and forgivable. In saying, “. . . your mistake was no bigger than the mistake your country made,” Emi makes the two mistakes equivalent. However, as critic Joseph Entin points out, “Of course, the radical power differentials between the government and the no-no boys are lost in this equation; one party—the state—had the power to imprison while the other party had to obey” (96). Emi forgets that in both the cases of the school yard ceremonies with the national anthem and Pledge of Allegiance and in the case of the military draft, the power of an American institution dwarfs the individual will of the ethnic subject, making the nation’s “yes” much more powerful than the racialized subject’s “no.” Literary critics have scathingly criticized Emi’s character as an endorsement of hegemonic white nationalist American culture. Sarita Nyasha Cannon calls Emi’s patriotism “obscene,” suggesting that perhaps Emi’s patriotism’s “bigness” that “seems to want to bust out” alludes to a male erection and gestures towards the linkage between notions of masculinity and American nationalism (21). Apollo O. Amoko says that Emi’s words “re-articulate uncritically the pedagogical address of the American nation” (43). Wenxin Li observes that Okada describes Emi as having “heavy breasts” and long legs that are “strong and shapely like a white woman’s” (83). Paul Spickard, Gayle Fujita Sato, Sheng-Mei Ma and Li all argue that, in the novel, Emi represents the attractiveness of American culture and serves as a contrast with the unattractiveness of Japanese culture, represented especially by Ichiro’s mother, who is described as “flat-chested,” “shapeless,” “thin,” and “wiry” (Okada 10, 20). While most of these critics criticize 41 Okada for including Emi as a character that glorifies assimilation, other critics, such as Ling and Seongho Yoon instead suggest that Emi’s rhetoric is a parody of the notion of an American melting pot (Ling 48; Yoon 61). However, there is no persuasive evidence that Emi’s character is parodic, and I suggest that these critics are projecting late twentieth and early twenty-first century politics onto this Cold War-era novel. In the novel, military service is the visible manifestation of the patriotic feeling Emi wants Ichiro to experience. Many passages throughout the text emphasize the possibility of a redemptive function that military service performs in allowing ethnic minorities to assume and/or preserve an American national identity. Ichiro’s character spends much of the novel in the company of another Japanese American character, Kenji, who serves as a foil. While Ichiro refuses to serve in the US military when drafted, due to Japanese nationalist sentiment instilled by his mother, Kenji, with the blessing of his first-generation immigrant father, enthusiastically and voluntarily enlists in the military to prove he is deserving of the rights of an American citizen (Okada 121). Kenji’s insistence upon proving that his racial identity does not determine his national loyalty is such that he is willing to answer America’s call to arms despite its mistreatment of himself, his family and his ethnic group. In this way, Kenji serves as a foil for Ichiro, as the third person narrator points out: “They were two extremes, the Japanese who was more American than most Americans because he had crept to the brink of death for America, and the other who was neither Japanese nor American because he had failed to recognize the gift of his birthright when recognition meant everything” (73). This passage again suggests that willingness to die for one’s country is the ultimate proof of patriotic feeling and what determines one’s worthiness of citizenship. 42 Literary critics have found problems with Kenji similar to those previously discussed with Emi. Amoko finds Kenji also to “re-articulate uncritically the pedagogical address of the American nation” (43). In contrast, Yoon suggests that Kenji, like Emi, be read as a parody of assimilationist ideology, given that his willingness to serve in the military ultimately leads to his death (61). Again, to read Kenji as parody is to impose late twentieth and early twenty-first century politics on this Cold War-era novel. Jeanne Sokolowski argues that Kenji’s refusal to assign blame to individuals or political powers for both his own physical injury and for the psychological and emotional injury of racism against all Japanese Americans “avoids the issue of responsibility; more seriously, it makes reconciliation and reconstruction impossible” (87). Sokolowski is correct; Okada’s novel cannot be read as a radical challenge to American white hegemony. Instead this novel explores the intensity of the Japanese American desire for assimilation into mainstream America and the simultaneous impossibility for achieving that goal in a democracy that is defined against the racialized Other. The text does more to generate sympathy for its Japanese American characters than to hold white America accountable for its institutionalized racism. In other passages, the novel continues to present Japanese American military service as evidence of patriotism and worthiness of full citizenship. One passage recalls a conversation that takes place on a military aircraft between a “giant blonde lieutenant from Nebraska” and a Japanese American whose parents are in a camp “with barbed wire and watchtowers with soldiers holding rifles”: Two years later a good Japanese-American who had volunteered for the army sat smoking in the belly of a B-24 on his way back to Guam from a reconnaissance flight to Japan. His job was to listen through his earphones, which were attached 43 to a high-frequency set, and jot down air-ground messages spoken by Japanese- Japanese in Japanese planes and in Japanese radio shacks. (x) The descriptions of the two men add much significance to this passage. The lieutenant, being blonde and being from the American heartland, represents hegemonic American identity, a white identity. The Japanese American soldier, obviously not white, has the negative connotations of his racial and ethnic identity mitigated by the word “good” and the fact that he is serving in the US military. In this way, the text moves to generate sympathy for Japanese Americans in readers who might otherwise favor white identification as represented by the blonde lieutenant. After learning that the Japanese American soldier’s parents are in an internment camp, the blonde lieutenant says he would refuse to fight under the same circumstances. The Japanese American soldier then reminisces about a friend who refused to fight and was sent to federal prison. This exchange serves several functions. It highlights the institutionalization of racism against Americans of Japanese ancestry following the attack on Pearl Harbor by referencing the role of the US government in interning and imprisoning Japanese Americans. It contrasts this use of government force with the concurrent military service of Japanese Americans. It emphasizes the injustice of expecting Japanese Americans to serve in a military that is simultaneously deployed against their own families. It generates sympathy for the novel’s protagonist, Ichiro, to prevent the reader from levying the same condemnation that the protagonist directs against himself. Finally, it allows the reader to identify with the giant blonde lieutenant from Nebraska yet still feel sympathy for the Japanese American protagonist. The novel’s representations of Japanese Americans who volunteer to serve in the US military highlight reasons America’s ethnic minorities who are denied full citizenship 44 rights might still choose military service. In Kenji’s case, his desire to prove his patriotism and worthiness of citizenship rights is the motivation. The Japanese American translator in the B-24’s narrative about his friend who was imprisoned for refusal to serve after being selected for the military draft suggests that his motive may be to maintain his personal freedom. The novel also makes subtle reference to educational benefits extended to military veterans as several of the returning soldiers are going college (2, 58). Military service was also a way to acquire release from internment camp (1). In other words, the novel suggests that there are benefits of military service despite continued racial discrimination in both civilian and military communities. In this novel, spaces controlled by the US military become sites at which to consider the ways that institutions perpetuate racism (as opposed to individuals who hold racist beliefs). Although there is a relationship between racist individuals and racist institutions since the latter are constructed by the former, the novel emphasizes that the impersonal bureaucratic functions of racist institutions wreak much greater havoc in the lives of those experiencing racial discrimination. For example, the novel repeatedly describes the US military’s administration of the internment of Japanese Americans: The whisking and transporting of Japanese and the construction of camps with barbed wire and ominous towers supporting fully armed soldiers in places like Idaho and Wyoming and Arizona, places which even Hollywood scorned for background, had become skills which demanded the utmost of America’s great organizing ability. (ix) This quote shows the bureaucratic efficiency of the US military forces directed against Japanese Americans who are forced to abandon their homes, businesses and jobs to relocate to prison camps where they are incarcerated and guarded by the US military. By linking “barbed wire and ominous towers supporting fully armed soldiers” with “America’s great organizing ability,” the passage communicates the overwhelming power 45 of American institutions relative to the powerlessness of those who are subject to the “whisking and transporting,” in this case, Japanese American individuals and families. In addition to representing racial discrimination by the military as an institution against Japanese American civilians, the novel also includes representation of discrimination against Japanese Americans serving in the US military. Japanese Americans continue to be viewed as a military threat even as they serve alongside their fellow Americans. Kenji’s father recollects learning of racial discrimination within the military against Japanese American soldiers one week after his son had enlisted with his permission: And he remembered that a week after Kenji had gone to camp in Mississippi, the neighbor’s son, an American soldier since before Pearl Harbor, had come to see his family which was in a camp enclosed by wire fencing and had guards who were American soldiers like himself. And he had been present when the soldier bitterly spoke of how all he did was dump garbage and wash dishes and take care of the latrines. And the soldier swore and ranted and could hardly make himself speak of the time when the president named Roosevelt had come to the camp in Kansas and all the American soldiers in the camp who were Japanese had been herded into a warehouse and guarded by other American soldiers with machine guns until the president named Roosevelt had departed. (121) This testimony by a Japanese American soldier serves two purposes. First, it exposes the irony of the US military simultaneously treating Japanese Americans as a military resource and as a military threat by contrasting the Japanese American soldier’s military service that, significantly, began “before Pearl Harbor,” with the subsequent imprisonment of his family and even of himself (during Roosevelt’s visit). Second, the passage criticizes the assignment of military duties along racial lines with the least desirable duties assigned to racial minorities, a practice well-documented by historians and appearing as a trope throughout ethnic American representations of the military. 46 This soldier’s testimony eradicated any hope for Kenji’s father that military service would entirely mitigate racial discrimination against his son. As illustrated throughout the novel, both the internment of civilian Japanese Americans and the racialized experience of military service of Japanese Americans demonstrate the ways American minorities are often unable to control their own bodies or protect their own lives within a setting of institutionalized racism. In addition to considering institutionalized racial discrimination against Japanese Americans through the lens of military service, the novel considers Japanese American reactions to discrimination and how it affects their commitment to military service. Kenji’s father has doubts about whether he was right to give permission for Kenji to join the military first upon learning of racial discrimination within the military and later due to his son’s injury. Kenji, himself, however, has no doubts despite his amputated leg and impending death due to his combat injury: “Things are as they should be, he assured himself, and, feeling greatly at peace, sleep came with surprising ease” (123). Kenji’s military service allows him to maintain a positive self-image and feel deserving of American citizenship despite anti-Japanese American racism. Ichiro’s reflections on reasons for serving or not serving in the military repeatedly return to the motivation for Kenji and other Japanese Americans who, unlike Ichiro, chose to serve in the military: “For each and every refusal based on sundry reasons, another thousand chose to fight for the right to continue to be Americans because homes and cars and money could be regained but only if they first regain their rights as citizens, and that was everything.” (34) Both Kenji’s assurance that he made the correct decision and the immense weight of Ichiro’s guilt are based on the premise that military service proves worthiness of and 47 secures citizenship rights despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The novel’s characters are thus fully invested in social justice to come at some point in the future. Indeed, the novel’s primary subject matter is the psychological and emotional burden of guilt that Ichiro carries for his refusal of military service. Ichiro refuses military service due to the Japanese nationalism his mother has instilled within him; however, he is conflicted because he also feels loyalty to America, which offers his family opportunities that Japan had not and provides the only land and culture he has ever known. He feels literally fragmented by his competing loyalties: “. . . I do not understand what it was about that half that made me destroy the half of me which was American and a half which might have become the whole of me if I had said yes I will go and fight in your army because that is what I believe and want and cherish and love . . .” (16). This passage emphasizes the way that military service is imagined to perform a redemptive function in allowing ethnic minorities to assume an American national identity. Ichiro, like Kenji, believes serving in the US military would have allowed him to prove his worthiness for American citizenship. Even after he is released from prison and all Japanese Americans are released from internment camps at the end of World War II, Ichiro is still unable to view himself as worthy of American citizenship. He sees his refusal to serve in the military as an unforgivable offense: Why is it then that I am unable to convince myself that I’m no different than any other American? Why is it that, in my freedom, I feel more imprisoned in the wrongness of myself and that thing I did than when I was in prison? Am I really never to know again what it is to be American? If there should be an answer, what is it? What penalty is it that I must pay to justify my living as I so fervently desire to? There is, I am afraid, no answer. There is no retribution for one who is guilty of treason, and that is what I am guilty of. The fortunate get shot. I must live my punishment. (82) 48 This passage reveals that Ichiro’s condemnation by the state has now been internalized. Although he is no longer physically imprisoned, he still feels “imprisoned in the wrongness of myself.” In this way the novel illustrates the lingering effect of institutionalized racism, which is to engender in the racialized subject immense guilt and self-doubt. As James Davis observes, “Though he is infuriated by anti-Japanese prejudice in others, Ichiro has internalized it himself . . .” (56). Ichiro’s self-loathing is mirrored in the guilt and depression of other Japanese American characters who had refused military service, most particularly a character named Freddie (47). Through this repetition, the novel suggests that Ichiro’s guilt and regret is the common feeling of Japanese Americans who refused military service. In contrast, the novel’s Japanese American characters who serve in the military are proud of their service to America and repeatedly attempt to use the military service as a way to claim American national identity and mitigate racial discrimination that is directed against them. Ichiro encounters a friendly young Japanese American veteran who is a waiter in a café and who wears a bronze discharge pin on his shirt as a visible representation of his service in the US military. The younger waiter attempts to start a friendly conversation with Ichiro by asking him if he is Japanese. This upsets Ichiro, presumably both because he feels guilty about his own refusal to serve and because he is afraid the young waiter, who is so obviously proud of his own military service, would judge him. Ichiro is also angered by the racial discrimination that makes marking oneself with nationalistic symbols a mitigating practice: “He would have liked another cup of coffee but the greater need was to get out and away from the place and the young Japanese who had to wear a discharge button on his shirt to prove to everyone who came 49 in that he was a top-flight American” (Okada 158). Ichiro has even more unpleasant encounters with other less friendly Japanese American veterans. These hostile encounters between Japanese American veterans and non-veterans are the novel’s exploration of the ways that white nationalism leads to intraracial discrimination. Due to their desire to use their own military service as evidence that Japanese Americans as a group are worthy of citizenship, many Japanese American veterans viciously attack and ostracize Japanese Americans who refused to serve, the “no-no boys.” Eto Minato, a Japanese American veteran and childhood friend of Ichiro’s, gives him a look of “despising hatred,” calls him a “rotten bastard,” and spits in his face (3). Bull, another Japanese American veteran, publicly confronts Ichiro about his refusal to serve while drinking in a bar and continues to harass Ichiro and Freddie, another “no- no boy,” throughout the novel, which ultimately leads to Freddie’s accidental death (74). Ichiro’s own brother, Taro, even sets him up to be beaten by a group of Japanese American youth in an effort to distance himself from his brother’s shame (79). In their efforts to identify as American, the novel’s Japanese Americans turn on each other even as they all suffer from white nationalism. This is a good example of what Michel Foucault called the “polyvalent mobility” of racism—its shape-shifting ability to assume new forms and serve the needs of radically different political agendas (Stoler 376). In the case above, the same white nationalist racism that is directed against minorities is now being directed from one racial minority to another. The novel simultaneously condemns and attempts to create sympathy for its protagonist. It is significant that Kenji, the Japanese American veteran who will ultimately lose his life to a service-related injury, is the only Japanese American veteran 50 who is kind to Ichiro and does not judge him for his choice not to serve in the military. This is especially significant because even though he accepts Ichiro, Kenji does not waver in his own conviction that he was correct to serve in the military. He does not agree with Ichiro’s decision but understands it. Kenji advises Ichiro that with time Japanese Americans who served in the military will become more sympathetic to him and other no-no boys after they realize that their military service has not eliminated ethnic and racial discrimination against members of their group: They think just because they went and packed a rifle they’re different but they aren’t and they know it. They’re still Japs . . . The guys who make it tough on you probably do so out of a misbegotten idea that maybe you’re to blame because the good that they thought they were doing by getting killed and shot up doesn’t amount to a pot of beans. They just need a little time to get cut down to their own size. Then they’ll be the same as you, a bunch of Japs. (Okada 163) Kenji’s acknowledgement that “getting killed and shot up doesn’t amount to a pot of beans” highlights the irony of his own commitment to military service in order to prove his worthiness of American citizenship. Kenji’s character never reconciles these contradictory ideas. Because racist thinking falsely represents all Japanese Americans as one homogenous body, many Japanese Americans who wish to be accepted within a white nationalist American democracy see jeopardy for themselves in the decisions of other Japanese Americans not to comply with the demand for national military service. In this way, the novel unveils the ways that minorities police their own groups and hold them to the standards of America’s white nationalism. In this way, the novel also relates the fear by American minorities that a refusal to serve in the military by some will be perceived as a lack of patriotism by all and further jeopardize the group’s already tenuous hold in the national body. 51 The novel creates additional sympathy for Ichiro and all Japanese Americans by relating the ways military service fails to mitigate ethnic and racial discrimination. Kenji’s conviction that the Japanese American veterans’ bid for equal citizenship will fail is echoed by Ichiro’s friend, Gary, another Japanese American who refused to serve: Later on, things will soften down. Reality will make them lose some of their cocksureness. They’ll find that they still can’t buy a house in Broadmoor even with a million stones in the bank. They’ll see themselves getting passed up for jobs by white fellows not quite so bright but white. (227) Here Gary asserts that military service does not mitigate racial identity in an environment of white supremacism and that upon realizing this truth Japanese American veterans will stop persecuting the no-no boys, realizing that they have more in common with the no-no boys than the “white fellows.” Gary argues that this epiphany is necessary for the resolution of the existing intraracial tensions: When they find out they’re still Japs, they’ll be too busy to be mean to us . . . Right now, I say the situation is highly emotional. They’ve gone all out to prove that their blood is as red as Jones’s or Torgerson’s or Mayo’s or what have you. They’ve just got through killing and being killed to prove it and I don’t blame them one bit for not hesitating to kill us. You and I are big, black marks on their new laundry. (227) Gary is arguing that World War II has created a “highly emotional” situation for Japanese Americans who are desperate to remain part of the national body but find themselves racialized and excluded. In discussing the assimilationist aspirations of the Japanese American veterans, Gary lists names associated with immigrants of ethnicities that have, through the figurative American melting pot, become recognized as “white” in America and thus granted full citizenship—Jones (English and Welsh origins), Torgerson (Norwegian origin) and Mayo (English and Irish origins). By holding these names out as red-blooded, Gary asserts that these names may be associated not only with patriotism but also with masculine vigorousness and virility—associations that are desired but 52 inaccessible to Japanese Americans. As Jun notes, “. . . the discursive terrain of citizenship makes the soldier the classical embodiment of manhood and national representative” (62). By volunteering for military service, the Japanese American veterans in the novel hope to reclaim not only their citizenship rights but also their dignity as men. However, as Gary acknowledges, the “no-no boys” are perceived as a threat to this already compromised venture. These passages featuring the beliefs of Kenji and Gary along with the incidents previously described involving Eto and Bull all show the insidious ways that white nationalism fosters intraracial discrimination amongst American minorities and leaves them doubly alienated from both mainstream American society and within their own community. Ultimately, it is failure to achieve inclusion in American democracy that is the fate of all of the Japanese American characters in the novel. In this way, the novel gestures to the failures of white nationalism and racial democracy. William Boelhower argues that the integrity of national claims is in large part dependent upon erasing or forgetting histories that do not coalesce with the current dominant national narrative; he calls this “the West’s radical act of removal” (47). Likewise, Zita Nunes discusses “the way race relations in a democracy are apprehended and theorized” using metaphors of cannibalism in which democracies “consume” their citizens and then reject or spit out a remainder–unwanted aspects of identity and culture (xi). Similarly, this novel represents American democracy using a metaphor of amputation in which the aspects of identity and culture that are unacceptable to white American nationalism, are cut off (in lieu of being rejected or spit out as in Nunes’s cannibalism metaphor). In this novel, which examines 53 American democracy through the lens of the US military, these metaphorical amputations are either literally or figuratively combat injuries and, in almost every case, lead to death. The dominant metaphor of failed incorporation in the text involves the protagonist’s foil, Kenji, who suffers a literal combat injury. In an ironic twist of fate, Kenji maintains his honor through military service and receives “A medal, a car, a pension, even an education. Just for packing a rifle” but only at the cost of his life after a prolonged struggle against infection in an amputated limb that was a war injury (Okada 60). In Kenji’s case, the initial injury and an ongoing series of amputations he accepts in his bid to join the national body ultimately lead to a failed incorporation due to his death from his combat wounds. Kenji insists until his death that he has no regrets about his decision to serve in the military, but the critical reader cannot avoid recognizing the presence of metaphors that complicate the simple conclusion that Kenji is correct in assessing his patriotic duty. Literary critic Daniel Kim even suggests that the repeated amputation of Kenji’s leg, closer each time to his groin, serves as a metaphor of castration (3). Kenji’s festering and continuously amputated limb serves as a metaphor that represents an immigrant’s loss of identity and culture upon leaving his or her native country to immigrate to the United States and become part of the national body, and the ongoing amputations represent the continuous psychological, emotional and physical assaults that American minorities experience as a result of racial inequality. A second metaphor of failed incorporation is that of Ichiro’s mother, a staunch Japanese nationalist and reluctant American immigrant, who suffers a figurative combat injury, a mental breakdown related to World War II. Upon realizing that America has defeated Japan in World War II and the proud and powerful Japan of her imagination no 54 longer exists, she first succumbs to madness and then drowns in her bathtub (Okada 104, 185). Upon finding her body “half out of the tub and half in” (perhaps representing her uncomfortable suspense between Japan and America), Ichiro reflects: “Suddenly I feel sorry for you. Not sorry you are dead, but sorry for the happiness you have not known. So, now you are free. Go back quickly. Go to the Japan that you so long remembered and loved, and be happy” (186). Although the mother had come to America with the hope of acquiring material wealth, she never relinquished her hope of returning to Japan, which was always, in her mind, home. In considering his mother’s militant Japanese nationalism, Ichiro wonders, “Was it she who was wrong and crazy not to have found in herself the capacity to accept a country which repeatedly refused to accept her or her sons unquestioningly, or was it the others who are being deluded, the ones, like Kenji, who believed and fought and even gave their lives to protect this country where they could still not rate as first-class citizens because of the unseen walls?” (104). In this way, the novel repeatedly considers the issue of nationalism for minorities who suffer from institutionalized racism. What does national loyalty mean to those who are discriminated against in the nation in which they live? Ichiro’s mother’s inability to find a home in white nationalist American society leads to her death, another metaphor of failed Japanese American incorporation. A third metaphor of failed incorporation leading to death involves Freddie, a second Japanese American “no-no boy” and Bull, a Japanese American military veteran. As that of Ichiro’s mother, Freddie’s combat injury is figurative, mental, and leads to his death. Like Ichiro, he experiences severe psychological trauma related to his shame about refusing the draft. However, what plagues Freddie most is the rejection of the Japanese 55 American community, symbolized by the Japanese American veteran character, Bull. Bull has internalized the values of American nationalism and in an attempt to place himself into the national body by virtue of his military service, viciously attacks Japanese Americans who refused the draft. The novel concludes with a fight between Freddie and Bull that leads to Freddie’s death in a car accident as he attempts to flee from Bull. It is Freddie’s death that leads to an epiphany by Bull that Freddie’s death is his own loss, as well: “Then he started to cry, not like a man in grief or a soldier in pain, but like a baby in loud, gasping, beseeching howls” (250). The narrator reconfirms Bull’s sense of pained helplessness by describing the interaction between Bull and Ichiro, who had been fighting a few minutes before: “Ichiro put a hand on Bull’s shoulder, sharing the empty sorrow in the hulking body, feeling the terrible loneliness of the distressed wails, and saying nothing. He gave the shoulder a tender squeeze, patted the head once tenderly, and began to walk slowly down the alley away from the brightness of the club and the morbidity of the crowd” (250). The simile comparing Bull’s cries to those of a baby emphasizes his feeling of helplessness as a member of an excluded American minority group. To embrace Japanese Americans who rejected American nationalism would exclude him from the national body as a disloyal citizen. However, the novel implies that for Bull to reject Japanese Americans who refused to serve when drafted during the Japanese internment is to reinforce the power of white nationalism that he, too, suffers from. In other words, by harming them, he is harming himself. While Freddie’s death symbolizes his failed incorporation into the American national body, Bull remains alive, but Freddie’s death brings the epiphany that he, too, despite his military service has been excluded from full citizenship. 56 While the failed incorporations of Kenji, Ichiro’s mother and Freddie are rendered permanent by their deaths, the status of Ichiro’s American citizenship remains unresolved. The novel’s greatest irony is its repeated juxtaposition of Japanese American guilt about betraying America by not serving in the military against America’s ongoing betrayal of her Japanese American citizens. The latter part of the novel is devoted to the process of Ichiro forgiving himself for his betrayal of America following his release from prison. The reader becomes witness to Ichiro’s struggle through the narrator’s third person delivery of his internal dialogue in which he struggles to regain his self-esteem and identity: Was it possible that he and Freddie and the other four of the poker crowd and all the other American-born, American-educated Japanese who had renounced their American-ness in a frightening moment of madness had done so irretrievably? Was there no hope of redemption? Surely there must be. He was still a citizen. He could still vote. He was free to travel and work and study and marry and drink and gamble. People forgot and, in forgetting, forgave. (51) Although Ichiro once again enjoys the rights of legal citizenship, he perceives his national identity as a social subjectivity contingent upon the forgiveness of his fellow countrymen. In this passage, because it is socially unacceptable, refusing military service becomes equivalent to renouncing “American-ness.” Although Ichiro retains his legal citizenship rights, he is particularly concerned with the ways his own subjectivity is constructed through social relations with his fellow citizens and thus feels his American- ness is contingent upon their forgiveness and acceptance: Time would ease the rupture which now separated him from the young Japanese who were Americans because they had fought for America and believed in it. And time would destroy the old Japanese who, living in America and being denied a place as citizens, nevertheless had become inextricably a part of the country which by its vastness and goodness and fairness in plenitude drew them into its fold, or else they would not have understood why it was that their sons, who looked as Japanese as they themselves, were not Japanese at all but Americans of 57 the country America. In time, he thought, in time there will again be a place for me. (51-52) In this passage, again Ichiro firmly links US military service with American national identity by referring to “the young Japanese who were Americans because they had fought for America and believed in it.” Ichiro’s belief that time would “ease the rupture” between him and Japanese American veterans relates back to Kenji and Gary’s assertions that time will reveal that military service does not mitigate racial identity. Interestingly, Ichiro’s bid for citizenship is also dependent upon the erasure of the “old Japanese,” who, like his mother, represent Japanese nationalism. Ichiro has internalized the false binary, created by the racialization and military internment of Japanese Americans that one must be either Japanese or American and cannot be both. Thus, Ichiro looks forward to the day when he will be able to discard his Japanese-ness through the death of the “old Japanese” and become fully American. There are two central characters in the text who befriend Ichiro and try to persuade him that, despite his refusal of military service, he still has a place in America. First, there is Kenji, Ichiro’s foil, childhood friend and wounded Japanese American veteran, who is dying of his war injury. Second, there is Ichiro’s romantic interest, Emi, who also does not judge him for his refusal to serve and encourages him to forgive himself. Interestingly, although both of these characters are willing to accept, forgive and rehabilitate Ichiro, both of them still view his refusal to serve in the military as a mistake, though a forgivable one. Kenji gives both Ichiro and the reader perspective on the ramifications of Japanese American decisions to join or not join the US military during World War II. Although Kenji is suffering greatly from pain and a series of amputations that he knows 58 will lead to his death, he still says that he would not trade his own injury for Ichiro’s dishonor even if it would save his life (73). In this relationship between Kenji and Ichiro, the novel again touches on associations between patriotism, war and masculinity. The narrator confirms Ichiro agrees that Kenji’s situation is the honorable one by directly reporting his thoughts: I’ll change with you, Kenji, he thought. Give me the stump which gives you the right to hold your head high. Give me the eleven inches which are beginning to hurt again and bring ever closer the fear of approaching death, and give me with it the fullness of yourself which is also yours because you were man enough to wish the thing which destroyed your leg and, perhaps, you with it but, at the same time, made it so that you can put your one good foot in the dirt of America and know that the wet coolness of it is yours beyond a single doubt. (64) Ichiro’s conviction that Kenji chose to serve because he was “man enough” is directly related to his own shame at feeling less than a man for not serving. Kenji is physically emasculated by his military service, and Ichiro is psychologically emasculated by his refusal of military service. Thus, the novel represents the impossible situation of the Japanese American male during World War II. Despite their agreement that Ichiro has shirked his duty, Kenji encourages Ichiro to forgive himself and tells him that with time other Japanese Americans will realize that they all, both veterans and those who refused to serve, are subject to the same racial discrimination and, therefore, will forgive Ichiro (164). In this way the novel acknowledges that Japanese American military service failed to mitigate the effects of racial and ethnic identity and earn equal citizenship and that it is racism, not the refusal of military service, that is to blame for discrimination against Japanese Americans. It is these passages that trouble the text’s dominant narrative and conclusion, which otherwise seem very accommodating to the white nationalist demand for unconditional patriotism from America’s repressed minorities. 59 Likewise, Emi, Ichiro’s romantic interest, feels sympathy for Ichiro’s psychological and emotional quandary. She calls him to take action to redeem himself and prove his worthiness of citizenship: “Admit your mistake and do something about it” (95). From Emi’s perspective, Ichiro’s mistake is matched by America’s own mistake in mistreating its Japanese American citizens and thus both mistakes should be forgiven: In any other country they would have shot you for what you did. But this country is different. They made a mistake when they doubted you. They made a mistake when they made you do what you did and they admit it by letting you run around loose. Try, if you can, to be equally big and forgive them and be grateful to them and prove to them that you can be an American worthy of the frailties of the country as well as its strengths. (96) By contrasting America with other countries, Emi argues that, despite its flaws, America still offers relatively more freedom because it is more tolerant of dissent. While Kenji urges Ichiro to forgive himself, Emi encourages him also to forgive America and accept “the frailties of the country as well as its strengths.” Both Kenji and Emi accept American nationalism as valid but flawed, and instead of hoping to eradicate it, hope only that it will become more inclusive. Ichiro’s conflicting loyalties are central to both his identity and his ongoing inability to make decisions about how to move forward in his life. At the time he is drafted into the military from the internment camp, he is conflicted between loyalty to his mother, a Japanese nationalist immigrant, and to America, the land of his birth. Ultimately, his decision not to join the military is based on his loyalty to his mother and perhaps influenced by his isolation from mainstream American society in an internment camp. However, upon his release from prison, as he re-enters American society, he is overwhelmed with regret and shame about his refusal to serve in the military of his native country. Thus, he ultimately rejects Japanese nationalism: “. . . I am only half of me and 60 the half that remains is American by law because the government was wise and strong enough to know why it was that I could not fight for America and did not strip me of my birthright. But it is not enough to be American only in the eyes of the law and it is not enough to be only half an American and know that it is an empty half . . . I wish with all my heart that I were Japanese or that I were American” (16). Ichiro accepts the false binary of Japanese and American identities and thus resolves to abandon his Japanese identity. However, having refused military service, he feels unable to adopt an American identity and thus finds himself without any stable identity at all. Ichiro reflects on his confusion due to feeling unable to identify completely with his mother’s Japanese nationalism or with American nationalism: “And the reason I do not understand it is because I do not understand you who were the half of me that is no more and because I do not understand what it was about that half that made me destroy the half of me which was American and the half which might have become the whole of me if I had said yes I will go and fight in your army because that is what I believe and want and cherish and love . . .” (16). Ichiro longs for a single unadulterated national identity, especially because in the context of World War II, the racialization of all people of Japanese ancestry as the enemy has directed the institutionalized forces of white racial nationalism in America against himself and his family. Since Ichiro believes that it is military service that makes one wholly American, he believes he will remain forever outside the national body. The novel points out the illogic and inconsistencies of American policies based on white racial nationalism. Emi remarks that in the historical context of World War II, Japanese Americans are racialized in a way that German Americans, Italian Americans 61 and Russian Americans are not despite the United States being at war with Germany and Italy and having hostile relationship with Russia through 1941: “It’s because we’re American and because we’re Japanese and sometimes the two don’t mix. It’s all right to be German and American or Italian and American or Russian and American but, as things turned out, it wasn’t all right to be Japanese and American. You had to be one or the other” (91). None of the immigrants from the other Axis nations were singled out for internment. In this this way, the novel emphasizes again that it was not just difference in national identity but also racism that led to the internment of Japanese Americans. Ichiro reflects on the principles of inclusion and exclusion from the American national body and questions the validity of those principles: Maybe I dealt myself out, but what about that young kid on Burnside who was in the Army and found it wasn’t enough so that he has to keep proving to everyone who comes in for a cup of coffee that he was fighting for his country like the button on his shirt says he did because the army didn’t do anything about his face to make him look more American? And what about the poor niggers on Jackson Street who can’t find anything better to do than spit on the sidewalk and show me the way to Tokyo? They are on the outside looking in, just like that kid and just like me and just like everybody else I’ve ever seen or known . . . Maybe the answer is that there is no in. Maybe the whole damned country is pushing and shoving and screaming to get into some place that doesn’t exist, because they don’t know that the outside could be the inside if only they would stop all this pushing and shoving and screaming, and they haven’t got enough sense to realize that. (159) In this passage, Ichiro returns to the idea that military service is insufficient to mitigate white nationalism and racial discrimination. Ichiro refers to a Japanese American veteran and comments that “the army didn’t do anything about his face,” and thereby points out that military service does not mitigate the effects of racism. His reference to “the poor niggers on Jackson Street” constructs a relationship between Japanese Americans and African Americans to the extent that they are both racialized and excluded from the 62 American body.28 By repeating twice that Americans are “pushing and shoving and screaming” for a sense of belonging, the passage suggests that national, racial and ethnic identity are constructed out of fear. By hypothesizing that all of the anxiety relates to trying to reach “some place that doesn’t exist,” Ichiro suggests that American principles of inclusion and exclusion serve only to generate a false sense of security for those who are included. The novel ultimately resolves the dilemma of conflicting nationalisms (exposed by Ichiro’s refusal of military service) by proposing a revised version of American nationalism that eliminates differences based on race and ethnicity—post-racial nationalism. According to Ichiro’s and Kenji’s imaginations, this post-racial future will unfold through racial mixing and white liberals who believe in racial equality. At one point in the novel, Ichiro becomes irritated by a Japanese American waiter who tries to establish ethnic affiliation with him by asking if he is Japanese. He then dreams of a future America in which racial and ethnic affiliation would not matter: “Still, how much finer it would be if Smith would do the same for Eng and Sato would do the same for Wotynski and Laverghetti would do likewise for whoever happened by. Eng for Eng, Jap for Jap, Pole for Pole and like for like meant classes and distinctions and hatred and prejudice and wars and misery . . .” (157). Through Ichiro’s imagining of the future, the novel seems optimistic about the future of post-racial American nationalism. 28 Jackson Street in Seattle was known for its African American culture and jazz scene beginning around 1918 when Lillian Smith’s jazz band played at Washington Hall. During World War II, when Seattle served as a key defense industry site, African American jazz culture in this area was at its height. There were over two dozen jazz clubs on Jackson Street in 1948 (De Barros). 63 Like Ichiro, Kenji dislikes racial and ethnic segregation. He criticizes both white nationalism and ethnic nationalism and implies that self-segregation is just as bad as internment: “They bitched and hollered when the government put them in camps and put real fences around them, but now they’re doing the same damn thing to themselves. They screamed because the government said they were Japs and, when they finally got out, they couldn’t wait to rush together and prove they were” (163). Kenji’s proposed solution to racial and ethnic division is for people to marry outside their own racial and ethnic groups, establishing the metaphorical “melting pot.” He advises Ichiro, “Go someplace where there isn’t another Jap within 1000 miles. Marry a white girl or a Negro or an Italian or even a Chinese. Anything but a Japanese. After a few generations of that, you’ve got the thing beat. Am I making sense?” (164) He continues, “. . . don’t let there be any Japs or Chinks or Jews or Poles or Niggers or Frenchies, but only people.” (165). With Kenji’s vision, as with Ichiro’s, the novel gestures towards post-racial democracy as America’s hope for the future and the resolution of America’s wartime racial anxieties. Li argues that the novel’s post-racial vision facilitates assimilation and suggests, “Okada’s vision is a product of the immediate postwar era when the Japanese American community’s desire for acceptance far outweighed concerns for ethnic and cultural preservation” (89). To usher in this utopic post-racial democracy, the novel proposes hope in the form of a sympathetic white liberal–the character of Mr. Carrick, a white business owner who is willing to hire Ichiro despite his dishonorable military service record. He, in fact, wants to hire a Japanese American worker due to his own guilt about the internment. He felt a personal connection with some Japanese American tenants of his and, thus, is very 64 sympathetic about the unjust internment. Ichiro is overwhelmingly grateful for Carrick’s sympathy: “There was someone who cared. Surely there were others too who understood the suffering of the small and the weak and, yes, even the seemingly treasonous, and offered a way back into the great compassionate stream of life that is America.” (153). Ichiro’s gratitude is seemingly out of proportion to the scale of Carrick’s moral achievement. Ichiro wonders, “What words would transmit the bigness of his feelings to match the bigness of the heart of this American who, in the manner of his living, was continually nursing and worrying the infant America into the greatness of its inheritance?” (155). The text’s grandiose presentation of Carrick’s character suggests that sincere white liberals who are concerned with equitable treatment of ethnic minorities are evidence that America has potential for a post-racial future. However, this oversimplification is undercutting the institutional nature of racism that is impersonal and not a result of one-on-one interpersonal interactions. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, in his book, Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Inequality in America, discusses the way that “individual whites can express a detachment from the racialized way in which social control agencies operate in America” (53). In other words, just because white liberals feel badly that Japanese Americans experienced internment does not mean they feel any personal responsibility for the practice and abolishing it nor does it mean they even realize that they are themselves the beneficiaries of white nationalism. Carrick trying to give one Japanese American a good job does not have consequences on the same scale as one racist law or policy, such as the internment of Japanese Americans, that affects thousands 65 or millions of minorities. Therefore, the novel’s glorification of Carrick’s kind gesture as hope for future racial equality in America seems farfetched. Likewise, the optimistic conclusion of the novel seems both bizarre and forced. Bull, a Japanese American veteran, is assaulting Freddie, another Japanese American, because he refused the draft. The two men are fighting when Freddie decides to flee by automobile and immediately dies in a collision, which fills Bull with remorse. In Bull’s remorse, Ichiro finds a “glimmer of hope” (250). It is understandable that Ichiro might have some satisfaction in Bull’s remorse since Bull has repeatedly bullied Japanese Americans who refused the draft, including Ichiro. However, the final paragraph still seems bizarre in its optimism: “He walked along, thinking, searching, thinking and probing, and, in the darkness of the alley of the community that was a tiny bit of America, he chased that faint and elusive insinuation of promise as it continued to take shape in mind and in heart” (251). None of the events of the novel seem a reasonable basis for Ichiro’s optimistic state of mind about the future of American democracy as the novel concludes. Although the novel is sympathetic to the complex situation of its protagonist, the narrative ultimately condemns Ichiro’s refusal to serve in the US military. Despite its chastisement of the American nation for institutionalized discrimination against its ethnic minorities, the novel maintains a conciliatory tone and suggests that Ichiro’s refusal to serve in the US military is an error but one that should be forgiven considering the nation’s own errors in its treatment of its Japanese American citizens. Ultimately, the novel seems to call for expanding and rehabilitating American national identity as it is constructed at the time of the novel’s publication to make it more inclusive of the 66 nation’s racial and ethnic minorities, rather than calling into question the basis of American nationalism altogether. No-No Boy’s conclusion imagines fraternity and glosses over difference in order to imagine a homogeneous nation.29 A critical reader of No-No Boy might draw a different conclusion than the conciliatory one seemingly offered by the text and instead interpret the novel as a condemnation of nationalism. No-No Boy attempts to expand American national identity by remembering a very particular history of injustice toward Japanese Americans and generating sympathy for victims of institutionalized racism. As a result, as literary critic Josephine Nock-Hee Park argues, the figure of the no-no boy “perpetually indicts the state” as a constant reminder of injustice (232). Seongho Yoon also reminds us that, ironically, the concept of the Other is both antithetical to democracy and intrinsic to the official narrative of the American nation: “. . . its universality is contradicted by the very presence of its constitutive outside that is placed in opposition to the particular articulation of the nation” (46). In suggesting resolution via a bid for a post-racial 29 Benedict Anderson, in his well-known text, Imagined Communities, discusses the significance of memory and forgetting. Specifically, Anderson argues, citing French historian Ernest Renan’s 1887 essay “What is a nation?” as an example, that recounting shared histories of conflict within the nation is one method by which national identity is reinforced (199-201). Anderson calls these memories of “reassuring fratricide” because they remind citizens of a shared national history of conflict but simultaneously gloss over the internal divisions that led to the conflict. He adds examples from nineteenth century American literature: James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pathfinder (love between white & Native American), Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (love between white and Polynesian), and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (love between white and black). The conclusion of John Okada’s No-No Boy provides a twentieth century example of this phenomenon of focusing on shared national identity and glossing over divisions. 67 national future, No-No Boy forgets all of its own observations about the deep institutional entrenchment of white nationalism.30 However, the reader need not forget. Taken as a whole, the novel contains a confusing combination of ideas, which is why so many literary critics deem the novel ambiguous. Through its representations of the US military and Japanese Americans during the period immediately following World War II, the novel examines what Sokolowski calls “the crisis of citizenship and national identity forced by the war” (69). Through these representations, the novel condemns America’s white racial nationalism yet insists that American minorities should feel unconditional loyalty to their country of citizenship. Additionally, it demands that American minorities proudly serve in the US military, an institution which the novel represents as fraught with white nationalist policies and practices. Finally, the novel expresses hope that America will develop into a post-racial democracy although the means of achieving this dream remain unclear except for the novel’s representations of future racial mixing and white liberal guilt. As Helen Huran Jun notes, although the novel’s representations clearly criticize racism against American minorities, “The narrative is hardly a systemic critique of the US state” (61). To explain the novel’s 30 In fact, both racial mixing and white liberalism contributed to the election of President Barack Obama, the first African-American US President in 2008. However, the continuation of racialized violence (such injustice with respect to law enforcement— Trayvon Martin and others) as well as the white nationalist backlash that contributed to the election of Donald Trump to the US Presidency in 2016 revealed the continuance of racial anxieties and animosities within the American body politic and resulted in a general consensus that American had not arrived at a post-racial era. Many ethnic American writers and scholars argue that although Jim Crow racism has been largely eradicated, the institutionalization of race continues. For example, F. Michael Higgenbotham argues that the legal construction of race, segregation and white racial privilege continues, resulting in the continuation of unequal power distribution along racial lines. He suggests that legal reforms in conjunction with interracial dialogue about American race relations might eventually lead to an actual post-racial era. 68 resistance to condemnation of the US nation-state, we may refer back to Ling’s 1995 argument that Cold War American culture at the time of Okada’s writing efforts had “limited cultural space for Asian American literary expression” and that even in its ambiguity the text was politically ambitious for its time (Ling, “Race,” 62). However, in its optimistic conclusion, No-No Boy provides an interesting contrast with the pessimistic conclusion of the next novel to be considered, Captain Blackman. Blackman and Representations of the US Military: Waiting for Justice No Longer In John A. Williams’s Captain Blackman, the US military serves as a site at which to consider the ways that institutionalized state power shapes individual and group subjectivities, identities and lives, specifically those of African Americans from the late eighteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Williams develops his themes through representations of the US military using a wide range of modernist techniques: settings in military bases in the United States, several combat zones in other countries and multiple US wars; an extensive group of characters who are US military members, including the protagonist and antagonist; flashbacks to multiple US wars; a narrative hook in the exposition that finds the protagonist in the middle of a firefight in Vietnam; a plot twist that involves black soldiers passing for white in order to seize control of the US nuclear arsenal in the denouement; poetic justice and irony in the military infrastructure developed by a white nationalist government being usurped for the destruction of that same government by its oppressed minorities in the denouement; defamiliarization of ethnic subjects through military service; third-person omniscient narration of experiences of military service; symbolism and pathos related to combat injury and death; and 69 incorporation of multiple military-related genres (war diaries, marching cadences, military-related legislation, telegrams, letters). These representations of the US military in Captain Blackman provide a scorching critique of American nationalism by juxtaposing a history of racism against black Americans with a revisionist American military history that highlights the service and sacrifices of black American military members. Additionally, the novel calls into question the imperialistic nature of several foreign US military operations by forging a connection between domestic racism against African Americans and the racialization of native peoples of other countries occupied by the US military, gesturing towards the formation of a transnational anti-racist coalition.31 In this way, the text calls into question both the willingness of black Americans to serve in the military and the US military operations in Asia taking place at the time this novel was published. By its conclusion, the novel decisively rejects American national identity as it is constructed at the time of the novel’s publication and presents a bleak, pessimistic outlook for the nation’s future race relations. 31 Williams was only one of many black voices to make the connection between America’s domestic racism and the racialization of people of other countries in the service of American imperialism overseas during this time period. In 1966, world heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali famously stated, “I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong” (Hall 1). In 1967, Ali added, “I am not going ten thousand miles from here to help murder and kill and burn another poor people simply to help continue the domination of white America” (1). In 1966, the Black Panther Party demanded that all black Americans should be exempt from military service because black people should not have to “defend a racist government that does not protect us” (1). Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee called the draft “white people sending black people to make war on yellow people to defend land they stole from red people” (1). In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. also denounced the war in Vietnam (1). Therefore, the novel emerged in the context of many similar themes and ideas circulating in black American discourse. 70 Earl A. Cash, author of the only book-length critical discussion of Williams’s work, argues that Williams is one of the best American novelists of the twentieth century but has been underappreciated as a writer (5). Indeed, Williams himself felt that his work did not receive the respect it deserves, as he discussed in a 1995 interview with his son, Dennis A. Williams, suggesting that racism is largely responsible, citing first as evidence the American Academy in Rome’s 1962 retraction of its award to him of $3,500 and a year’s residency in Rome based on false rumors that he was tied to “drugs, jazz and white women” (“An Interview” 40). Second, he mentions resentment on the part of whites in the publishing industry because he demands to be treated with respect and dignity: “Everybody wants you to kiss their ass and I’m not going to do that” (40). The scant critical attention to Captain Blackman serves as evidence of this lack of appreciation for Williams’s work. Besides Cash’s book-length discussion of Williams’s work, published in 1975, with one chapter devoted to Captain Blackman, the novel received a handful of mixed reviews in newspapers and magazines in the 1970s and was also mentioned during a handful of interviews with Williams in the 1970s. Two critical articles on the novel have been more recently published in nationally recognized, peer-reviewed literary journals, one in African American Review in 1996 and one in MELUS in 2009. The novel has also received brief mention, without being the main subject, in a small number of other journal articles, books, interviews and reviews. Williams was a prolific writer, and wrote six books of nonfiction and twelve novels, one of which, The Man Who Cried I Am (1967), earned him international recognition and has been the subject of more extensive literary scholarship. Williams was recognized late in his life with induction into the National Literary Hall of Fame in 1998 and receipt of the American Book Award 71 Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011. However, critics have remained indifferent to Captain Blackman. Given the dearth of critical attention to the novel, it is not surprising that no books or journal articles have been published that focus primarily on the relationship between the text’s representations of the US military and nationalism, a situation this dissertation will remedy. In Williams’s novel, the protagonist, Captain Abraham Blackman, is an African- American officer in the US Army who is seriously wounded fighting in the Vietnam War during the novel’s exposition. As a result of his injury, Abraham drifts in and out of a coma, dreaming that he is fighting in many historical American conflicts: the American Revolution, the Battle of New Orleans, the Civil War, the Indian Wars, the Spanish- American War, World War I, World War II, and the Korean War. This narrative method and its ambitious scope, covering almost 200 years of American military history allow the novel to survey the black American soldier’s relationship to the nation over time raising complex questions about the duties of citizenship in the face of national hypocrisy with respect to democratic ideals. The novel serves as a lesson in black military history, much like the lessons taught by the protagonist, who is both a professional military officer and a self-educated and appointed teacher of black American military history for his troops. Cash argues that the novel’s movement through time, connecting past and present (at the time of the novel’s publication), helps to illustrate Williams’s thesis that the black man’s situation in America had not changed much over time from the Revolutionary War to the War in Vietnam (120). The connection between the novel’s commentary on nationalism and its emphasis on history is crucial. We might think again about the connection between memory and 72 history by returning to Renan’s essay “What is a nation?”: “Forgetting, I would even go so far as to say historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation, which is why progress in historical studies often constitutes a danger for [the principle of] nationality. Indeed, historical enquiry brings to light the deeds of violence which took place at the origin of all political foundations . . .” (Renan 11). In other words, the integrity of American national identity is in large part dependent upon the willingness of its citizens to erase or forget the parts of themselves and their histories that do not coalesce with the existing dominant national narrative. Renan’s argument is buttressed by the later scholarship of Boelhower and Nunes, which I also mentioned in the previous section discussing Okada’s novel. All three scholars emphasize the ways the integrity of the national narrative is dependent upon the erasure of ethnic minority culture and history. After considering these ideas about the role of forgetting in sustaining national myths and narratives, one may better understand the radical nature of the subconscious dream-like remembrance of African American military history that reflects Captain Blackman’s conscious desire to educate the predominately minority military troops who serve under him. While Okada’s novel delves into history in order to make a relatively conservative demand for the expansion of existing national identity, Williams’s novel makes a more radical move to deconstruct and reject existing national identity through the recovery of history. Williams’s protagonist reflects on the inaccuracy of historical narratives maintained by hegemonic American institutions: “But one day, he thought, he was going to take it upon himself to tell the young legs about black soldiers, because the white man sure wasn’t going to do it and do it right” (312). Captain Blackman’s resurrection of black Americans’ long history of military service and bravery in battle on 73 behalf of the United States provides a counter narrative not only to the myths of racial inferiority that support the institutionalized racism experienced by Blackman’s troops but also the same myths of racial inferiority which were circulating in the American culture of Williams’s readers. Both at the time of Blackman’s Vietnam injury and in his dreams of his own participation in different past American military conflicts, his most significant confrontations are not with America’s military enemies but with another American soldier, Ishmael Whittman. In this way, the text produces an allegorical struggle between Blackman and Whittman (white man) that represents racial conflicts between black and white Americans. The biblical allusions to the significance of the protagonist and antagonist’s first names are unmistakable. The biblical Abraham is remembered as the father of the Jewish people, just as, by the conclusion of the novel, Blackman becomes the metaphorical father of a transnational black community. The biblical Ishmael, firstly, is the son of Abraham; thus, the novel may be gesturing to the “Out of Africa” theory that all modern humans originated in Africa 200,000 to 400,00 years ago, ironically making Blackman the metaphorical father of Whittman (white man). Secondly, the biblical Ishmael would constantly mock and disdain his half-brother and as a result was cast out; thus, with this character, the novel gestures toward the historical mistreatment of black Americans by white Americans and suggests white Americans will also experience a fall from grace. Cash calls Whittman “an historical anachronism fighting futilely to maintain the white supremacy held in the past” (121). The relationship between the two characters reflects the impatience for justice of black Americans and the reluctance to dismantle 74 institutionalized white supremacism of white Americans at the time of the novel’s publication in the early 1970s. While Blackman is the smarter of the two, based on their Army aptitude tests, and the more competent of the two, based on his ability to navigate with maps and lead troops in battle, Whittman is still promoted and given command ahead of Blackman (298). Whittman’s character becomes a metaphor for the institutional nature of racism, revealing the concrete ways in which racist ideology is brought to bear upon the black body. It is Whittman’s orders as a military commander that send Blackman into danger and result in Blackman’s critical injuries although, in the end, Blackman survives his injuries and receives a Medal of Honor for heroism. Williams’s choices of protagonist and antagonist were perhaps influenced by his own experiences with racism in the US Navy, which he describes repeatedly in his 1965 travel-diary, This Is My Country Too, an autobiographical article he wrote for Dial magazine that was published in 1971, and in the 1995 interview with his son. In his travel diary, Williams recalls his military service during World War II: “My biggest battles were not against the Japanese, but against the United States Navy and many of my white comrades” (This Is My Country Too 4). In the 1995 interview, he says that the military was where, after growing up in Syracuse, New York, he first encountered “deadly, gonna-kill-yo-ass racism” (“Interview” 46). Williams’s comparisons of Blackman and Whittman throughout the novel illustrate the insidious nature of racism by unveiling its institutional workings within the US military with respect to unequal promotion and advancement, unequal treatment enabled by racial segregation, unequal assignment of dangerous duties and unequal administration of martial discipline. 75 At the time Blackman enlists, he is optimistic about the opportunities that await him in the military and believes all of the military recruiters’ promises: Three squares, a profession, and travel. And rapid promotion, they said. And, Blackman knew, the Services were now integrated, had been for a year. He left New York without looking back; the bus on the way to Ft Dix. He scored in Grade I of the AGCT, and someone said he was officer material, but at Fort Bragg, his next post, where he made corporal, no one seemed to notice. (Captain Blackman 297) With time, Blackman learns that the racial integration of the American military, a result of President Harry S. Truman’s 1948 Executive Order 9981, did not end institutionalized racial discrimination. Not only do his high marks on the Army’s aptitude testing go unnoticed, his white peers are promoted ahead of him even when his performance is superior: “Whitman, with his flaxen hair, had scored in Grade III, gotten his stripes earlier and assigned to Headquarters company where he did little except to complain about serving with Negro soldiers—a fact, which gave him a lot more leisure than he could have had serving with any other regiment” (298). With this quote, the narrative highlights two aspects of institutionalized racism in the military: unequal promotion and inequitable distribution of labor. The novel repeatedly returns to the color barrier experienced by blacks with regard to promotion despite the large number of black Americans serving in the military during Vietnam. The omniscient narrator reports Blackman’s thoughts about the unequal promotion as a sign of ongoing racial discrimination within the military: “You’d think with so many brothers coming into the Army now, that they’d be glad to kick some of us upstairs. No. It’s the same old shit” (312). At another point in the text, a conversation between two white soldiers makes it clear that even when black soldiers are promoted 76 due to affirmative action, institutionalized racism undermines recognition of their professional accomplishments: “Here is a boy made Grade I in AGCT.” “What? Let me see? Jesus, you are right. And these boogies been screaming for officers.” “Been overseas, too. Bogie.” “Yeah, a medic, though . . .” “Hell, he can be a sanitation, supply, morale or infantry officer. That little old six weeks of training.” “Abraham Blackman. Hmm. Purple Heart for the Bogie action–” “Oh, you know how that one goes. Some one or two star goes to a hospital, walks up and down the wards, handing out Purple Hearts–” “I know, I know, but if this kicks back, we at least had good reasons for putting it through in the first place. Overseas. Bogie. Purple Heart and Grade I. Maybe we better go back over this stack, Ralph, and see if we can’t find some more nigger second-lieutenant material; we got some quotas to fill, man.” (Captain Blackman 258) In this conversation, two white officers in charge of military promotions downplay Blackman’s military service, heroism, and combat injury while attempting to fill racial quotas. The racial quotas suggest some attempts to reform the institution, yet the attitudes of the administrators demonstrate the insidiousness of residual racism. The racial slurs, such as “boogies” and “nigger,” highlight the irony of having racist whites administer affirmative action programs and suggest the intransigence of racist ideologies and attitudes and illustrate the complexities of the relationship between legal and social equality. With these scenes, the novel reveals the institutionalized nature of racism, which Lipsitz describes as an investment in whiteness when he describes white Americans’ determination to hold onto “an identity that provides them with resources, power and opportunity” (vii). Like Lipsitz’s book, Williams’s novel makes visible the ways that 77 institutionalized racism denies racial minorities access to “asset accumulation and upwards mobility” (viii). Williams’s novel fictionalizes the US military’s historical denial of black soldiers’ promotions and recognition for distinguished performance. The novel goes on to illustrate the ways that not only black soldiers’ wallets but also their lives were in danger. The omniscient narrator again reveals Blackman’s thoughts, this time to consider the assignment of black soldiers to the most dangerous combat positions: “Chuck had all the answers and the shit was getting thick, and the little brown men were steady taking out big white men and the big white men became afraid . . . Was that why, Blackman now wondered, nearly all the rifle companies were slowly but certainly changing colors to all black?” (313). The novel refers to the inequitable distribution of hazardous duties, which places black soldiers on the front lines of combat units rendering them more likely to die in combat. In this way, the novel suggests that black people are unable to protect their own bodies and lives within a racist institutional setting. During the dream sequences, Blackman witnesses additional incidents that demonstrate that black lives do not matter to the US military. During the Revolutionary War, he witnesses black soldiers sent into battle without weapons. During World War II, he observes black deserters massacred in a swamp near Tombolo, Italy instead of disciplined using the Uniformed Code of Military Justice. Also, as previously mentioned, during Vietnam, Whittman’s official orders were responsible for the combat encounter in which Blackman is severely injured and nearly killed. The novel even suggests that Whittman intentionally sent Blackman into danger in order to see him physically harmed: “This was white power; this is what he’d done, finally, to the nigger who’d whipped his 78 ass in Korea . . . But I did this, Whittman thought, as he drew near the bed and met Blackman’s eyes. I sent him in when Intelligence, as usual, didn’t know shit from Shinola about what was out there” (301). Again, this incident suggests the black man’s inability to protect his life or control his body within a racist institutional setting. The novel links its critique of American nationalism to its critique of institutionalized racism. Racialized injustice ultimately causes Blackman to decide that his faith in America’s democratic ideals is naïve and misguided: “It was a mistake. I mean to expect my enemy, which he was, and always has been, to reward my service with equality. A serious misjudgment. Worse, tragic” (326). This unequal treatment of black people in America and of black soldiers in the US military causes Blackman to believe he no longer has a duty to remain loyal to the US nation-state. Returning to Oldenquist’s analysis of patriotism in the previous section on Okada, there are several grounds on which a country’s citizens might question the duties they owe to their country. First, if one subscribes to impartial patriotism, and one’s country is not founded upon and/or upholding the values or ideals to which one subscribes, one’s loyalty might be withdrawn. Second, if one subscribes to sports patriotism, one might withhold loyalty if one does not feel a sense of ownership or belonging that allow one to identify the country as one’s own. Third, if one subscribes to loyalty patriotism, one may feel no duty owed if either of the two cases above is true since one must both feel a sense of belonging and simultaneously confirm the absence of a more compelling universal demand for justice based on higher values or ideals. The racial discrimination Blackman and other black Americans experience causes him to find America is not upholding its 79 professed values of equality and justice and also deprives him of a sense of ownership or belonging. In the previous section of this chapter, discussing No-No Boy, I referenced Michel Foucault’s discussion of the “polyvalent mobility” of racism—its shape-shifting ability to assume new forms and serve the needs of different political agendas. In this novel, although the ban on black Americans fighting in combat units was lifted, it was replaced with a glass ceiling that largely prevented blacks from becoming officers or getting promoted. Although the face of racism had changed, it was still present and still limiting the life opportunities of minority soldiers: “But what was all this bullshit about the Army being the most democratic institution in America? Cause guys have to get shot with each other? Shit. There ain’t nothing but spooks, PRs, and peckerwoods in the ranks, and the junior officers are mostly crackers—them that ain’t black” (316). Interestingly, Blackman expands his racial critique into a class critique by including not only blacks but also Puerto Ricans and poor whites (designated by the terms “peckerwoods” and “crackers”) in his list of those devalued by the US Army. In this way, the novel associates racism with classism and suggests that unlike racist whites, Blackman does not rely on skin color alone for his evaluations of justice. This shift from a focus on race to a broader focus on class supports Matthew Calihman’s argument that Williams embraces the cultural pluralist possibilities of the late 1930s Popular Front, which attracted black writers such as Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison and Chester Himes. Williams was born too late to have joined those writers in supporting the Popular Front in its heyday and was never Communist- affiliated. However, Calihman argues, “Yet, despite having been only minimally involved 80 in organized radical politics and institutional life, Williams has often identified himself with the literature of the twentieth-century Left, with the radical critique of capitalism, and, especially, with the memory of the Popular Front” (147). In Captain Blackman, Williams’ suggestion that the struggle for justice might be most effectively fought through multi-ethnic coalitions is reflected not only in Blackman’s critique of the ways military labor is assigned along both racial and class lines but also in representations of Blackman’s service in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War along with white men from all over the world (197). Blackman’s decision to participate in that conflict was influenced by another character, his Jewish friend, Doctorow, who reappears in flashbacks of different time periods, always as an ally, gesturing toward cooperation between blacks and Jews as two oppressed groups within the American nation. Calihman argues that the novel’s inclusion of these cross-racial coalitions distinguishes Williams’s work from both black nationalist ideology and assimilationism, gesturing instead toward cultural pluralism in the political spirit of the Popular Front. However, the novel does not take for granted cooperation between minority groups. Instead, the novel suggests that one of the most insidious parts of institutionalized racism is that within its system, its victims also become its perpetrators. The novel makes it clear that no one functioning within American institutions is innocent, including black Americans. For example, the narrative links racism by US troops directed against natives of Vietnam to simultaneously occurring domestic racism against black Americans: Handy caught Blackman’s eye and winked. “Just like sayin’ nigger, ain’t it man?” Blackman said, “There’s a whole heap of black soldiers callin em gooks, too. Even you,” Blackman finished accusingly. “Negroes here out-Whiteying Whitey. Catchin his goddamn disease just hangin out with him in these wars.” (304) 81 In addition to emphasizing the white and black American use of dehumanizing racial labels, such as “gook,” the novel emphasizes both white and black US troops’ willingness to commit physical violence against the Vietnamese, who’ve been rendered the dehumanized Other. For example, Blackman leads his predominately minority troops on a combat mission, and they conduct a massacre in a Vietnamese village. Blackman is horrified at seeing black soldiers who themselves have been victims of racial dehumanization apply the same attitudes and lack of sympathy toward the Vietnamese people: They’d killed people—old men, women and children—who might’ve been Viet Cong. In other words, killed them because they had the same skin color, that was what it amounted to; that’s what all the training taught them without mentioning those words. There’d been other things at the villages; the legs spoke about them with the attitude: Who’s Gonna Care What Happens to These Dinks Out Here? White soldiers you could understand talking like that, but black soldiers? (314) This “training” suggests a pedagogy of white nationalism, focused only on exterior appearances (“skin color”), that is internalized even by black soldiers. The dehumanization of the Vietnamese makes possible the physical violence.32 Returning to Lipstiz’s discussion of whiteness, we can consider his argument that white identity functions by insisting upon the existence and degradation of the non-white Other: “White racism is a pathology looking for a place to land, sadism in search of a story” (72). By describing black soldiers’ racism against Vietnamese villagers, the novel demonstrates that this dynamic of racialization is not limited to whites and suggests that it is more broadly entrenched within American nationalism. In these passages, Blackman’s descriptions of minority versus minority discrimination parallel the descriptions of 32 Shannon E. French and Anthony I. Jack theorize the intersection between neuroethics and military ethics and the practice of dehumanization in warfare. 82 minority versus minority racism in No-No Boy. In both novels, this phenomenon is linked to white nationalism and its practices of inclusion and exclusion. In summary, one of the dominant objectives of Blackman’s narrative is to reveal and emphasize the threat that history poses to both white racism and American national identity. This objective is revealed through Blackman’s prophetic comments to Whittman: “You are afraid of the past, Ish. You drop it in a hole and cover it over, like it was a stone, but it’s a seed, sprouting a jungle . . .” (302). The history Blackman recalls for the troops in his black military history lectures does sprout like a jungle. This becomes evident at the novel’s conclusion, which features a fantastic and spectacular destabilization of American national identity. In the novel’s apocalyptic ending, light- skinned blacks “pass” into the upper echelons of the US military,33 seize control of US nuclear attack system, and prepare to attack the United States. It is this denouement that caused Cash to deem the novel “the most ambitious and experimental effort of the author” (123). While the ending is simultaneously ominous and absurd, it becomes an allegory for the dissolution of American society unless its members take heed of the nation’s history and abandon the form of nationalism that functions through xenophobic repression of the Other and amnesia about American history. In this way, the text becomes a pointed critique of racial oppression, imperialist military operations and xenophobic nationalism. 33 In this way, the novel incorporates the traditional “passing” trope, in which a person who in some contexts has a black racial identity passes for white, which has a long history in African American literature and may be viewed also as sub-type of the African American “trickster” trope. 83 Some critics, such as Dan Georgakas have suggested that the violent revolution at the end of the text is too extreme a departure from the realism of the text’s other representations of war that mirror historical US military conflicts (57). However, Barbara Foley argues that Williams’s text falls into the category of black fiction that presents “a fictive text that calls to mind not so much ‘reality’ itself as a factual text that could have been written—but, interestingly enough, was not written—about that ‘reality’” (397). She argues, “In works such as these, it is no accident that the conclusions partake of a note of apocalypse: the violence that these writers see latent beneath the surface of American life is allowed to erupt in the realm of imagination, and the inclusion of ‘historical’ particulars heightens the reader’s intuition that the implausible is not wholly impossible” (398). John Reilly agrees, “Presenting the outcome of history in a version of fantasy, Williams jettisons the premise of realism . . . Instead, he presents his novel as a creation frankly governed by the artist’s imagination, replacing the domination of an old genre with the new control of the Black writer’s consciousness” (6). It is worth asking, however, whether by resorting to an implausible revenge fantasy to conclude an otherwise realistic narrative, Williams misses an opportunity to imagine and represent more realistic political action that might confront white racial nationalism and demand responsibility and accountability and lead to restitution and/or reconciliation. Ultimately, John Williams’s text, which was published in 1972, must be read in the context of the frustrations that remained at the end of the black American civil rights movement, which is often said to have begun in 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education and ended in 1968 with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. While Brown v. 84 Board of Education was viewed by many as a triumph for American race relations, critical race theorists, such as Derrick A. Bell, Jr. in his Harvard Law Review article, “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma,” suggest external pressure in the form of the Cold War and internal pressure in the form of black American World War II veterans who were unwilling to submit to the same level of social oppression they’d experienced before the war were the reasons for the progressive legislation—not a decline in white racism. It was the assassination of King which came to symbolize America’s continuing oppression of black Americans and led to insistence that violent catastrophe would ensue if America’s race relations remain unchanged. The text imagines, through Blackman’s reflections, a transition from a black American freedom struggle that emphasizes nonviolent protest to one that features a military revolution: If America could make military power relevant to political bargaining with other superpowers, couldn’t we, once that military power was in our hands, or short- circuited by us, bargain politically for all we never got? . . . Okay, say we got our force. We’ve penetrated the center of enemy power by the simple expedient of utilizing the enemy’s weakness, his momentum, his inability to perceive anything beyond color. (Captain Blackman 331) By providing a revisionist history of the American military and the conflicts in which it has engaged as well as by reimagining the black freedom struggle as a violent revolution, the text both dismantles national mythologies used to erase history and threatens a violent end to the nation if it refuses to abandon xenophobic nationalism and racism. Gabriel Miller notes that Williams has been criticized for being too angry and too didactic. It is no surprise that the book’s publisher was Thunder’s Mouth Press, which situates it amongst many other counter-culture publications that call into question dominant American culture, including books by Chester Himes, Jack Kerouac and Ismael Reed. The novel was published thirteen years into the Vietnam War, three years after the 85 public became aware of the Mai Lai Massacre, during a time when draft cards were being burned in protest and one year before the draft was abolished all together. It was published in the midst of the Black Power movement’s reaction against black passivity and nonviolence and for black political and economic self-sufficiency. This is an angry text that was published during an angry time. Considering the historical context in which this novel was published, Williams had good reason to be both angry and didactic and neither characteristic reduces the power of his narrative strategies and politics. The re- memory that occurs through the novel’s construction of a revisionist black military history that documents the institutionalized nature of racism both within the US military and within American society was part of a larger cultural movement during the late 1960s and early 1970s that destabilized the existing American national identity. No-No Boy and Blackman in the Era of Trump In considering Okada’s and Williams’s representations of military service and narratives about white nationalism and the duties of citizenship, Engin F. Isin and Greg M. Nielsen’s concept of “acts of citizenship” is useful. Isin and Nielsen propose that when we consider citizenship, instead of focusing on the legal status of subjects, we shift the focus to acts and examine the ways that “subjects constitute themselves as citizens or, better still, as those to whom the right to have rights is due” (2). Isin and Nielsen argue that acts of citizenship are collective or individual deeds that rupture existing social historical patterns. In other words, citizenship practices that are already established, such as voting, paying taxes, and serving in the military do not fall into this category. Isin and Nielsen emphasize, “Acts of citizenship are understood as deeds that contain several overlapping and interdependent components. They disrupt habitus, create new 86 possibilities, claim rights and impose obligations in emotionally charged tones; pose their claims in enduring and creative expressions; and, most of all, are the actual moments that shift established practices, status and order” (10). There are several ways in which Isin and Nielsen’s concept of acts of citizenship is useful in considering Okada and Williams’s novels. First, we can consider the acts of citizenship of the characters, specifically the protagonists, Ichiro and Blackman. Second, we can consider the novels themselves as acts of citizenship by John Okada and John Williams. In No-No Boy, Ichiro’s refusal to serve in the US military is an act of citizenship in that he disrupts the established process of the draft in protest to the existing configuration of American national identity. By refusing military service, he and other Japanese American characters who refuse to serve draw attention to the irony and injustice of a demand for military service by a state that does not extend to them or their ethnic group the protections of citizenship. In Blackman, both Blackman’s rewriting and teaching of a revisionist American military history and his revolution at the novel’s conclusion are acts of citizenship that take aim at foundational educational, political and military institutions that enable racial discrimination and inequality. In other words, both novels suggest that their protagonists act as American citizens without being complicit in the corruption of the US nation-state. The two characters travel on inverse trajectories: Ichiro moves from a refusal to serve in the US military to a proposed reconciliation with an expanded American nationalism while Blackman moves from service in the US military to usurping the state’s military power and attacking the US government, suggesting that existing American nationalism must be completely dismantled. Although No-No Boy ultimately upholds the state-sponsored narrative that all citizens should 87 perform military service, it does so only after thoroughly interrogating and criticizing racist state practices and hegemonic narratives. Blackman, on the other hand, ultimately rejects the view that state-sponsored military service should be compulsory, taking a revolutionary view that rejects military service for a state that does not extend equal citizenship to all citizens and embraces transnational allegiances in the fight against white nationalism. Moving beyond the acts of citizenship by the characters, we can consider the writing and publication of the novels themselves as acts of citizenship by Okada and Williams. Returning to the significance of memory and forgetting in consolidating national identity, we can consider the histories that these texts present and their implications for American nationalism. These do not fall into the category of “reassuring fratricide” that Benedict Anderson argues consolidates nationalism because they do not gloss over the nation’s internal divisions in order to provide the comfortable illusion of a homogenous nation. Although Okada’s novel is more conciliatory in its conclusion, both novels use history to emphasize the specific experiences of their respective ethnic groups and the injustice of racial discrimination and to call white nationalism into question. In this way, both novels are enduring creative expressions that have the potential to shift established practices through the presentation of ideas that disrupt hegemonic national narratives, condemn white nationalism, and claim citizenship rights. Returning to Thomas Gossett’s claim in 1963 that racism “is now on the defensive as it has never been before” (459) and Ichiro’s positive feeling at the end of No-No Boy about “. . . that faint and elusive insinuation of promise as it continued to take shape in mind and in heart” (251), we are again faced with Michel Foucault’s “polyvalent 88 mobility” of racism—its shape-shifting ability to assume new forms and serve the needs of radically different political agendas. In his book Racism Without Racists, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva surveys the ways racial inequality has continued to be produced and reproduced from 1960 until the time of the book’s publication in 2014. He comments on the lingering of explicit and overt racism reminiscent of the Jim Crow era and popular with the “Tea Party” and other far right groups. However, he also notes that often blatant racism is superseded by a subtler racism that makes racial discourse and practices covert while still preserving structures of inequality. In her book, The New White Nationalism: Its Challenge to Integration, Carol M. Swain discusses the resurgence of white nationalism in new forms that she argues will find a broader audience than older white nationalisms: America, they believe, is fast becoming a nation dominated by non-white people. Since they believe that it is the white blood and white genes—and the white culture these have created—that are responsible for America’s past greatness and success as a nation, this development can have only catastrophic consequences, according to their reckoning. The black and brown peoples of the world, they contend, are morally and intellectually inferior to whites and Asians, and thus the more numerous and influential they become, the more American society will degenerate. (17) Although Swain published her book in 2002, events that have taken place since Donald Trump took office in January 2017, including the increasing visibility and vocality of white nationalist factions,34 the appointment of alt-right conservative Stephen Bannon to 34 Particularly noteworthy is the support for Trump of white supremacists David Duke, Richard Spencer, and Andrew Anglin, who have relished Trump’s racially tinged rhetoric against immigrants and Muslims. This resurgence of white nationalism led to a white nationalist rally and a clash with anti-racist protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017 that resulted in the death of an anti-racist protester, after which Trump proclaimed that there were “very fine people on both sides” at the rally. 89 an advisory role in the White House,35 and drastic changes to immigration policy,36 suggest that Williams—as opposed to Gosset or Okada—most accurately assessed the intransigence of white nationalism at the highest levels of the nation. The representations of the US military in No-No Boy and Blackman are crucial to the authors’ examinations of the ways American institutions perpetuate white nationalism and are still relevant to issues of national and racial identity confronting our nation today. 35 Bannon, however, after helping Trump get elected was fired by Trump eight months into his term and left the White House in August 2017. Then in January 2018, another public clash between the two men occurred when Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (2018) cited Bannon as saying the President’s son, Donald Trump Jr, is “unpatriotic” and “treasonous” for meeting with Russian officials during the campaign. Trump responded by saying Bannon had “lost his mind.” 36 Anti-immigrant rhetoric was a key feature of Trump’s 2016 campaign. Upon taking office and ignoring US Congress’s 1965 legislation that states no person may be discriminated against on the basis of race, sex, nationality, place of birth or place of residence (unless Congress makes an exception), Trump signed Executive Order 13769, suspending entry for citizens of seven countries. He was later forced to revise this executive order due to legal challenges in federal courts. Upon taking office, Trump also signed Executive Order 13768, which increased the number of immigrants prioritized for deportation. Trump has also terminated the humanitarian Temporary Protected Status for immigrants from countries crippled by disaster or war, most recently, in 2018, threatening to deport over 200,000 Salvadoreños who have been living and working in the country for over ten years. Nicaraguans and Haitians had already lost their Temporary Protected Status. In the context of debates about immigration in January 2018, the press and congresspersons widely reported (and it was not disputed by the White House) that Trump said in a meeting that he did not want immigrants from “shithole” countries in America. Also, Trump moved to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that offered protection for people who had been brought or come to the United States illegally as children to stay for two-year renewable periods and be permitted to work. 90 CHAPTER TWO Race and the Management of Labor in the US Military Who will show me any Constitutional injunction which makes it the duty of the American people to surrender everything valuable in life, and even life, itself, whenever the purposes of an ambitious and mischievous government may require it? ... A free government with an uncontrolled power of military conscription is the most ridiculous and abominable contradiction and nonsense that ever entered into the heads of men. – Daniel Webster, US Representative (1813-1817 and 1823-1827) and US Secretary of State (1841-1843 and 1850-1852) Since January 2003, at the height of the debate on the possible unilateral strike against Iraq, I have advocated for a reinstatement of the military draft to ensure a more equitable representation of people making sacrifices in wars in which the United States is engaged. – Charles B. Rangel, US Representative (1971-2017) Military historian Gerald Astor points to the 1966 television documentary, The Anderson Platoon, arguing that it captured “a defining moment” during the Vietnam War. A French TV crew accompanied a thirty-three-man platoon from the US Army’s 1st Cavalry Division for several weeks. Lt. Joseph B. Anderson, an African-American graduate of West Point, led the group, which was composed fairly equally of black and white soldiers. Astor describes the scene in detail: At one point the unit came under heavy fire from Vietcong soldiers. As the embattled Americans awaited a helicopter to evacuate the casualties, a seriously wounded black sergeant in severe pain lay on the ground. The camera focused on a white trooper patting the distressed sergeant’s hand to comfort him. When the chopper finally put down, an integrated quartet of soldiers bore the injured man off. Bleeding together, succoring one another, without regard to race, white men acting under the orders of a black, integration in the line of fire had fully arrived. (4-5) A television viewer of the documentary might have walked away with the impression that the military was now beyond race and racism and marching blissfully into a colorblind future. As Astor acknowledges, this visual snapshot of racial harmony glosses over almost 200 years’ history of racial discrimination in the US military that traces back to 91 the Revolutionary War and largely limited black soldiers to noncombat roles, frequently as servants, menials or support personnel.37 At the time this film was released, racialized labor practices were still a persistent feature of the US Armed Forces.38 As documented in Isaac Hampton II’s The Black Officer Corps: A History of Black Military Advancement from Integration Through Vietnam, published in 2013, even African-American officers, such as Lt. Anderson, still experienced racialized struggles related to performance reports and obtaining command positions (62). This ongoing racial inequality with respect to labor practices is documented in the 1971 Butler Report, commissioned by the US Army, as well as in the oral narratives of black officers serving during the 1960s and early 1970s (69). It is significant that the Anderson film was released in 1966 as anti-war protest was beginning to intensify, and that same year the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) issued a report claiming “a heavy discriminatory burden on minority groups and the poor” and calling for a withdrawal of all US troops from Vietnam (Nickerson 4). On July 26, 1948, eighteen years before The Anderson Platoon appeared on television, President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981, stating, “It is hereby declared to be the policy of the President that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin. This policy shall be put into effect as rapidly as possible, having due 37 Again, as in Chapter One, we may return to Benedict Anderson’s notion of “reassuring fratricide” that consolidates nationalism by glossing over the nation’s internal divisions in order to provide the comfortable illusion of a homogenous nation. 38 An earlier example of film that served a similar purpose was the documentary The Negro Soldier (1944) produced by Frank Capra as US Army propaganda in order to induce black Americans to enlist in the segregated US military. 92 regard to the time required to effectuate any necessary changes without impairing efficiency or morale” (“Executive Order 9981”). Executive Order 9981 was a major milestone in the struggle for racial equality and was the impetus for the end of racial segregation in the US Armed Forces.39 However, integration was still not fully complete by the time the US was sending advisors into Vietnam in the early 1950s and the relationship between race and labor in the military was still troubled long afterwards. While the Anderson film suggests that the Army has become post-racial in the years that passed between 1948, when Executive Order 9981 was signed, and 1966, when the documentary was released, Hampton’s research and the Butler Report show that the film’s narrative does not accurately represent the racial dynamics at play in the Army, glossing over lingering institutionalized racism. In fact, the racial dynamics at play in the US military are constantly changing. Here we return to the concept of the “polyvalent mobility” discussed in the last chapter. Racism’s shape-shifting ability to assume new forms and serve the needs of radically different political agendas is manifest in changes in the ways race has been used to assign military labor roles over time. For example, when ships were operated largely through the dangerous and difficult labor of sailing, blacks very commonly served as sailors, including combat, in American naval forces from the time of the Revolutionary War. For example, Nathaniel Shaler, commander of a private armed schooner that fought against the British during the Revolutionary War reported, 39 This executive order, signed by President Truman in 1948, desegregated the US military largely a result of lobbying organized by African American civic leaders A. Philip Randolph and Grant Reynolds, who, in 1947, organized the Committee Against Jim Crow in Military Service and Training, which was renamed the League for Non- Violent Civil Disobedience Against Military Segregation (Glisson 91). 93 The name of one of my poor fellows, who was killed, ought to be registered in the book of fame, and remembered with reverence as long as bravery is considered a virtue. He was a black man by the name of John Johnson. A twenty-four pound shot struck him in his hip, and took away all the lower part of his body. In this state, the poor brave fellow lay on the deck, and several times exclaimed to his shipmates, ‘Fire away, my boy! No haul color down!’ Another black by the name of John Davis was wounded in much the same way. He fell near me, and several times requested to be thrown overboard, saying he was only in the way of others. When America can boast of such tars she has little fear from the tyrants of the ocean. (George Williams 30) However, as the US Navy became increasingly mechanized and sails were replaced by steam engines in the mid-nineteenth century, from the Civil War through World War II white sailors took the engineering and combat roles and blacks were either pushed out of naval service entirely or placed into less desirable or more dangerous roles, such as cook, steward or munitions handler. Thus, race was first used to assign blacks to fill the role of sailor and later used to exclude blacks from filling the role of sailor.40 In Class, Race and Marxism, David Roediger discusses “race and white supremacy as specific modalities in which the logic of capital combines rationality and irrationality” and situations in which “ideological, psychological, political and cultural appeals to whites mattered much more than immediate economic self-interest” (5, 65). Although there is no declared profit motive in the military, as there would be in a capitalist enterprise, the success of the military mission, which often reflects US socio- economic interests, is at stake. In theory, the military would operate in ways that would enable it to perform its mission most efficiently and effectively. However, on many occasions, in order to preserve institutionalized, racist labor practices, the US military has 40 This racialized experience of military service in the US Navy is documented in Richard E. Miller’s The Messman Chronicles: African-Americans in the U.S. Navy, 1932-1943 (2004). 94 tolerated manpower shortages, suffered from deteriorated unit cohesion, degraded morale and weakened command and control of troops. I argue that these irrational choices have been effectively brought into public discourse and explored through fictional representations of the US military in 20th century ethnic American literature. John Oliver Killens’s World War II novel, And Then We Heard the Thunder (1963) and Joe Rodriguez’s Vietnam novel Oddsplayer (1989) both explore the institutionalization of white supremacy and the freedom struggles of American minorities by using representations of military service to consider relationships among labor, race and class in the US military. Killens’s novel follows African-American soldiers serving in segregated Army units both in the United States and overseas during World War II (1939-1945). Rodriguez’s novel depicts the experiences of American minorities serving in integrated Army units in combat zones during the Vietnam War (1961-1975). Although they cover two different time periods and conflicts, both novels explore military service as labor by considering compulsory military service through the draft, racialized relations of power within the military, the costs of socio-economic mobility for American minorities, and the disproportionate assignment of undesirable and dangerous labor to American minorities. Both novels also trace the freedom struggles of minority laborers in the military: the resistance techniques of minority soldiers; associations between dignity, masculinity, and labor; and the possibility of interracial and international coalitions for freedom struggles. In these ways, the novels construct relationships between race, class, and labor as mediated by the United States government through the institution of the military. While other novels from the African American and 95 Latino/a canons have dealt with military labor practices, none have done so in such depth as these novels. John Oliver Killens (1916-1987) grew up in Georgia in the segregated American South and served in the US Army in segregated units during World War II.41 Although And Then We Heard the Thunder is fictional, there are many parallels between the life of the protagonist, Solomon Saunders, Jr., and Killens’s own life. Both served in segregated WWII Army units and experienced severe racial discrimination, both studied law but never completed law school, both aspired to become writers, and both were activists in the struggle for racial equality. Killens’s success as an activist writer is marked by the nominations for Pulitzer Prize of two of his novels, Youngblood and And Then We Heard the Thunder. As a young man, working in Washington DC, Killens was exposed to radical thought; however, the extent of his involvement in the Communist Party is uncertain: “He unquestionably had contact with numerous Party members and frequently espoused standard Communist doctrine, and he seemed to be a joiner by nature. But whether in Washington he was a left-liberal sympathizer mainly concerned with racial justice, a fellow traveler, or a card-carrying party member, he quickly understood the extra political caution required of federal employees” (Gilyard 37). It is perhaps both his 41 Sensing the inevitability of being drafted into the military, Killens applied to the Army Air Corps but was rejected. He was then drafted into the US Army, in which he served in the 813th Amphibian Truck Company transporting cargo. Unlike his protagonist, Solly, Killens was never involved in direct combat himself; however, he witnessed a great deal of combat at close proximity and sometimes ferried cargo with “bombs and shrapnel dropping all around” (Gilyard 63). 96 own experience of segregated military service and his early exposure to radical thought that results in Killens’s attention to issues of race and class in his novel.42 Joe Rodriguez was born in Texas in 1943 (Rosales). He volunteered for military service in the US Navy, was trained as a hospital corpsman and deployed to Vietnam for eleven months during 1965-1966, where he experienced segregation and pervasive racism. Thus, there are some parallels between his own life and those of his characters in The Oddsplayer. He was able to obtain an early release in order to attend college in 1966 and pursued higher education using his Montgomery GI Bill benefits, eventually earning a doctorate at University of California-San Diego and becoming a professor of Chicano/a studies at San Diego State University. Rodriguez became an anti-war activist following the death of his brother, a 2nd Lieutenant in the US Army, in Vietnam. He continues to be a literary activist today and published his latest novel, Words Unspoken, Things Unseen, about gentrification and defending a homeless shelter targeted for demolition, in 2014. Military Service as Labor During WWII: And Then We Heard the Thunder And Then We Heard the Thunder is a lengthy novel of 499 pages divided into four parts: “The Planting Season,” “Cultivation,” “Lightening—Thunder—Rainfall,” and “The Crop.” Each of the four parts chronologically traces the narrative of the protagonist, a young African American man named Solomon “Solly” Saunders, Jr., who is drafted to serve in the United States Army during World War II, and peripherally those of the other members of his all-black segregated military units and their white officers. The protagonist experiences continuous geographical relocation due to his assigned military 42 See also Killens’s short story “God Bless America,” published in 1952, which also attends to the relationship between race and military service. 97 duty locations, so the settings include New York, Georgia, California, the Philippines and Australia. Part One, “The Planting Season,” describes Solly’s initiation into the United States Army as an enthusiastic new draftee and then traces his journey from his residence in New York City to his first military duty station in the Jim Crow South in Ebbensville, Georgia, where he is assigned to H Company of the 55th Quartermaster, a support unit,43 and quickly becomes disillusioned by racism both in the military and in the local community. Solly and some of the other black unit members engage in militant protest of racial inequality, and white military and civilian authorities react harshly to maintain existing relations of power. Ultimately, the protesters are reassigned to another segregated military unit in California that is headed for combat in the Philippines. Part Two, “Cultivation,” describes Solly’s training in California with his second segregated all-black Army unit, the 913th Amphibians of the 15th Amphibian Regiment, this time a combat unit instead of a support unit, in preparation for deployment to the Philippines. Although Solly and his fellow unit members are no longer located in the deep South, they continue to face Jim Crow segregation and overt racial oppression. 43 As mentioned in the Introduction, during World War II, African American soldiers served in almost entirely in segregated units, which were predominately support units, and were very rarely allowed to serve in combat due to racist doubts about the combat abilities of blacks as well as unwillingness to share the glory of combat victories with blacks. One of the rare exceptions was the 99th Pursuit Squadron of the Tuskegee Airmen, activated in March 1941 and the first black flying unit to deploy overseas in 1943. Some Tuskegee Airmen, such as the 477th Bombardment Group, were never allowed to serve in combat. Ralph Ellison published the short story “Flying Home” in 1944, exploring the complicated situation of these pioneering African American military members. The story presented a protagonist who is a pilot with the Tuskegee Airmen, whose plane crashes in a rural Alabama field leaving him stranded and at the mercy of uneducated blacks and racist whites. 98 During a period of four months, Solly is transformed from a man who believes in the war against Germany and Japan because it is anti-fascist and democratic to a man who just wants to survive the war and get out of the United States military as quickly as possible, so he can continue fighting domestic American racism.44 His experiences of racism within the military lead him to conclude that the African American struggle for democracy in America is more significant to him than the struggle for democracy overseas. Part Three, “Lightening—Thunder—Rainfall,” describes Solly’s military unit’s journey from California to the combat zone in the Philippines and then its movement to the front lines, where the narrative describes two beachhead invasions that result in massive casualties. During this period of fighting on the frontlines in the Philippines, the black soldiers continue to experience racial discrimination and are assigned the least desirable and most dangerous military duties with insufficient equipment and training. Additionally, they witness the racism and violence directed toward the Filipino people. Solly becomes even more disgusted with the war but during an invasion of the American airfield reluctantly kills two Japanese soldiers in self-defense and, ironically, becomes a war hero. Part Four, “The Crop,” describes Solly’s convalescence and recovery from his combat injuries in Australia, along with the other surviving men from his unit, all badly injured. The black soldiers find the Australian people very welcoming, and after they are medically cleared, they are assigned to very easy duty in Australia. Solly even has an 44 These two opposed attitudes of Solly’s represent the two major strands of thought and feeling circulating in African American discourse at the time. 99 affair with his white Australian nurse, Celia. However, white American soldiers and military authorities bring Jim Crow segregation to the Australian nightclubs, which leads to a race riot between white American soldiers and black American soldiers allied with white Australian soldiers who are also disgruntled by the Americans’ white supremacist policies and attempts to dominate Australian culture.45 Almost all of Solly’s black comrades die in the riot, but he survives and is left at the novel’s conclusion crying and hoping for a New World “with a new and different dialogue that was people-oriented. What other hope was there?” (Killens 499). In considering the novel’s representations of labor, we might start with the military draft. While some black soldiers did voluntarily enlist to serve in segregated units during World War II, many were conscripted. The United States implemented the Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 on September 16, 1940. This Act required all male US citizens between the ages of 21 and 45 to register for the military draft. If selected from the draft lottery, males were required to serve for at least one year, but once the United States entered World War II, draftees were required to serve through the end of the war. By the end of the war, 10 million American men had been drafted into the military and just over one million were black (“The Draft”; Murray). The consequence of 45 The race riot portrayed at the conclusion of the novel is based on actual race riots that occurred in Brisbane, Australia in 1942, in which the black soldiers of the 394th Quartermaster fought with the white soldiers of the 208th Coast Artillery. Killens did not personally witness the riots and his biographer, Keith Gilyard, suggests that he took great artistic liberty in his fictional recreation of the events, but there is some basis in reality. 100 the draft for the men who were drafted was a loss of control of their productive powers and their working conditions, which were then controlled by the US military.46 In the novel’s exposition, Solly leaves a job in the New York City government and interrupts his time in law school when he is drafted (Killens 3). However, initially, he has a positive attitude toward the war and military service and plans to take advantage of all the socioeconomic opportunities the military offers. He thinks to himself, “I’ll be the best damn soldier in the Army of the United States of North America” (7). The narrator reiterates, “Solly had his own plans. For winning the Democratic War. Everything fitted into a groove—his attitude toward the war, his idealism, his qualifications, his over-all plans for moving ahead in this world” (9). This exposition suggests the initial goodwill of the protagonist toward the American government and the US military. Although at the beginning of his military service Solly is willing to serve and believes in the struggle against fascism and for democracy, his attitude contrasts with those of many of his black fellow soldiers who, from the time they are drafted, have no desire to serve in the military. Private Joseph “Bookworm” Taylor tries to act crazy, so he can get a Section 8 discharge from the Army for being mentally unfit for military service (16). Private Jerry “Scotty” Scott frequently goes AWOL and says, “I just don’t like the goddamn mama-jabbing Army, that’s all” (32). Private Geoffrey “General” Grant is a black nationalist and so unhappy to be in the Army and about domestic racism that he wants Japan to defeat the United States in the Pacific theater: “The General was pro- Japanese—he pictured the Japanese as the champions of the colored race” (264). Through 46 Protest of the military draft and attempts to evade it continued during Vietnam and are described in narratives such as Robert E. Holcomb’s oral narrative in Wallace Terry’s Bloods (1984). 101 representation of these characters, the novel emphasizes the range of black attitudes towards military service during World War II.47 However, due to conscription through the military draft, whether or not they were willing to perform military labor, many soldiers had no choice. The soldiers’ lack of control over their work and work processes is illustrated repeatedly in the book’s representation of relations of power in the military. The novel represents the ways that the military’s infrastructure is designed to control labor. First of all, there’s a clear chain of command of authority with each soldier held accountable for following the orders of those in the chain of command above him with the lowest ranking soldiers at the bottom and the Commander-in-Chief, the President of the United States of America, at the top. The authority of those in the chain of command is reinforced by the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), a body of federal law that allows the military to have rules, regulations and punishments different than those that govern other US citizens. Finally, there are military police to enforce the regulations of the UCMJ and the orders of military leaders. This infrastructure enables a system of control in which power is concentrated in the higher ranks and soldiers in the lower ranks have almost no control over their lives and labor. As Solly’s commander reminds him: “There’s no such thing as 47 For example, W. E. B Du Bois was opposed to participation in World War II, particularly in the Pacific theater as he felt it was largely an effort to maintain American imperial dominance over Asian peoples (Lewis 631). On the other hand, the editorial staff of the African American newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier encouraged black Americans to serve in World War II and fight for a double victory against fascism abroad and racism at home (Gilyard 55-56). In the meantime, A. Philip Randolph and other black activists were pushing for racial equality in both defense industries and in the military (Foner 697). 102 fair and unfair in the Army. There’s only order and discipline. There’re those who dish it out and those who take it” (93). Upon their initiation into the military, Solly and his fellow junior enlisted African-American soldiers discover the way the US military’s system of control functions in conjunction with white supremacy at the institutional level and racism at the personal level.48 Jim Crow racial segregation within the military in the form of all-black military units as well as designated spaces for whites and blacks produce an environment where inequality is both possible and inevitable. This segregation facilitates the practices of white supremacy, including the assignment of less desirable and more hazardous duties to minority soldiers. Second, the officer corps is almost exclusively white, which means that white command and control authority coming from the top down will direct the activities of junior enlisted minority soldiers. This also provides higher ranking whites with the ability to control blacks through punishments and the granting of promotions and petty privileges. Finally, military police are used to enforce Jim Crow segregation, enforce compliance with orders passed down through the chain of command and administer punishments. The black junior enlisted characters in the novel discover that, due to racism in their chain of command, they are even more vulnerable to white supremacy in the 48 Killens’s representations of white supremacy and racism in the military during the World War II era agree with the first-person memoirs and oral narratives of ethnic American World War II veterans. Wilbert L. Walker’s memoir We Are Men: Memoirs of World War II and the Korean War (1972), Yvonne Latty’s collection of oral narratives We Were There: Voices of African American Veterans, from World War II to the War in Iraq (2004), and Paul Stillwell’s interview The Reminiscences of Lieutenant Commander Wesley A. Brown, Civil Engineer Corps, U.S. Navy, Retired (Brown) all contain similar accounts of the World War II era. 103 military than they were as civilians. When they are given the opportunity to voice their complaints to a sympathetic white officer, Solly speaks up: “We get all the dirty details. Somebody goes up to regimental and volunteers for us. At the same time we get fewer passes than any other company. And you know the story about how the MPs and Ebbensville’s finest treat our men when they catch them in town, but nothing is done about it, except we go on ten-mile hikes, ostensibly to cool us off” (73). Private William Thomas “Buck” Rogers proclaims his perception of the position of a black man serving in the white Army: “You ain’t even a second-class citizen any more. You’re a second- class soldier” (97). Through the soldiers’ dialogue, the vulnerability of the junior enlisted men is contrasted with the indifference of the leadership with respect to their morale and well-being. The novel first illustrates the ways this system of control plays out by describing the relations of power in H Company of the 55th Quartermaster, the all-black segregated support unit to which Solly is initially assigned. The company commander is a white, Southern officer, 1st Lieutenant Charles J. Rutherford. Since the black unit is consistently assigned the least desirable duties, and Lt Rutherford is perceived as exploiting the men for his own personal advantage, the unit becomes known as “Rutherford’s Plantation,” and the black soldiers become known as “Rutherford’s Slaves.” Rutherford controls the soldiers under his command with a combination of punishing uncooperative soldiers and granting promotions and petty privileges to “good” soldiers. He wants the soldiers under his command “to regard him as their benevolent Great White Father” (291). The relationship between Solly and Rutherford illustrates white supremacy at work within the military chain of command. Due to his “unusual qualifications for a 104 colored man”—college education, organizational, administrative and clerical skills, Rutherford assigns Solly as his company clerk (30), although, if he had been white, Solly’s background would suggest that he should be a military officer himself. As a black man, his labors are instead exploited by his white commander. Another black soldier, Bookworm, highlights this injustice by asking one of the white officers in the unit, “How come we don’t have colored officers in the Fifty-fifth Quartermaster?” (73). The officer has no response. In this way, the novel emphasizes that an all-white officer corps facilitates the operation of white supremacy within the Army. Rutherford attempts to control Solly by promising him and granting him promotions and privileges as incentives to cooperate and, conversely, threatening Solly and punishing him with demotion, forced marches, reassignment to undesirable and hazardous duties and court-martial when he is uncooperative. Rutherford expects Solly to be grateful any time he is treated fairly and for the rewards he is given for compliance and becomes enraged when Solly protests about the racial discrimination within the unit. One example of this is Rutherford’s reaction when he finds out Solly and some of the other soldiers in the unit wrote a letter of complaint to the NAACP about the ongoing mistreatment of black soldiers in the unit: I tried to be decent with you, particularly, I give you the benefit of every doubt, cause you were educated and I thought you were different, but now I know don’t any of you appreciate decent treatment. Education can’t work magic with your kind. All of you’re going to face a general court-martial for plotting against the government of the United States. Holding it up to ridicule before the whole damn world. Giving comfort to the enemy. I’ll get every one of you shot at sunrise. This is war, god-damn you! (195) Rutherford’s berating of Solly and the other men highlights various means by which the whites who hold power attempt to control blacks: education, the law and physical violence. The novel’s narrative has Rutherford follow through on his threats multiple 105 times by stripping Solly of rank, sending him on long forced marches with a heavy pack, and sending him into combat (345, 174, 205). Rutherford’s relationship with Solly is a microcosm of a larger system in which white military authority is used to control the labor of black soldiers. In the novel, the black soldiers are assigned both the least desirable and the most hazardous duties with little concern for their safety or well-being. Presumably to preserve military resources, the 913th Amphibians are not assigned escort when traveling to the combat zone or when moving to the front lines within the combat zone, which makes them exceptionally vulnerable to enemy attack. While in one of a group of twelve aircraft traveling through the combat zone to the front lines, Lieutenant Graham, one of the white officers assigned to the black unit complains about their vulnerability to attack by enemy aircraft, “Here we are, going toward the front unescorted. This thing doesn’t have any guns in it anywhere. Two zeros could systematically knock every one of us out of the sky” (285). Solly laughs and replies, “We are Uncle Sam’s most expendable nephews. I thought you were hep to that, Lieutenant. They’ve made a colored man out of you” (285). Solly’s laughter suggests amusement at the ironic situation of a white man losing his white privilege and being treated the same as a black man and also at the dismay of a white man suddenly realizing the concrete effects of institutionalized racism. Solly’s mocking reference to family relationships plays on the WWI and WWII-era military recruiting slogan “Uncle Sam Wants You” and highlights the reality that blacks are excluded from the metaphorical American family. Bernard Nalty, in his book Strength for the Fight: A History of Black Americans in the Military, discusses the US Army’s initial refusal to allow black military units to 106 fight in combat during World War II with the well-known exception of the Tuskegee Airmen: “The 24th Infantry moved cargo . . . the 2nd Cavalry Division, arrived in the North African theater of operations only to be disbanded to provide men for service units” (167). Initially, the black units were simply used as labor for undesirable tasks— blacks were assigned to quartermaster units that take care of supplies, mortuary affairs, and subsistence or engineering units that take care of construction and demolition. As World War II progressed, due to increasing political pressure, particularly from Assistant Secretary of War John Jay McCloy, in 1944, Secretary of War Henry Lewis Stemson directed the Army to introduce black units into combat. The experiences of the characters in Killens’s novel reflect this history. Initially, the black soldiers are assigned to the 55th Quartermaster, a support unit, but their second assignment is to the 913th Amphibious Company, a combat unit. Bookworm comments to Solly with dismay about his own frustration with black civil rights activists’ demanding that blacks be assigned combat roles: “Some of your folks’ leaders called on the President down in Washington and demanded that colored soldiers be allowed to die with dignity at the front rather than serving in the Quartermaster. Now ain’t that a mother-fer-ya?” (255).49 Finally granted combat roles, the black soldiers are ironically then thrust immediately, willing or not, into the most dangerous combat situations that are expected to result in the highest numbers of casualties. 49 Again (see footnote 50), the novel’s characters represent the range of black attitudes toward military service. Some, such as the Pittsburgh Courier, suggest military service was a way for blacks to prove their worthiness of citizenship and make progress in the struggle for civil rights. Others, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, saw military service by black as exploitation and collusion with racist American imperialism. 107 The novel emphasizes this role of racial inequality with respect to the assignment of military duties of Solly’s units. As the first colored amphibious unit in the Army of the United States, the 913th Amphibious Company of the 15th Amphibious Regiment, the men are given inadequate training before deploying into the combat theater of operations (214-18). The narrator relates the announcement by the commander, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Casanova Busby: “He told them they had to compress four months of amphibian training into a period of four or five weeks. Maybe less” (214). Busby details, “In four or five weeks you have to become the best swimmers, the best marksmen, the best drivers, the best damn soldiers in the Army of the U.S.A.” (214). The safety of the men is compromised as they are rushed through training with their records forged to show completion of training that never occurred (231). After being rushed through training and shipped to the combat zone, the men discover that they were not needed or expected so quickly. There are no quarters and inadequate provisions available for them, and they are informed by an officer, “Some promotion-happy lieutenant colonel hurries his outfit overseas before it’s ready, just so he can make full colonel. I don’t say it happened with you all, but it wouldn’t be the first time” (271-72). While awaiting their combat equipment and assignment to a mission, the black combat unit is “assigned to the waterfront, unloading ships, doing labor-battalion work,” or as they called it “tote dat barge and lift dat bale” (275-78). When their amphibious assault equipment finally does arrive, the unit is immediately assigned to the hazardous task of beach landings to establish a hold in enemy-occupied territory (291). However, upon arrival at the front lines, they are again assigned as stevedores while they awaited specific mission orders (285). Finally, the 108 orders for the first beach landing arrive and twenty-three members of the 913th Amphibious Company die in the first week (318). After a second bloody beach landing, 913th Amphibious Company is forced to engage in hand-to-hand combat to defend the airfield after five planes full of Japanese kamikazes land on the airstrip. This encounter results in Solly having to kill one Japanese solider with a gun and a second in hand-to- hand combat while incurring life-threatening injuries himself (356-60). In addition to the assignment of black soldiers to less desirable duties and hazardous duties, the novel portrays ways that the military institutionalizes racial segregation to reinforce relations of power by giving even the lowest ranking white soldier preferences and privileges denied to all black soldiers. This is an instance of what W. E. B. Du Bois famously reminded readers in his discussion of race relations in Jim Crow America in Black Reconstruction in America: “It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage” (700). While all enlisted soldiers receive low wages relative to military officers, the white enlisted soldiers receive reassurance that they are not in the absolute lowest social class due to their elevation above the black enlisted men. Solly and the other members of the all-black units find themselves subject to Jim Crow racial segregation both on and off base at every duty location to which they are assigned: Georgia, California, Philippines, and Australia. In Georgia, when black soldiers go into town on a pass, they are not allowed to board the bus to return to the base late in the evening until all of the white soldiers have boarded. In California, there are two separate post exchanges on the military bases for shopping and recreation, one for black 109 soldiers and one for white soldiers; the black exchange is perpetually understaffed and overcrowded. In the Philippines, the black soldiers are not provided adequate accommodations and are forced to sleep in a mosquito-plagued jungle. Additionally, white soldiers try to segregate sexual activities by telling Filipino women that black men have tails (320) and denying black soldiers access to Filipino prostitutes. In Australia, the local people treat black American soldiers as social equals, but white American military personnel enforce Jim Crow segregation in Australian bars and clubs. The novel suggests that Southern military members and military units (“southern peckerwood divisions”) are the instigators of this racial segregation, which suggests their desire to continue receiving the same “psychological wage” to which they were accustomed in the American South (385, 423). Both racial segregation and racially discriminatory policies and regulations are enforced by military police. In Ebbensville, Georgia, Solly is arrested for refusing to cooperate with civilian police in the local community and being a “sassy nigger” (133). A full bird colonel military police officer comes to the local police station to investigate. Solly initially hopes the colonel will be an ally since they are both in the Army, but he is quickly disillusioned when the officer, colluding with the local police, assaults him both verbally and physically: “‘You are nothing but a nigger, nigger,’ the colonel said. ‘You are a nigger, your mammy is a nigger blacker than you, and your mammy’s mammy is the blackest nigger that ever was a nigger’” (133). In other instances throughout the novel, the military police prevent black soldiers from entering the whites-only post exchange, evict and arrest black soldiers who enter civilian parties, clubs and bars deemed off limits due to Jim Crow policies, arrest soldiers and prostitutes engaging in 110 interracial sexual activities and gather black soldiers who have gone AWOL and imprison them or return them to duty. Solly compares the military police to civilian police who would break up labor demonstrations in New York City, the police who beat him up in Georgia and other abusive police forces all over the United States: “Cops were bastards everywhere the world over. Cops were bastards . . . Seen them get their kicks kicking asses that could not defend themselves” (467).50 The novel’s descriptions of World War II’s racially segregated military units, the use of the black combat units as labor battalions, the dispatch of black combat units into high-casualty battles with inadequate training, and the social segregation of black and white soldiers during off-duty time all emphasize the way that white supremacy in the US Army affected the military duties of black soldiers and provide an example of how American institutions bring white supremacy to bear on minority individuals. Throughout the novel, the adjective “white” has negative connotations reinforcing the insidious nature of white supremacy: “Far out in the bay the ship stopped suddenly, as if the white rays from the sun had dehydrated its engine” (269). The men moved toward “deep thick jungle standing breathless in the white heat” (270). The men are “ill at ease on the hot white sandy beach” (270). A black soldier who is killed in action is buried in the “cold white unfriendly earth” (370). Solly asks himself how many times he has heard “death’s 50 These representations of racist policing are part of an ongoing discourse that continues today in works such as Joe Soss and Vesla Weaver’s article “Police Are Our Government: Politics, Political Science, and the Policing of Race–Class Subjugated Communities” (2017) in which they explore “the ways ‘race-class subjugated communities’ are governed through coercion, containment, repression, surveillance, regulation, predation, discipline, and violence.” 111 soft white flapping wings” (379). Through this figurative use of language, the novel reinforces the negative consequences of white supremacy for black people. As Solly and the 913th Amphibians leave California to deploy to the Philippines, white soldiers board the ship first. The white soldiers board to the Army band playing “God Bless America” while the black soldiers await their turn to board. However, the black soldiers are enraged as they begin boarding when the band shifts its tune to “The Darktown Strutters’ Ball.” The shift from a solemn patriotic anthem to a rollicking dance hall entertainment is an insult that contributes to the destruction of Solly’s patriotic feeling and a temporary feeling that he is only out for his own advancement and survival, which cedes again to a feeling of racial solidarity with his fellow black soldiers (256-258, 473). In this text, racism is perceived as a direct threat to black masculinity. Solly repeatedly reminds himself: “Never sacrifice your manhood . . . This was the ship to human dignity” (496) He also associates racial oppression with images of genital mutilation while being harassed by two white police officers about whether he has a pass allowing him to be off the military post: This was the way they emasculated Negroes in Georgia every single day in the year. Solly imagined the plug-ugly one going down the line from man to man with a long white-handled razor and slicing brown and black testicles one at a time. The colored soldiers naked before the world and the two policemen. He could hear the testicles drop to the pavement with a horrible monotonous thud. The image was so powerfully real to him he felt a painful throbbing in his groin. (126) 112 This horror-filled imagining is an allusion to the American history of lynching and the threat white supremacy poses to the black body, particularly the black male body.51 While Solly is only daydreaming about the razoring of testicles, the imagined threat to his genitals becomes foreshadowing of reality. Shortly after the daydream, Solly is beaten by a white Army military police colonel at the local police station, and the officer tells the other men assisting with the attack, “Pull his legs apart and keep them apart,” and then proceeds to beat Solly’s legs and thighs and close to his groin (133). After the incident, as Solly lies in a hospital bed recovering, he is overcome with impotent rage and the omniscient narrator reports that he is thinking, “I lost my manhood and I’m losing my mind” (142). This metaphor which imagines white racism as a threat to black masculinity becomes a leitmotif and throughout the novel, Solly feels his thighs burning and remembers this attack on his genitals whenever he experiences white racism. Solly’s investment in two traditional notions of masculinity, the physically strong dominant male and the socio-economic breadwinner with a successful career, creates a conflict for him. On the one hand, he wants to maintain his dignity by refusing to be complicit with the white supremacy that oppresses him and other black Americans. On the other hand, he has career ambitions and wants to attain the highest level of socio- economic success possible. The two primary women in his life appeal to these two conflicting ambitions. Millie, his wife, wants him to pursue socioeconomic success even at the cost of accommodating the white supremacist system: “And you’re not black either and you know you’re not. You’re dark brown, and you have soft sensitive features, 51 See Philip Dray’s At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (2007) for a comprehensive history of the practice of lynching in the United States. 113 you’re extremely handsome, and that makes a difference with white folks and you know it does. And it makes it much easier for us to be accepted in their world” (5). Fannie Mae, his mistress, wants him to struggle for racial equality and refuse to repress his racial identity: “That’s why I love you and I’ll always love you. Not just because you’re beautiful. But because you demand your dignity and manhood. Manhood is more important than money or promotions. Please remember. Never sacrifice your manhood— never sacrifice your manhood” (185). Throughout the novel, Solly’s inner conflict plays out each time he is confronted with racism and has to make the choice whether to accept white supremacy in order to be as successful as possible within existing American institutions and culture or whether to protest racial inequality and accept the consequences of white backlash. Towards the beginning of the novel he follows Millie’s advice to avoid racial conflict: “I know you’re not going into the Army with a chip on your shoulder. Forget about the race problem at least for the duration. Be an American instead of a Negro, and concentrate on winning the war, and while you’re in the Army work for those promotions just like in civilian life” (6). The narrator observes of Solly, “How desperately he wanted to get ahead in the Army, to be an officer and all the rest of it” (122). At one point, Solly even simplifies American patriotism by equating it to capitalist ambition, “Wave those flags and make that money, that’s America to me” (251). Solly isn’t the only black soldier in the novel who is enthusiastic about finding personal success in the military. Private Jackie “Hopjack” Ray “was a Yankee-doodling flag-waving red-blooded American who couldn’t wait to get overseas and into the patriotic war” (264). Hopjack believes military service will be his path to being accepted 114 as fully American: “I want to be one in that number in my full–dress uniform marching down Fifth Avenue with that white shit falling from them windows” (273). Private William Thomas “Buck” Rogers is much more cynical than Hopjack and much less proud than Solly. Although he understands the institutionalization of white supremacy in the Army means black soldiers will not be accepted as or treated as equal, he is still willing to perform exaggerated compliance for whites and serve in an overseer role of policing other blacks in order to attain personal advancement. He gives white officers respect to their faces, but he mocks them behind their backs (293). Ultimately, Rogers is concerned only about himself and shares Solly’s initial philosophical approach to military service: “The war was a great game and everybody with any sense was trying to run as far and as fast as he could until the game was over” (277). Rogers identifies with Solly and approaches him to say, “I dig you, pops. These other cats don’t talk our language. They don’t have the faintest notion what you putting down. . . . War or no war, you going to be a big colored man in this white man’s jungle. These squares around here ain’t in your class. What I mean, I admire a cat like you that knows where he’s going and got definite plans for getting there” (18). Solly detests Rogers and does not want to identify with him because he does not like to see himself as complicit with white supremacy. However, the novel’s other black soldiers initially perceive Solly the same way Rogers does. Scotty analyzes Solly’s position in the racial relations of power: “But I reckin the more education you get the more you look at things like white folks. You’re like the slave that lived in the Big House. I’m a field hand” (90). The novel repeatedly returns to this idea of Solly being an “Uncle Tom” and being “Captain Charlie’s boy” and catering to the white man to get ahead. 115 However, Solly never feels comfortable with seeing himself that way and eventually decides getting ahead in the Army is not worth the psychological cost of tolerating racism without protest: “All his escape hatches from being Negro were more illusion than reality and did not give him dignity” (496). He gives up his aspirations of getting promoted and becoming a military officer and just wants to survive the war and get out of the Army as quickly as possible. He stops assisting in his commanding officer’s attempts to use War Department propaganda to keep the black soldiers in the unit committed to the military mission. Solly is disillusioned about the Army: “He felt he’d been like an innocent virgin when he came into the service, and the Army had brutally raped him of his youth, his faith, his idealism. His great ambition. He’d never believe in anything again. Never ever. He was old and disillusioned. He would never dream again” (208). As Solly lost faith in the US Army due to his apprehension of its institutionalized racism, he became more heavily invested in the Double V campaign—a call orchestrated by The Pittsburgh Courier, a weekly black newspaper, to struggle against fascism both abroad and in America. At the beginning of the novel, he wanted to avoid conflict with white Americans, even arguing with Fannie Mae: “How can we win a war against the enemy if we fight amongst each other?” (81) and “And we Americans have a common enemy and we have no time for family squabbles. We can settle them later” (111). At that point, Solly is still hopeful that the wartime sacrifices of black soldiers will lead to full citizenship and racial equality. However, after being arrested by civilian police officers and then beaten with collaboration between white military and civilian police for being a “sassy nigger,” Solly alternates between determination to wage war against American 116 racism and despair that the situation will ever improve (133, 144, 209). Solly eventually loses interest in the war against fascism overseas and devotes himself entirely to the struggle for black freedom in America: “He wanted to live and taste the freedom that the war was being fought for. And see his son grow up in the New World that was coming to him” (310). Through the thoughts and dialogue of the black characters, the novel represents the toll that white supremacy and racial oppression take on black support for the war against fascism overseas: “Here we are supposed to be fighting against the racist theories of Hitler and we find the same theories holding forth in our own so–called democratic Army. The wonder is that the Negro soldier is not a hundred times more bitter” (226). As Robin D. G. Kelley points out in his book, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, the characters’ comparison of the fascism of Hitler to American racism reflects discourse circulating amongst radical black intellectuals, such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Aime Cesaire, C. L. R. James, George Padmore, Ralph Bunche, Oliver Cox and others: “They viewed fascism as a blood relative of slavery and imperialism, global systems rooted not only in capitalist political economy but in racist ideologies that were already in place at the dawn of modernity” (56). Ultimately, the black soldiers come to believe that despite the great sacrifices they are making they have no personal investment in the war. Solly asks, “How can you fight a democratic war with an undemocratic army?” (Killens 325). Solly determines he is willing to die for freedom but he does not understand why he should kill men he has no problem with and becomes skeptical about the war: “He was part of the glorious patriotic flag-waving murderers, the most passionless, the most meaningless murderers the world 117 had ever known. They were murderers for kicks in the bigshots’ profiteering and for ticker-tape parades down the great Fifth Avenue” (308). The narrator describes Solly’s disillusionment as he reflects on his situation immediately before entering combat: “He wondered why men took life so seriously and yet gave it up so willingly on the altar of patriotism at the behest of high-priest politicians and high-priest ammunitions makers and high-priest newspaper publishers and all the other Bee-Essers and high-priest profiteers, and what do we ever really get out of it excepting death and destruction and widows and orphans and Tag Day for the Disabled Veterans?” (295) After being injured in combat in the Philippines, Solly is finally offered a chance to go to officer candidate school, but having lost interest in the socioeconomic advancement offered by the Army, he declines in order to separate from the military and get home sooner (424). In four months, Solomon is transformed from a man who believes in the war because he thinks it is anti-fascist and democratic to a man who just wants to survive the war and get out of it. This is due to his exposure to US racism. “Understand me clearly. I am not concerned about this madness called the Democratic war except to get it over with and get out of it. I used to believe in it. But I have had experiences in this Democratic Army, and I no longer give a damn. I don’t want to get ahead in here. I just want to get out” (244). “You tell me what a black American has to fight for” (249). While Millie encourages Solly to try to get promoted, to identify with America and to be proud of his military service, Fannie Mae says all black soldiers should be conscientious objectors (249-50). In this way, the text emphasizes that the productive powers of black soldiers are exploited for the benefits of a white supremacist system that operates to their detriment. 118 Although the novel’s setting is World War II, its publication in 1963 during the Vietnam War as the number of American troops was escalating and as the domestic Civil Rights movement was in full swing, means that its message about black military service was very politically significant. The novel should be read in the context of a larger discourse about military service for African-Americans. As discussed by James E. Westheider in his book, The African American Experience in Vietnam: Brothers in Arms, during the mid-1960s black nationalists, including Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver believed that Vietnam “was a place to get killed while fighting for the white power structure” (25). Four years after the publication of this novel, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave the famous address at Riverside Church in New York City in which he called for the end to the war in Vietnam (King). Therefore, this novel may be read as part of an African American zeitgeist of the 1960s that both encouraged civil rights struggle and opposed black military service. Recognizing the gap between the War Department’s rhetoric about fighting to preserve democracy and defeat fascism and the reality of ongoing racial oppression in America, the black soldiers engage in protest activities throughout the novel. The novel describes various methods of working-class black resistance as practiced in the military: attempts to be excused from military service by acting crazy to get a section 8 “mentally unfit for service” discharge (Killens 22), faking injury, going Absent Without Leave— AWOL (233), goldbricking–inventing excuses to avoid tasks/ shirking duty (66, 286), insubordination, stealing government jeeps and command cars for nonmilitary pursuits, use of mockery and sarcasm, race riots and engaging in behaviors of self-preservation with little commitment to the military mission: “don’t be no hero” (235). 119 The novel’s most dominant symbol of black soldier resistance is the character, Corporal Jerry “Scotty” Scott, a wily working-class trickster figure, who is always one step ahead of the white officers trying to exploit him.52 Scotty has declared his own war on the racist whites in the Army, specifically the officers and the military police who hold authority: “They put me in this cracker Army against my will and had the nerve to put me under a peckerwood officer and send me to Georgia. Them Japs and Germans ain’t done me nothing. These crackers is my natural enemy . . . And as long as I’m here I’m gonna to fight em, goddammit” (88). Scotty’s sentiments reflect his alienation from his military labor. Through the military draft, he is forced to do work that he does not want to do and does not feel he benefits from. Furthermore, the nature of the labor is to fight people who have never caused him direct harm under the direction and supervision of those who cause him direct harm on a daily basis. For Scotty, these are intolerable working conditions and, therefore, he is determined to resist them to the utmost of his ability. When Solly repeats propaganda justifying the war to Scotty and says they are fighting for freedom and race relations will get better after the war, Scotty rebukes him and reminds him that he was beaten by a white military officer in the jail in Georgia, “Just cause you a staff sergeant you don’t have to believe everything the man tells you. I thought they beat that shit out of your head in Ebbensville” (330). In this exchange, Scotty ironically seems the wiser of the two men even though Solly is the more educated and higher ranking man. Because Scotty has resisted education and acceptance of the institutions maintained by the white hegemony, he has a clearer view of his own self- interest. Scotty is constantly lying to and harassing higher ranking military NCOs and 52 See Winifred Morgan’s The Trickster Figure in American Literature (2013). 120 officers. The feisty soldier impersonates a first sergeant while AWOL (91), demotes officers he doesn’t like and promotes officers he does like when addressing them by rank (223), starts a riot to protest racial segregation of the post exchange (223), and freely lies to white officers whenever it serves his agenda (465). Although Scotty has no power or authority in the Army based on his rank, he is largely able to get away with breaking rules and engaging in rebellious behavior precisely because he has nothing to lose: “Scott was the only soldier in all of the United States of America that Solly knew of who had Uncle Sam over a barrel . . . He didn’t seek to get ahead, he wanted no promotions, no extra–special privileges, no stripes, no nothing. He demanded nothing from the man but manhood” (228). The greatest threat the officers had for Scotty was to court-martial him and send him to jail, but, as he repeatedly told Solly, he would rather go to jail than go into combat and risk his life (234). When they first met, Solly was amused yet appalled by Scotty’s antics, but by the end of the novel, Scotty has won his respect: “Jerry Abraham Lincoln Scott was a dedicated patriot and Dignity was his country and Manhood was his government and Freedom was his land” (484-85). Even Scotty’s name contains an illusion to freedom from slavery in its appropriation of the name of the US President who signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Although Scotty is the most rebellious of the black soldiers from the time they all entered the Army, as the novel’s narrative progresses, they all become increasingly impatient with white racism and more willing to risk punishment to combat it. Solly informs one of the white officers that the black soldiers are “just about ready to lay down their lives for freedom and democracy,” referring to their anger over racial segregation on the military base not the war overseas (218). Near the end of their time in Georgia, the 121 media publishes a letter that Solly wrote to the NAACP and multiple men from the unit signed complaining about the mistreatment of black soldiers and stating they were fighting for freedom and democracy overseas but not receiving it at home (178). The negative publicity angers the base commander and outrages the unit commander, Captain Rutherford, who threatens Solly, “I’ll throw the book at you, goddamn your black ungrateful soul!” Instead of pacifying the captain to preserve his promotion opportunities and stay out of trouble, Solly threatens to report Rutherford for conduct unbecoming a commissioned officer and warns him, “You may do anything you think you’re big and white enough to do, sir, but you’re going to have a fight every step of the way” (197). The novel emphasizes the importance of broad racial solidarity in combatting oppression by alluding to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the black newspapers and civilian black civil rights leaders.53 Solly’s mistress, Fannie Mae, is head of the local NAACP Youth Council which correlates with her militant attitude and enthusiasm for the Double V campaign (54). When the black soldiers in Solly’s unit get so frustrated with the racial oppression at Camp Johnson Henry and in Ebbensville, Georgia that they feel the need for support from outside the military and the South, they turn to the colored newspapers in hope for support, which they receive, and which brings attention to their plight: “The Reverend Johnson Digby, Junior, had taken the letter and gone straight to the war department, demanding an investigation. He’d held a press conference and denounced the treatment of Negro 53 As represented in the novel, the NAACP and the black press were the most important outside social forces in the struggle to abolish racism in the military. Both organizations put significant pressure on the War Department to change racist policies and practices (Kryder 170). 122 soldiers, North and South. The letter as well as the Reverend’s actions appeared in all of the Negro newspapers and even in a few of the white” (179). When the regimental commander is confronted with the negative attention, he berates the H company commander, Captain Rutherford, for having troops so unhappy that they complained to “the colored papers and the NAACP and the President of the United States” and informs Rutherford that the NAACP is “worse than the labor unions” (189-90). The military leadership’s association of the race-based protest of the NAACP with the class-based protest of the labor unions alludes to a common strategy for defusing both class-based and race-based struggles for improved conditions by conflating them with plots to overthrow the American government and establish communism.54 Captain Rutherford calls the men’s complaint to the NAACP “Communist plotting at a time when our very life as a free nation is in danger” (193) and complains that Solly has been “agitating like a goddamn Communist” (195) and calls him a “no-good New York Communist” (196) and a “goddamn stinking Communist” (197). In this way, Rutherford attempts to discredit the letter and scare the men with threats of prosecution for un- American activities. However, when Rutherford tries to get the black first sergeant, Anderson, to testify against the men who initiated the letter to the NAACP, Anderson replies, “. . . I’d rather be a hero or a Communist or whatever you want to call me than be an uncle tom” (197). In this way, Anderson side-steps the issue of Communism and reasserts the primacy of his race-based affiliation in the struggle for freedom, which was the reason for the letter. This passage demonstrates the use of inflammatory rhetoric to 54 Robin D. G. Kelley, in the epilogue to his book, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression, discusses the common use of red-baiting in the 1940s to undermine struggles for racial and economic justice (226). 123 control labor, specifically the use of the term “communist” as derogatory label to derail the struggle for racial justice. In the passage above, Killens’s novel exposes the logical fallacy at the core of red-baiting, namely that logical arguments against social injustice might be invalidated by radical associations. Not only does the novel emphasize the importance of solidarity at the national level through reference to the NAACP, it also emphasizes the importance of solidarity at the local level within the armed forces. When Captain Rutherford busts a black sergeant down to private after a racially tinged confrontation with military police, a group of black NCOs go together to confront him about the harsh punishment. The black first sergeant insists, “If noncoms don’t stick together they are nothing to themselves or the Army. Right?” (92). When Solly is arrested by racist civilian police officers in Ebbensville, Georgia, James Larker intervenes and is arrested with him, giving Solly a sense of “warmth and comradeship and coloredness” (129). When Scotty begins to loudly protest black exclusion from the segregated whites-only post exchange, a crowd of black soldiers gathers to join the protest. The novel’s conclusion features the soldiers’ greatest show of solidarity and resistance with a race riot that takes place in Australia, where the black soldiers are convalescing from their combat injuries. In defiance of military orders intended to end interracial recreation, the black soldiers had defiantly gone to a racially integrated night club (438). In response, military police came to the club and arrested two of the black soldiers and took them to a jail where black soldiers were frequently beaten and abused (441-44). In a show of solidarity, the remaining black soldiers return to the military base for weapons and military vehicles and then head to the jail to demand the release of the 124 jailed soldiers (448). Even though they know they will face repercussions from the white authorities, the black soldiers are determined to maintain a united front against racism. An angry white colonel determined to regain control of the situation initiates a war against the black soldiers. Almost all the black soldiers die in the conflict, their deaths are represented as dignified and heroic while “fighting for their country and Democracy and Freedom and Manhood” (495). Solly explains why he will join in the protest even though he will jeopardize his imminent release from military service and return to civilian life, “I have to go, you know that, don’t you? I have no choice. It’s my own life I’m defending. That’s my brother at the MP station” (452). Although Solly was mainly concerned with his personal advancement when he joined the Army, he now recognizes that his own story is part of a larger story of injustice and that solidarity is the key to challenging white supremacy (223, 225). Following the deaths of his comrades, Solly determines that he will continue the fight against racial oppression: “No peace – there is no peace – there is no peace till freedom. You can’t make a man a slave and have him live in peace with you” (497). Although the primary focus of the novel’s narrative is racial conflict between black and white Americans, to its credit the novel does not oversimplify its representation of American race relations by adhering to reductive stereotypes. Just as the narrative tackles the thorny issue of the “Uncle Tom” black who is complicit with white supremacy, it also critiques the position of the antiracist white liberal who is sympathetic to targets of racism yet unaware of the full extent of his/her own white privilege and/or unwilling to make personal sacrifices in the struggle to dismantle institutionalized white 125 privilege. However, ultimately the novel also offers hope for an interracial antiracist coalition. The position of the white liberal is explored primarily through the character of Lieutenant Robert “Bob” Samuels, a white officer assigned to two of Solly’s units, first the 55th Quartermaster in Georgia and then the 913th Amphibians in California and the Philippines. Samuels is a “tan-faced white man, almost brown,” a Jewish liberal from New York City who identifies and sympathizes with blacks due to his own outsider status as a Jew. Due to his attempts to befriend and support the black soldiers, Solly give him the nickname Great White Brother, interchangeably Great White Buddy or GWB (149, 200, 208). Samuels expresses interest in struggles for social justice based on both class and race. He says he is not a communist or fellow traveler, but he wants America to achieve social justice in terms of the distribution of resources: “We are a highly industrialized country. We’re the richest country in the world and our capitalists can afford to give our working people the highest standard of living in the world” (397). Samuels also commits to working toward racial equality for the black soldiers in his unit (71-74). However, near the beginning of the novel, the narrative reveals there is a limit to how far Samuels is willing to go and how much he is willing to sacrifice. When Solly is arrested by the local police in Ebbensville, Georgia and then beaten by a white full bird colonel military police officer, Samuels confronts the local police but is then unwilling to confront the full bird colonel (154). The Ebbensville police taunt Samuels: “Must be one of them New York Jews,” one of the cracker policemen loud-talked. “He mess around with the colonel he won’t be an officer many more days. Colonel got a heap of weight and I mean he pushes it around and he don’t like no Jews to begin with nohow.” (153) 126 Solly remembers the incident as a betrayal long afterwards, and he becomes incensed whenever Samuels or any other white liberal tries to take any credit for progress with respect to racial discrimination, such as the desegregation of the post exchange (229, 403). He also becomes enraged when Samuels tell him that achieving racial progress is just a matter of time and patience: “Don’t you ask me to have any more patience than you would have, and don’t be so damn happy–go–lucky with my life. I’m the one that’s smothering. I’ve been a second-handed American all my life, but I damn sure haven’t gotten used to it, you better believe I haven’t. And I don’t have any future plans for getting into the patience habit” (229). Despite the tension between Solly and Samuels, over time they develop a friendship. As their friendship continues and deepens, Samuels’s investment in antiracism and willingness to makes personal sacrifices for its cause increases. Samuels continues to appeal to Army leadership through his chain of command to end segregation but gets nowhere (426-27). Solly scoffs at him for his continued efforts: “You are out of your mind if you think you’re going to change this cracker Army. Your trouble is you always wanted to be an officer and a colored man too, and that is the ever-loving most impossible situation” (427). Finally, Samuels admits that the hegemonic powers of America are not going to abandon white privilege without a violent struggle: “You’ve been right about the whole goddamn thing. I admit it. You and your undemocratic cracker army fighting the war for democracy and your Double-V for victory. Every bit of it–all down the line. I admit it –” (433). Samuels finally wins the friendship of the black men in his unit when he joins them in a race riot at the novel’s conclusion. As the black soldiers begin to trust Samuels, 127 they also begin to treat him as a black man. Solly tells other black soldiers that Samuels is a black man passing for white so he can be an officer and he feels “glad Bob Samuels had chosen sides and Bob was his friend and Bob was his country, the best part of it, the healthiest portion . . . and Bob was not a phony bastard, he wanted to believe, all white bastards were not bastards” (478). Even Scotty admits, “You all right with me, old buddy. You the first peckerwood I ever know who was a good peckerwood without being a dead peckerwood” (486). Later Solly adds, “You’re a colored man tonight, old buddy. You have naturally earned your spurs. I’m going to vote you into the club” (490). However, Samuels is angered by the attempts to repress his white racial identity: “I am a white man and I am your friend, and you are a Negro man and you are my best friend, and we are both friends of the human race. Don’t hand me any other kind of half-assed nationalistic shit!” (490). In this way, Samuels’s character gestures toward the possibilities of interracial antiracist coalitions. A second group of whites who sympathize with and befriend the black soldiers are the Australians, who live where the black unit is sent to convalesce after taking heavy casualties in their defense of an airfield invasion. The narrative of the Australians focuses most specifically on the characters of Hank Dobbs, a member of the Australian military who befriends Scotty, and a nurse, Celia, who befriends Samuels and Solly and eventually has an affair with Solly (387). Although the country of Australia has its own racially restrictive immigration policies, mostly to eliminate Asian labor competition, and also discriminates against its native aboriginals, the Australians generally accept black American military personnel as social equals and explain away their own race problems as matters of labor not race. Daniel McKay argues that the text’s representation of black- 128 Australian racial harmony is a utopian fantasy grafted onto the text and that historically most Australians were white supremacists during World War II (14). Regardless of their historical accuracy, in Killens’s novel these imaginations offer an alternative to toxic American race relations. The black Americans and Australians frequently fraternize in an Australian nightclub called The Southern Cross, which is open to all United Nations soldiers without regard to race or color (380). The interracial socializing at this nightclub eventually becomes the impetus for military orders restricting American servicemen from going to the premises. The black men of Solly’s unit decide to go to the club anyway to challenge restrictions on interracial socializing (438). White military police officers come to kick them out of the club and end up arresting two black soldiers (441-44). The Australians dislike the American military police’s attempts to control their businesses and social lives and therefore they join with black Americans to fight white American soldiers and combat oppression (467). This leads to a race riot in which most of the black American soldiers die (390). Solly befriends the Australians and even has an affair with Celia, an Australian nurse; however, he still feels racial hostility towards them similar to the hostility he initially held toward Samuels. He is irritated by the Australians’ conviction that they understand the perspective of American blacks and their obliviousness to the extent of their own white privilege (397). Solly’s feelings are expressed in hostility toward his lover, Celia, when she says it is unfair for him to hold her whiteness against her: “. . . fairness is a thing no white has a right to ask of colored . . . ‘Fairness’ is a word that 129 should choke in the white man’s throat” (413) He continues on to explain to her his bitterness toward white people: Your people are the mistreaters, mine are the mistreated. Your magnanimity comes a little late and easily, since yours is the guilty conscience. Your people are the malefactors, the offenders against the majority of the human race. It’s easy for you to say, ‘I forgive you for being black, and therefore you should forgive me for being white.’ What are you forgiving me for? For living? . . . So you personally haven’t done anything against colored people, so you should be accepted by them. But almost every colored person in the world can say truthfully he’s never done anything against white people. So what? Does this ipso facto wipeout white supremacy? Does it guarantee they won’t lynch my boy in the state where I was born? (420) A drunk Solly in a crowd of his white Australian friends scorns the support of white liberals: “I’m putting my money on that large minority known as colored people, three quarters of the world’s population. That’s the basket I’m putting my eggs in” (403). One of the white Australians accuses him: “You’re not a Socialist. You’re nationalistic and you’re anti-white and you’re reactionary” (403). The third instance of whites befriending the black soldiers of Solly’s unit is a group of white aircraft artillery soldiers from Kentucky who share a poor, working class background with the black American soldiers and are not prejudiced against them the way the Southern whites typically are: “It was funny how these blue-eyed bluegrass country boys seemed to have left their crackerism behind them in the blue fields of Kentucky. They had a natural ball with the mean bastards of the 913 without even trying hard. They didn’t even appear to be self-conscious about it” (336). Through these characters, the novel gestures toward an alliance between white and colored laborers. Much to the amusement of Solly and Worm, one of the white Kentuckians even envies the freedom he imagines the black soldiers have in New York City: I didn’t have no goddamn freedom down on the farm where I come from. I worked from sunup to sundown and didn’t never get nowhere. I had no education 130 or nothing like that. And if I went back home right now, me and you couldn’t go into town together. What kind of freedom is that? But y’all up there in New York City, y’all different, y’all got something to fight for in this war. They tell me up there freedom is a nacherl fact, and a man ain’t nuthin but a nacherl man. If I was from New York City like y’all is, I wouldn’t mind being in this mother-huncher. (337) Solly and Worm find the white man’s imagining of black freedom hilarious. Given the examples of Samuels, the Australians and the anti-aircraft artillery unit from Kentucky, it is fair to say that the book refuses to portray all white people as racist. There are a few other mentions in passing of sympathetic whites, such as the white corporal with a southern accent who volunteers to go for help when blacks are arrested at the Red Cross party (281) and the adjutant who desegregates the Post exchange in California (229). Through these characters, the novel suggests an antiracist coalition that crosses racial lines. Not only does the text suggest moving beyond ethnic nationalism, it also suggests transnational alliances between laboring people. This is manifest in Solly’s sympathetic thoughts and feelings towards the Japanese and the Filipinos. Solly identifies with the Japanese soldiers and sees them as pawns of their hegemonic power just as he sees himself as a pawn of US hegemonic power (268). Even when he kills a Japanese soldier in hand-to-hand combat while defending the airfield, Solly cries and says, “I don’t hate you, Tojo, damn you. I don’t hate you!” (360). Solly also compares Filipino laborers to black American laborers: The sturdy menfolks in the fields behind their plows and their hard-working caribous and the women carrying babies on their backs and bending in the everlasting rice patties with the water almost up to their knees. Solly thought of his own, the Negro people, standing deep in the corn and cotton fields of Georgia and Mississippi with nowhere to go and not a damn thing to look forward to. War or no war, it would make no difference to them, except for those who gave their sons up in noble sacrifice to the great bloodletting in the name of peace and freedom. (321) 131 Solly also takes note of the damage to Filipino culture wrought by the war and military occupation. He grieves for a Filipino mother and baby who are killed by a bomb and is angry about “the privation and the devastation, and the terrible degradation” that the war brought to the Philippines (346). It is through Solly’s identification with Japanese and Filipino people that the novel suggests a transnational coalition for social justice. In this way, the novel gestures toward the international perspective of Communist thought. In his book, Black Marxism, Cedric J. Robinson describes the Communist Party’s work on the Negro Question in America: “The work among Blacks in America, then, was to be one sector in a world movement against colonialism and imperialism as the contemporary stages of world capitalism” (222). The novel concludes with Solly trying to imagine what will come next following the devastating race war. The narrator emphasizes that Solly does not want a reversal of white supremacy in which colored people dominate white people: “Not just the bottom coming to the top. This was not enough for him” (266). Inspired by 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States published in 1941 by Richard Wright, Solly feels pride in himself and his race that softens him toward white people: “. . . if I’m proud of me, I don’t need to hate Mr. Charlie’s people. I don’t want to. I don’t need to. If I love me, I can also love the whole damn human race. Black, brown, yellow, white . . . He looked around at the other soldiers in his ward, most of them white, and he loved the whole damn miserable wonderful human race” (372).55 55 Wright’s book combines his prose with photos from the Farm Security Administration that illustrate black life in the United States, both rural and urban, in the 1930s. 132 Solly also has no desire to abandon American nationalism entirely; instead he wishes to reform it. He still feels a sense of belonging to the nation despite his sense that America has betrayed some of its fundamental ideals. The narrator reiterates, “. . . it was his country as much as it was anybody else’s, and he loved it angrily and critically, and he hated the phony patriots, the goddamn goosestepping flag-waving patriots, who really loved the status quo more than they loved the country and its promises unfulfilled” (478). Having assessed the current devastation of the race war, Solly tries to imagine a better future, “The whole damn world was burning down. He wanted to believe a new world would rise up from the smoking ruins. He wanted to believe whatever was left of the world would come to its senses and build something new and different and new and new and altogether different . . . a new and different dialogue that was people-oriented” (498-99). Kandice Chuh, in her book, Imagine Otherwise, discusses precisely such a new world as the one to which the conclusion of Killens’s novel gestures. Although Chuh’s inquiry focuses specifically on the Asian American subject, her idea of making room for coalitions that allow for difference has potential for broader application: Thinking in these terms allows us to take as motivating grounds for collaborative efforts to detoxify the relations of power that install difference as division, precisely our attempts to understand the investments and effects of differentiation. We can reinhabit and rearticulate difference not as the otherness constructed by certain practices of power, including certain paradigms of knowledge, but instead as the basis for unification. (147) This revolutionary thinking about identity formation is paralleled by Solly’s epiphany after reading Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices: “If I love me, I can also love the whole damn human race. Black, brown, yellow, white . . .” (372). It is echoed in Captain Bob Samuels’s friendship with Solly and willingness to sacrifice his own career and life 133 for social justice. It is complementary to Solly’s hope for “a new and different dialogue that was people-oriented” (499). As Chuh states, “What is needed is not identity but a commitment to combating states of domination, to unifying for the sake not of the self but in the endless pursuit of justice” (148). Military Service as Labor During Vietnam: Oddsplayer Compared to And Then We Heard the Thunder, Oddsplayer is a much shorter novel of 136 pages divided into three chapters. However, its brevity belies the complexity of its representations of the lives of an interracial group of US Marine Corps enlisted men in a combat zone in Vietnam. Like And Then We Heard the Thunder, Oddsplayer’s representations of military service as labor examine the draft, relations of power in the military, the assignment of undesirable and hazardous labor, the cost of social mobility, resistance to labor, and the possibilities of interracial and transnational coalitions in the struggle for social justice.56 The novel has received very little critical recognition, with only a couple peer-reviewed academic articles, but it has been recognized as the first Chicano novel published that grapples extensively with the combat experience of the Vietnam War. It was also mentioned in George Mariscal’s noteworthy anthology, Aztlan and Viet Nam (1998). Instead of a single protagonist and a single narrative, Oddsplayer has multiple narratives sometimes telling the story of a single character and sometimes telling the story of the group. The multiple narratives are intermittently picked up, dropped and then 56 Although they do not develop as fully the theme of military service as labor, other ethnic American novels of the Vietnam War also examine the labor of ethnic American soldiers, including George Davis’s Coming Home (1972), A. R. Flowers’s De Mojo Blues (1985), Albert French’s Patches of Fire (1997), Alfredo Véa’s Gods Go Begging (2000), and J. Everett Prewitt’s A Long Way Back (2015). 134 picked up again later in the novel. The settings also skip from location to location within Vietnam, from a combat zone in the south to the front lines of the north, with flashbacks to life back home in the United States. While, taken as a whole, the narrative of the combat unit moves forward chronologically, there are flashbacks and flashforwards with details about individual characters, delivering fragmented bits of narrative out of chronological order that the reader must piece together to understand the full story of the novel. This fragmentation of the narrative mirrors the chaos of the combat environment. The first chapter introduces the main characters, presents many conflicts and sets up suspense about how and whether the conflicts will be resolved. The second chapter continues the development of the multiple plot lines. The third chapter provides resolution and closure to the conflicts and suspense generated throughout the text. The characters are predominately American with the exception of brief appearances by some relatively flat and static Vietnamese characters. The American soldiers are a multi-racial and multi-ethnic group that includes black, white and Latino characters from a range of socio-economic backgrounds, belief systems and life experiences. The novel examines their relationships to the war, to the US government, and to each other thus providing fertile ground for an examination of military labor practices. As during WWII, the military draft under the Selective Service system provided manpower for the war. On July 26, 1948, President Truman issued Executive Order 9981, which demanded “equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the Armed Forces without regard to race, color, religion or national origin” (Murray 68). As a consequence of this act, the Selective Service system ended racial quotas on enlistments, 135 and by 1954, the last segregated unit was disbanded (68). However, the proportion of nonwhite draftees exceeded the proportion of nonwhites in the civilian population. Murray argues that deferment policies were the primary source of this inequity: One cause of this inequity is the deferment policy of the Selective Service System . . . The deferment of college students, begun during the Korean War, was continued and expanded. Fathers were deferred and, for a while, married men were not inducted. Occupational deferments were freely granted for a wide variety of jobs. The physical and mental standards were raised and a new classification was introduced: 1Y – “qualified for service only in emergency.” (69) As in World War II, the consequence of the draft for the men who were drafted was a loss of control of their productive powers and their working conditions. Oddsplayer addresses the issue of the draft in several ways. The clearest discussion of the draft’s inequity comes through the narrative of a middle-class white soldier, Priest, who recognizes his privilege and refuses to take advantage of it out of a sense of social justice. Although Priest’s father is a proud World War II veteran who believes in the justice of the Vietnam War, he wants his son to take an educational deferment to go to college and avoid the dangers of military service. Priest, ironically, does not believe in the justice of the war, but he also feels it would be unfair for him to take advantage of his socioeconomic privilege to avoid the draft. He asks his father, “What about those on the bottom who can’t afford tuition to buy their way out?” (25). Instead of seeking an educational deferment Priest allows himself to be drafted. Priest is, however, the exceptional character as most of the enlisted characters, most poor minorities, didn’t believed they had any option about being drafted. Hendrick, one of the primary characters, is a poor black from north Chicago, who had been desperately working to save up money to go to college and escape the ghetto when his plans are derailed by the draft (64). Although some of his peers encourage him 136 to lay low and refuse to respond to the call to duty, he ultimately decides to serve and try to take advantage of the military’s opportunities for socio-economic mobility, such as the Montgomery GI Bill to pay for college (65). Later, in the combat zone, the omniscient narrator reviews Hendrick’s reasons for joining the military: Hendrick’s skin put him at the wire long ago. Had he been at the perimeter all his life because of the rage in him? Here he was doing battle for a country which set him apart. Don’t blame yourself Hendrick thought. You’re trying to get off the bottom. That’s the reason you’re here. It sounds mercenary. Hendrick laid out his odds. Maybe I’m selling my soul. I’m not defending shit. I’m doing time to do better than my folks. If I don’t make it, they’re getting my insurance and moving up for me. (118-19) By saying Hendrick’s skin put him at the wire, the narrator makes a comparison between racial oppression and military combat. Both situations are psychologically stressful and put the subject at risk of physical injury or death. Hendrick feels no personal investment in the war in Vietnam and little patriotic feeling, which is why he wonders if he is “selling his soul.” His military service is just a matter of taking advantage of socio- economic opportunity after being drafted. When Hendrick is considering whether or not to comply with his draft notice, he seeks advice from an older black combat veteran, Rebo, who tells him, “Ordinary life is combat in disguise. The killing is out of sight. That draft letter makes it plain. Don’t do nothing without figuring if it’s worth the dying. That’s Rebo’s line on the perimeter” (66). Through these passages, the text communicates the already-at-war feeling of racial minorities who struggle with poverty and racial discrimination on a daily basis even in civilian life. Unlike Priest, who feels like he has an alternative to get a college deferment and avoid military service, Hendrick feels like he has few other options and one major goal of escaping the ghetto: 137 Hendrick considered himself poor, not just because his parents never had money, no matter how hard they worked, but because he felt powerless. Things happened and he got sucked along but. Priest was upper class and would never feel like that. Before a man could get free of the streets, he had to escape pursuit. People with money know how to walk slow, because no one is chasing them. Poor people only know how to make rent, how to stretch out the food. (108-09) Clearly, Priest serves as a foil for Hendrick and it is with Priest’s feeling of agency that the text accentuates the feeling of helplessness among poor minority soldiers. For Hendrick, military service is simply a continuation of trying to survive and escape in a situation that is largely out of his control. Similarly, a Puerto Rican soldier from New York named Fernandez had no attractive alternative to military service. He tells his fellow soldiers that after he was arrested for assault a judge gave him a choice between jail time or military service and comments that, in hindsight, jail would have been smarter (125).57 Other characters, too, were drafted although the specifics of their situations are not revealed by the narrative. It is the novel’s observation that upper middle-class whites have a greater degree of choice about military service than do poor minorities that is the critique of institutionalized inequality that often falls along racial lines. Like And Then We Heard the Thunder, Oddsplayer also focuses on institutionalized relations of power within the military chain of command. While And Then We Heard the Thunder focuses primarily on the imbalance of power in officer– enlisted relations, Oddsplayer remains primarily within the realm of the enlisted soldiers and the relations of power between non-commissioned officers, who are predominately 57 This fictionalized account of the choice between military service and jail has a basis in historical practice. Leana Allen Bouffard and John H. Lamb (2004) describe this practice and argue that military service has been an effective deterrent for continued criminal activity in “Jail or the army: does military service facilitate desistance from crime?” 138 white, and a multiracial group of lower ranking enlisted personnel. The novel focuses especially on two specific non-commissioned officers, Talbot and Dibbs, who are the top sergeants at their respective outposts and hold complete command and control authority over the enlisted men assigned to those locations. There are much briefer narratives concerning two other high-ranking non-commissioned officers, Fortecca and Slater. Sergeant Talbot, a white man, is the Marine Corps top sergeant who runs an outpost in the rear part of the combat zone that is the setting for the most dominant narrative in the novel. He is the senior ranking military member and has complete command and control authority over all personnel in the camp with the exception of the Naval corpsman (medic), Kirsch. Using a variety of strategies, Talbot attempts to maintain absolute power and control over the men assigned to his outpost. He maintains surveillance on troops that threaten his authority or the military mission, he gathers and disseminates information, and he threatens and follows through with disciplinary actions, ranging from assignment to more dangerous duties at the outpost to discipline under the Uniformed Code of Military Justice to almost certain death through reassignment to the front lines in the north. The omniscient narrator reveals that Talbot has become unable to function outside of the military’s combat environment, suggesting that he is perhaps mentally unbalanced (14). The text does offer some clues about why Talbot is the way he is, suggesting that his mother was harsh and uncaring and therefore he never learned to care for anyone but himself (85). The third-person omniscient narrator describes Talbot’s worldview, which is defined exclusively by his military position: “In his office, Talbot reigned with complete self-assurance. His authority was clear and his relationships with both the 139 officers and the enlisted men was defined by his rank . . . Inside Talbot’s office, the man and his surroundings so defined each other, that they constituted his limits and his freedom” (69). Talbot maintains his authority in part by maintaining surveillance on the outpost, encouraging the soldiers to inform on each other and spreading stories to observe how they circulate. Talbot keeps particularly close watch on any whom he sees as a threat to the military mission or to his authority by assigning them to a single living quarters. Talbot calls the men assigned to this hut “question-marks” because he is uncertain how they will perform in combat (34). By assigning all of the “question-marks” to a single hut, Talbot produces the effect described by Michel Foucault in his discussion of Bentham’s Panopticon: “to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (201).58 The men in the hut are well aware that they are being watched and targeted. Priest observes, “And the malcontents: we are herded together in one hut so that Talbot can keep a close watch” (21). Hendrick describes a time when he was on watch and suddenly realized Talbot was standing behind him and how Talbot’s laughter upon his discovery was unsettling. Not only do the men constantly have the feeling of being watched, they also have the feeling that Talbot is constantly listening. Priest complains, “Bootlickers and informers spy on each person in this camp and talk to Talbot. Talbot listens and tells them stories. Rumors spread with the fools who believe they are safe” (21). Hendrick 58 Foucault theorized the relationship between gazing, power relations and disciplinary mechanism in Discipline and Punish (1975). 140 later adds, “Talbot wants every man in this hut dead” (44). The novel constructs Talbot as an oppressive force that makes the jobs and lives of his workers, both white and black, miserable. Each one of the six men assigned to the “question-mark” hut passionately hates Talbot, including Hendrick, Perez, Priest, Isaac, Hartman and Lieck. Although the text provides evidence that Talbot is racist (discussed in the coming paragraphs), his oppression of the white soldiers as well suggests ground for an interracial labor coalition to struggle against Talbot’s injustices. As discussed in the previous section about the draft, Hendrick, the first occupant of the question-mark hut, is a black man who grew up poor in north Chicago and decided to cooperate with the draft because he wants to take advantage of the opportunities for socio-economic advancement. He is a very good soldier, as Talbot admits, but he hates Talbot due to Talbot’s racism and lack of care for his troops, so Talbot does not trust him. Talbot warns Hendrick: “I will not be challenged and I want no slackers. I have no time to slap wrists. Tell the others not to cross me, keep their mouths shut and learn from you. There won’t be any trouble then” (71) Although Hendrick hates Talbot, he follows orders and is generally compliant to avoid trouble, and due to his competence and cooperation, he holds a section leader position, yet the omniscient narrator reports, “He felt like Talbot’s goon in a position of leadership” (42) After his men are assigned a particularly dangerous mission, Hendrick feels particularly resentful: “Hendrick felt like a stooge. The patrol would be outside the wire in plain sight. Being a house nigger could get him killed” (43) Besides his general dislike for Talbot’s racism and method of interacting with the troops, Hendrick is particularly upset about Talbot’s relationship to one of his friends, a Chicano soldier named Perez. 141 The narrative gradually reveals the racial tension that had existed between Talbot and Perez, the second occupant of the question-mark hut. Revealing his racist tendencies, Talbot constantly addressed Perez with racial slurs, calling him “a half-breed Indian and a Spic” (34). During a conversation with Hendrick, Priest recalls, “Perez couldn’t take Talbot’s constant insults about his race. He lost his head and Talbot shipped him to that graveyard in the North” (21). Later in the novel, the narrator reveals that after Talbot called Perez a name, Perez punched him in the face to which Talbot replied, “Your last stand, halfbreed,” and wrote up orders for him to go north to the front lines (35). Upon Perez’s arrival in the north, one of the other troops informs him, “The brass gave us a one-way ride. I hope you messed up that sergeant good” (45). A third occupant of the hut is Isaacs, a peaceful and religious white man who dreamed of becoming a missionary before he was drafted. Isaacs made an enemy of Talbot when he testified about Talbot’s racial slurs at Perez’s court martial for punching Talbot. In this way, Isaacs illustrated the cost to whites of participating in the struggle for social justice. However, Isaacs is not rebellious toward Talbot’s authority in any way other than that he refuses to fight the Vietnamese even to defend his own life. Talbot sees him as weak and refuses to allow him a mental health transfer instead assigning him to point, the most dangerous position on patrol, saying Isaacs will remain there until he either toughens up or gets killed (41). Hendrick, Isaacs’s section leader, in an interracial alliance of labor struggling against management, tries to protect Isaacs, but Talbot will not allow it (41). Witnessing death in the combat zone causes Isaacs to slowly lose his sanity. The narrator reveals that Talbot plans to ship Isaacs North to the more hostile 142 combat zone at the front in hopes of getting him killed when enough time passes that it is not obvious retaliation for Isaacs’s testimony at Perez’s trial (34). The fourth occupant of the hut is Hartman. Talbot’s is unable to understand Hartman and, therefore, does not trust him: “How easily Hartman blended with shadow. Talbot never saw him unless he searched. Hartman was always moving in the background out of scrutiny. Did he intend to be so evasive? Talbot decided that the new man had something to hide. Hartman obscured himself too well” (15). In the following discussion of Sergeant Dibbs, we learn that Talbot had good reason to be uneasy about Hartman. In addition to his inability to make sense of Hartman, Talbot is enraged that Hartman insists on accompanying Kirsch, the medic on humanitarian missions to help Vietnamese civilians (48). Talbot preemptively threatens Hartman, “I’ll put you on the point if you cross me, Hartman. This is my camp. You settle with me . . . You picked the wrong time to crawl out from under cover. I’ll hang your head on my wall if you push me, fuck your combat medals” (131-32). The final occupant of the hut is Lieck, a poor white man who grew up an orphan. No one likes or trusts him, including Talbot, who calls him a “rat” (132). Lieck is completely devoted to his own survival and doesn’t care at all about anyone else; however, as part of his self-protective strategy he lies and tells people whatever he thinks they want to hear. It is through Talbot’s terrorism of both white and minority soldiers that his power and control as a non-commissioned officer (junior management) is manifest. It is through his attacks on minority soldiers that Talbot’s racism becomes visible. 143 Not only does Talbot’s racism affect the working conditions of the minority soldiers who work for him, it also affects the working conditions of Vietnamese civilians who perform menial labor on the military base. He dehumanizes Vietnamese by calling them “gooks,” “yellow bastards,” “black-pajamaed slants,” “two-faced yellow kikes,” “dinks,” “slopeheads,” etc. (9-10). He places no value on their lives. He thinks of the Vietnamese woman who cleans his clothes and room as a “slant-eyed bitch” and is angry because she refuses to sleep with him for fifteen American dollars (111). She makes him feel uncomfortable, so he has violent fantasies about dominating her: “He wanted to grab her by the hair and pull back her head and see fear in her eyes. He did not feel he had the upper hand and he hated her for making him uneasy” (111). On another occasion, he tortures and rapes a Vietnamese woman who refuses to cooperate when he interrogates her: “She was a gook and a woman. She should have known her place” (112). On another occasion, three Vietnamese, an old man, a woman and a child who’ve been hit by American weapons are brought to the outpost for medical treatment, but Talbot refuses to allow them to receive medical attention, calling them “three worthless slants” (132). Talbot is both a racist and a misogynist who holds the power of life and death for many people. His prejudices shape the working environment on the military outpost he runs. The one man on the outpost whose labor Talbot is unable to control is the naval corpsman (medic), Kirsch. Kirsch is in the US Navy not in the US Marine Corps and is attached to Talbot’s unit but has a separate chain of command, allowing him some relief from Talbot’s tyranny. Kirsch is sympathetic toward the local Vietnamese civilians and offers them medical supplies and treatment whenever he is able to do so in defiance of Talbot’s wishes. Talbot makes no secret of his hatred for Kirsch and fumes, “I’d send you 144 north into full combat, you traitor’s prick, if I could. You’re bad for my men. They laugh at me behind my back because I have no authority to transfer you” (12). Taken as a whole, Talbot’s relationships to the men under his command and the Vietnamese civilians he controls with American military power reveal the extent of abuse possible when racism is combined with institutional power, authority and resources. Although Talbot’s abuse is not limited to minority soldiers, he creates an environment in which racism and misogyny are part of the culture and shape relations of labor. Perhaps in order to assert that Talbot’s abuse of his authority is not an anomaly but a fairly typical feature of the nightmarish environment, the novel presents three more abusive non- commissioned officers, who are developed in less detail: Dibbs, Fortecca and Slater, all white non-commissioned officers. Just as Talbot controls the outpost to the south, Dibbs is the senior-ranking non- commissioned officer at an outpost in the north. Like Talbot, he wants complete control and authority over all of the troops under his command. When Dibbs encounters an experienced combat veteran on his third tour, named Point, who freely questions authority of anyone he thinks less knowledgeable about the combat zone, Dibbs murders Point by shooting him in the back. Point and Hartman were friends, and Dibbs uses Point’s death as a warning to Hartman by allowing him to see the murder weapon and warning him: “That smart ass got his ticket punched. Don’t forget who’s in command” (55). After getting Point out of the way, Dibbs begins bearing down on all of his troops with more patrols and longer watches, much the same way Talbot bears down on his own troops (56). Dibbs also assigns Hartman the grisly duty of gathering dead Vietnamese bodies from the wire each morning (57). Eventually, Hartman realizes that Dibbs is out to 145 kill him, just as he’d killed Point (57). Like Talbot, Dibbs oppresses all of the men who work for him, both minorities and white. However, also like Talbot, Dibbs’s power and authority are brought to bear on his subordinates in a racialized fashion. He bears racial animosity against the Vietnamese. Point warns Hartman to commit suicide if he will ever be captured by the Vietnamese near the outpost, “The enemy knows what Sergeant Dibbs does to prisoners” (18). Later Hartman finds out that Dibbs takes the Vietnamese up in helicopters for interrogation and then throws them out when he is finished, a move known as the “combat pinwheel” (48). Point also says the war will be lost because Dibbs’s inhumanity leaves the Vietnamese with nothing to lose; therefore, they do things like booby trap their bodies with grenades as they are dying in order to kill Americans who find them (48). Point advises, “The enemy has a cause. We have technology. Got to kill them all” (48). A third non-commissioned officer, also white and also racist, Fortecca, provides another example of the abuse of power and authority. He gets into a confrontation with a black soldier and uses his rank to strip the lower ranking soldier of his dignity while also making racial innuendos. Fortecca notes that the “blacked out” rank on the man’s collar means he’s a lance corporal. Then Fortecca points to his own rank of corporal and informs the man: “This means that I put out shit, and what you got on your collar means you take it” (73). He then tasks the man with an unpleasant task and adds one more racial innuendo by telling him not to get too much sun. The omniscient narrator reports that as the lower ranking black man walks away, Fortecca thinks, “Nigger” (73). Fortecca provides yet a third example of the ways that institutionalized relations of power in the military give greater teeth to racist behavior. 146 As one final example of a noncommissioned officer using his authority to racist ends in assigning and managing labor, the novel briefly touches on a character named Slater, who controlled the outpost in the north to which Perez was sent. In an attempt to control his men by turning them on each other, similar to Talbot’s strategy. Slater tries to turn the blacks and Latinos at the outpost against each other by telling each group that the other group was talking badly about them (62). Slater also assigns specific men who he wishes to punish or kill to the point just as Talbot does (62). Through these characters, Talbot, Dibbs, Fortecca and Slater, the novel portrays widespread abuse of power within the military chain of command. It represents the lower enlisted ranks as particularly vulnerable to that abuse of power. Additionally, it illustrates the damage wrought by the insidious combination of power and racism within an American institution and the ways this creates an untenable working environment. Through the narrative of the character, Perez, whom Talbot has transferred north to the front lines of combat, the novel explores further the ways racial minorities in the military are particularly vulnerable to institutionalized racism. Upon his arrival to the front, Perez discovers that the most dangerous fighting of the war on the front lines is performed almost exclusively by minorities: “Another Spic,” Cooper said smiling. He looked at Perez and stopped. “Hey,” he added and put out his hand, “This is Black talking, color to color. We’re mostly rainbow people here: Latins, Blacks and mixed bloods, except for the non-coms and officers. We’re at the end of the line and colors bleed when someone has to die.” (36) Fernandez, a light-skinned Puerto Rican solider, describes the hostile racial climate at the outpost: “Watch yourself, Perez. They’re allies but right at the edge. A wrong word, even a look gets you wasted. You are in our tent, so you’ll be marked as one of us. I look like them, you don’t, but remember who your friends are. The non-coms and officers are 147 Blancos and we Trigueños and Spics are expendable. You got to follow direct orders, but remember we are just numbers” (45). Another black soldier warns Perez that his life in imminent danger and that the men’s survival is not a priority for military leadership: “The suckers in charge have slick ways to beat you down . . . At least the incoming is straight up. The Man will grease you on the hottest point of the perimeter. He’ll work your ass the whole day, then nail you to the night roster. He wants you to make a mistake and check in your piece. His conscience is White and you’re bagged meat” (62). In the face of racism within the military’s command structure, the primary defense of the minority soldiers is racial solidarity. Fernandez advises Perez to trust the other colored soldiers: “Rank and power rule; all we Rainbows got is each other” (45) The soldiers on the front actively work to take care of each other and thus build some sense of security in an environment where they feel they are being attacked on all sides, by the Vietnamese on the other side of the wire and by racist whites within the wire. The narrator observes, “Neither race nor culture, ‘blood’ nor class, lead to peoplehood without effort. Victims of prejudice do not stand together automatically” (91). The text focuses heavily on the importance of building coalitions of working class people to resist the domination and exploitation of corrupt power and white supremacy. This racial coalition is not limited to the soldiers in the combat zone but extends back to ethnic group members back in the United States. Fernandez gives Perez motivation to keep going, “We got to stay alive and tell our brothers” (46). In this way, the novel’s colored soldiers up north at the front represent a variety of ethnic nationalism that is willing to build cross-racial coalitions with other minority groups to combat white supremacy. 148 Just as the minority soldiers at the front lines have a Rainbow coalition, Hendrick works to build a similar coalition at Talbot’s camp in the south. Hendrick, however, finds himself grouped predominately with white soldiers, especially after Perez is sent north: “White faces everywhere. He wished Perez was back . . . Still not enough color to put him at ease . . .” (117-18). Hendricks enjoys the comfort of being in the company of another minority who understands “trying to get ahead and just keeping up” (119). However, before he left for war, Hendrick’s combat veteran friend, Rebo, had advised him, “Find people you can trust, no matter what color. Combat puts people on the point alone. Stuck there, you’ll never get home” (82). Perhaps due to Rebo’s influence, Hendrick builds a coalition with antiracist whites and dubs them also Rainbow. He befriends Isaacs because Isaacs testified against Talbot for Perez, demonstrating his willingness to make personal sacrifice for justice (34). He also included other whites who seemed to care about all people and desire social justice: “Kirsch was rainbow, someone he could trust, no matter what color. Maybe Priest was too” (100). Kirsch demonstrates his belief in social justice by insisting on providing medical treatment and supplies to the local Vietnamese and by confronting Talbot about his evil ways. Priest not only gives up his white privilege and accepts his draft selection, but he also constantly speaks out about injustices taking place within the camp. Together the Rainbow coalition fights for better working conditions and tries to protect Isaacs from Talbot although he ultimately dies in an enemy attack at the end of the novel (135). The junior enlisted soldiers find ways to fight back against dangerous and unjust working conditions and to contest the higher ranking personnel who both control their labor and pose a threat to their lives. Upon Perez’s arrival to the front, Cooper, a black 149 soldier, warns him that the white officers and non-commissioned officers don’t value the lives of the low-ranking, predominantly colored enlisted men, but he adds, “We’re at the end of the line and colors bleed when someone has to die. But we’ve got some tricks of our own” (36). Later, Fernandez, a Puerto Rican solider adds, “Obey orders during the day but you always keep your head down. Night . . . is mad time and the game changes” (45). Fernandez also criticizes Perez for attacking Talbot so openly: “Mano a mano, right? You looked him in the face and went for his throat. Coño, we got smarter ways” (46). Fernandez then pats a grenade on his utility belt. Perez later finds out the junior enlisted men killed a non-commissioned officer, Slater, whom they felt had treated them badly and intentionally gotten one of their comrades killed: “‘Slater wound up in pieces,’ Fernandez said. ‘He went to take a shit and turned up mierda. Zapped in private. The Board of Inquiry determined that he was wasted by a grenade. From where—who knows?’” (62).59 Likewise, Hartman, acting as a free agent, retaliates against both Dibbs and Talbot for the deaths of his comrades. After Dibbs shoots Point and then begins a reckless campaign against Hartman and the remaining men on the post, Hartman publicly announces his planned revenge on Dibbs: “We’ll take care of business the American way” (58). By calling his planned assassination of Dibbs “the American way,” Hartman implies that American nationalism is intrinsically violent. 59 This practice of “fragging” as a resistance technique of junior enlisted military member is detailed in George Lepre’s book Fragging: Why U.S. Soldiers Assaulted Their Officers in Vietnam (2011). Lepre points out that narratives circulating generally associate fragging with the murder of officers but that noncommissioned officers (such as Slater, Dibbs and Talbot) were often targets, as well. He also documents that investigations often revealed that victims of fragging incidents were poor leaders resented by their subordinates. 150 Just as Hartman plans to assassinate Dibbs, the Rainbow coalition in the south plans to end Talbot’s reign of terror by killing him. Early in the text, Hendrick gives Priest a grenade and asks him if he’d be willing to kill Talbot (33, 44). By its conclusion, the novel implies that Hartman, Priest, and Hendrick all have plans to kill Talbot (134). Talbot has threated to court-martial all three of them for insisting on trying to save the lives of three Vietnamese civilians, an old man, a woman and a child, injured by an American patrol (132). Talbot calls them “three worthless slants” and wants to let them die (132). When Talbot punches Isaacs in the face for crying about the injured Vietnamese, saying, “Goddamn you mama’s boy!” all of the other men start to attack him. Just then, the entire outpost comes under attack by the Vietnamese, and Talbot pushes his way out of the room. Hartman, Hendrick and Priest leave behind him with weapons loaded. The novel never reveals who actually kills Talbot but implies that it was a group effort: “The litter bearers had carried in Talbot’s body and put it down without a word. No questions. The attack had come from everywhere” (136). In this way, the lower ranking enlisted soldiers (labor) are able to struggle to improve their working conditions by eliminating abusive noncommissioned officers (management). The novel makes a connection between racist labor practices in the military and racist labor practices in America’s civilian sphere through flashbacks of the character Perez. Before joining the military Perez had come to political consciousness through a girl named Maria, whom he met in college. Maria criticized their history professor’s “color-coded” version of the historical relationship between Mexico and the United States. Having become politically aware, Perez makes connections between his experience of military service, contemporary labor practices involving Mexicans and 151 Mexican-Americans in the United States and the history of Western colonialization in Latin America. As B. V. Olguín comments, “That is, Rodriguez’s Private Perez is gesturing toward a subaltern identity that not only is produced in the clash between the First World and the Third World, but also spans the divide between those two sites” (99). Perez’s identity is complicated because as a racialized minority, he identifies with both a Chicano history of being exploited for labor in the United States and an indigenous history of being exploited for labor in Mexico. While being shelled on the front lines, Perez thinks back to Chicano demonstrations in which he participated to address institutionalized racism— gerrymandering, redlining, textbooks that omitted accurate histories of America’s minorities (Rodriguez 50-51). During another battle, he thinks back on his own experience dropping out of college to work in a factory to pay his father’s medical bills: “The workers in the factory, all underpaid, broke into two groups: a few Anglo supervisors and a larger group of undocumented workers from Mexico” (90). Although Perez was a legal citizen, the supervisors treated him the same as all of the undocumented workers. The undocumented workers began to complain about unpaid wages they were owed, and, conveniently, there was an immigration raid just before payday (91). Immigration demanded Perez’s green card and when he told them he was an American citizen did not believe him and said his driver’s license and college ID card could be forgeries (91). Through Perez’s recall of this incident, the novel gestures toward labor exploitation, immigration policy, and denial of wages to undocumented workers. Through Perez’s flashbacks, the novel makes a connection between the exploitation of 152 minority soldiers as laborers on the front lines of combat and instances of institutionalized racism. Just as And Then We Heard the Thunder suggested that black WWII veterans were less tolerant of domestic racism after experiencing combat overseas, Oddsplayer also touches on the idea that American minorities’ experience of combat will make them less likely to peacefully tolerate domestic racism after the war. Following a discussion between the Rainbow soldiers up north on the front lines about killing Slater for his racist practices, one of the black soldiers, Johnson, comments, “We were just niggers minding our own business back home. The Man reached out and grabbed us by the throat. I wasn’t concerned about nothing – just getting by. After this war I ain’t going back” (63). In this way, the text implies that the peaceful toleration of institutionalized racism in the United States will not continue. Also like And Then We Heard the Thunder, Oddsplayer gestures toward a transnational antiracist coalition. While the black soldiers in And Then We Heard the Thunder identified with the Filipino and Japanese laborers, in Oddplayer, Hendrik identifies with Vietnamese farmers, saying, “You got your war. I got mine. We’re both betting against the house. Just don’t come through the wire and make me waste you” (66). Again, there is the notion that working-class people in all societies have common interests and all are struggling against hegemonic powers in their own countries. Hendrick also compares the racialization of the Vietnamese to racialization of black people in America: “Whites called the local people gooks, slant-eyes, yellow meat, yaller niggers. The color of skin fixed the enemy” (63). 153 Like Hendrick, Perez recognizes the parallels between American minority and Vietnamese experiences, in Perez’s case the Chicano experience. John Alba Cutler argues that Rodriguez’s novel marks a shift in Chicano literature from focus on the activist as the figure representative of Chicano authenticity to focus on the soldier as representative of Chicano authenticity. Cutler argues that this move is “a more nuanced conceptualization of that authenticity, partly by delineating more complex sites of identification between Chicano soldiers and Vietnamese people” (593). This is manifest in Perez’s repeated visions of colonial violence by Spaniards in Mexico as a comparison to what he interprets as imperial American violence in Vietnam (95). Returning to Hendrick, the text observes that constructing the Vietnamese as the enemy actually gives whites and American minorities something in common. This point was emphasized when Rebo’s grandfather, a WWII vet, is trying to understand why the United States is at war with Vietnam and says, “Maybe they need an enemy. Better yellow folk than us” (65) In this case, Rebo’s grandfather is suggesting that black Americans might profit from anti-Vietnamese sentiment since white racism will have an alternate target. Fernandez, on the front in the north in Vietnam, makes a similar proposition to Perez that the bonds holding American soldiers together are only as strong as their feeling of having a mutual enemy: “War is like the street . . . There’s you and them, the ones outside the wire. You team with people because without hands you’re dead. And then you start acting out a loyalty game that’s only as strong as the enemy” (125). Oddsplayer’s conclusion is even darker than that of And Then We Heard the Thunder. Both novels end with extensive casualties of white and colored soldiers 154 following bitter combat. In Killens’s novel, the combat is primarily between black and white Americans although the black American form an alliance with Australians. In Rodriguez’s novel, the conflict is much more complicated as combat takes place simultaneously between predominantly minority working class American and their white leadership and between all Americans and Vietnamese, suggesting a link between domestic racism and class exploitation and American imperialism overseas. Killens’s novel concludes with a gesture toward the possibility of a new world with “a new and different dialogue that was people-oriented” (Killens 498-99). Conversely, Rodriguez’s novel ends with despair, the final two sentences being, “All bets are off. Dust swirls over the devastation” (136). Conclusion John Oliver Killens’s World War II novel, And Then We Heard the Thunder (1963) and Joe Rodriguez’s Vietnam novel Oddsplayer (1989) both explore the institutionalization of white supremacy and the freedom struggles of American minorities by using representations of military service to consider relationships between labor, race and class in the US military. Both novels emphasize the irrationality of the US military’s long refusal to institutionalize racial equality by exploring the triangulation between race, class and labor practices. Both novels also use the specific freedom struggles of their respective characters to represent the longer and broader freedom struggles of minority citizens of the United States and of people of color around the world, which are still ongoing today. As Nikhil Pal Singh writes in his book, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (2004): “Just as the formal rights of statehood and self-government have provided few, if any, answers to enduring global patterns of 155 inequality, exploitation, and oppression that plague the peoples of many of the world’s former colonies, formal citizenship rights have not delivered economic opportunity and political empowerment for a significant proportion of U.S. blacks” (222). 156 CHAPTER THREE Self-Addressed Envelopes: The Empire Writes Back from Home We should have an army so organized and so officered as to be capable in time of emergency, in cooperation with the National Militia, and under the provision of a proper national volunteer law, rapidly to expand into a force sufficient to resist all probable invasion from abroad and to furnish a respectable expeditionary force if necessary in the maintenance of our traditional American policy which bears the name of President Monroe. – William Howard Taft, Inaugural Address, Thursday, March 4, 1909 Americans need to educate themselves, from elementary school onward, about what their country has done abroad. And they need to play a more active role in ensuring that what the United States does abroad is not merely in keeping with a foreign policy elite’s sense of realpolitik but also with the American public’s own sense of American values. – Mohsin Hamid, Washington Post, Sunday, July 22, 2007 In his essay, “Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History,” Dipesh Chakrabarty calls attention to the violence necessary to secure the nation-state’s place as the dominant form of human collectivity. He reminds us that both imperial powers and the ruling elite of colonized countries produce histories that ensure the continued dominance of the Western worldview, even when working with colonial archives. Ultimately, Chakrabarty calls for ending this ideological hegemony by enacting a “politics of despair” that manifests through the creation of subaltern histories that bring to light the violence inherent in the imposition of modern liberalism upon colonial populations. He insists that these histories, although emerging from a Western tradition, should incorporate narrative forms that resist translation, casting doubt not only upon the dominant narratives of Western liberalism but also upon the dominant narratives produced by non-Western writers in the colonial context by drawing attention to the violence inherent in the production of knowledge: I ask for a history that deliberately makes visible, within the very structure of its narrative forms, its own repressive strategies and practices, the part it plays in collusion with the narratives of citizenship in assimilating to the projects of the modern state all other possibilities of human solidarity . . . This is a history that 157 will attempt the impossible: to look toward its own death by tracing that which resists and escapes the best human effort at translation across cultural and other semiotic systems, so the world may once again be imagined as radically heterogeneous. (388) Chakrabarty goes on to say that this type of history must replace existing hegemonic narratives of citizenship with “other narratives of human connections that draw sustenance from dreamed-up pasts and futures where collectivities are defined neither by the rituals of citizenship nor by the nightmare of ‘tradition’ that ‘modernity’ creates” (388). In this chapter, I argue that two multi-genre novels, written by immigrants to the United States, Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters (1990) and Mario Bencastro’s Odyssey to the North (1999), in many ways correspond to this type of resistant history for which Chakrabarty calls.60 The texts examine and construct complex relationships between US foreign policy and the physical, social and economic welfare of the people of the authors’ native lands, the Philippines and El Salvador, respectively. Neither of these books’ primary subject matter is the US military as both are concerned more broadly with US foreign policy and its effects on the lives and psyches of the people of the authors’ native countries, yet the representations of the US military, which are sporadically scattered throughout the texts, are very significant. I argue that this significance lies in the texts’ configuration of the US military as a metaphor that transcends signification of that institution itself and becomes a synecdoche representative of the US nation-state and US foreign policy in its larger dimensions. In this way, the texts’ representations of the US 60 A few examples of the many other novels in which American immigrants represent US military operations in their native countries in order to critique US imperialism include Junot Diaz’s Drown (1996) and Le Ly Hayslip’s When Heaven and Earth Changed Places (1993). 158 military emphatically highlight the violence inherent to Western liberalism and modernization, particularly in the context of colonial relations. Along with their subject matter and content, the novels’ refusal to privilege a single narrative, their presentation of multiple genres and their incorporation of multiple languages all bring into question the authority of modern narratives, including those that legitimate the modern nation-state and its attendant institutions. In this way, the novels enact Chakrabarty’s “politics of despair” by calling into question the narratives of modern liberalism used to justify US intervention in the Philippines and El Salvador and US immigration policy. Both Dogeaters and Odyssey to the North were written by immigrant writers living in the United States and published in English for American audiences with publication made possible by the support of American institutions and presses. Therefore, these texts may be ironically figured as self-addressed envelopes originating from the United States and containing messages that call for their predominately American readership to discard widespread amnesia about the relationship between US foreign policy and the contemporary social, political and economic problems of other countries as well as our own problem of undocumented immigration. Dogeaters’s Representations of the US Military Through its representations of the US military, Dogeaters presents an alternative history of relations between the United States and the Philippines that undermines colonial narratives of paternalism and benevolence.61 Lisa Lowe argues that the texts of minority literature constantly interrogate discrepancies between canonical historical 61 See also Paul A. Kramer’s The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines (2006). 159 narratives and the material devastation they conceal (99). In the case of Dogeaters, American narratives, such as that of President William McKinley’s 1898 address regarding his decision to invade the Philippines, which is excerpted in the novel, historically suggest that US military occupation of the Philippines is a benevolent affair for the good of the Filipino people. However, Dogeaters undermines this hegemonic narrative and critiques US military presence in the Philippines by representing relations between US servicemen stationed in the Philippines and Filipino prostitutes.62 In the first part of this chapter, I discuss the ways that these characters contribute to the novel’s enactment of Chakrabarty’s “politics of despair.” These sexual relations must be read in the context of the novel’s broader critique of US government support for the Philippines’s oppressive, right-wing totalitarian regime during the Marcos-era (1965- 1986), which occurs through representations of relationships between the US consul in the Philippines, members of elite Filipino society and officials of the corrupt, abusive Filipino government.63 As Aiping Zhang observes, Jessica Hagedorn creates a fictional world in which “the stench of colonization is still everywhere in the life and psyche of the people and their nation” (258). In addition to the novel’s narration of the devastating effects of neocolonialism on its Filipino characters, it also incorporates a variety of post- 62 This novel is part of a larger discourse about the relationship between the US military and prostitution. For example, Andris Zimelis discusses links between prostitution, nationalism and foreign policy in “Human Rights, the Sex Industry and Foreign Troops: Feminist Analysis of Nationalism in Japan, South Korea and the Philippines” (2009). Likewise, Donna M. Hughes et al. detail the linkage between the US military and international sex trade in “Modern-Day Comfort Women: The US Military, Transnational Crime, and the Trafficking of Women” (2007). 63 For a description of the relationships between American officials and Filipino elites, see Julian Go’s American Empire and the Politics of Meaning: Elite Political Cultures in the Philippines and Puerto Rico During U.S. Colonialism (2008). 160 modern narrative techniques that ironically call into question the integrity of narratives altogether, even its own. Ultimately, Dogeaters’s representations of US military presence in the Philippines illustrate the continued imbalance of power between the two nations and support the novel’s call for new ways of conceiving post-colonial Filipino identity.64 Dogeaters’s author, Hagedorn, was born in the Philippines in 1949 but moved to the United States with her family when she was fourteen years old (Miles et al.). She was trained in theater arts at the American Conservatory Theater, and her artistic endeavors span the arts to include musical performance as singer and songwriter, plays, poetry, and novels (Bonetti 91). Hagedorn’s physical and imagined travels between the Philippines and the United States are reflected in her works, which commonly feature the Filipino- American cross-cultural experience and take a multimedia, multi-genre approach, incorporating poetry, prose and photographic images as well as musical and theatrical elements. Interestingly, Hagedorn returned to her native country in 1988 to finish writing Dogeaters, which was her first novel. Dogeaters was published in 1990 in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House Inc. (Miles et al.). Portions of the book were also published in US literary journals, including Conditions: Thirteen, Everyday Life, Rolling Stock, and The Seattle Review. The novel was well-received at the time of its publication, won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1990, and was nominated for the National Book Award in 1991 (Miles et al.).65 Literary criticism of the 64 For another such intervention, see E. San Juan Jr.’s After Postcolonialism: Remapping Philippines-United States Confrontations (2000). 65 In 1997, Hagedorn adapted the novel to a play, which premiered in 1998 and was still on stage in San Francisco in 2016. 161 novel appeared in academic journals within a few years of the novel’s publication, peaked in the following decade with eighteen peer-reviewed journal articles and continues to appear regularly. However, none of the criticism deals specifically with the novel’s representations of the US military. Amongst the colorful milieu of characters that populate Dogeaters, the primary representations of the US military are a character named Joey Sands, a Filipino child prostitute, and one of his clients, Neil, a sailor in the US Navy, stationed in the Philippines. Additional glimpses of very peripheral characters who are also US military members and customers of the Filipino sex trade appear throughout the novel. In “The Last Commodity: Child Prostitution in the Developing World,” Aaron Sachs reports that there were approximately 60,000 child prostitutes in the Philippines in 1994, four years after the initial publication of Dogeaters. This statistic connects the novel’s characters and narratives with contemporary events in the Philippines. Sachs notes that poverty often forces third world children into prostitution but adds, “While these socio-economic conditions have served to expand the potential supply of child prostitutes by a vast margin, the demand for them has perhaps increased even more. And it is the demand for child prostitutes that turns vulnerable children into victims” (24). Sachs argues that a link exists between the demand for third world child prostitutes and US military presence, particularly that of deployed military members on “R&R” (rest and relaxation leave) in third world countries, such as Thailand and the Philippines. Hagedorn’s novel brings these unpleasant realities to light in the larger context of neocolonial relations between the United States and the Philippines through Joey’s narrative. 162 Joey’s narrative is broken into segments and interspersed throughout the novel amidst the narratives of other characters. Dogeaters’s “politics of despair” is reflected in its postmodern narrative strategies, such as the disordered arrangement of the plot, the shifting point of view and the unreliability of the narrators, which all emphasize the fabricated nature of the text. The novel has several different narrators, and instead of one dominant plot, the narrative focus skips and hops between seemingly unrelated stories capturing a whole milieu of colorful Filipino personalities as well as a few American characters who, like the US military, represent a lingering colonial presence in the post- colonial Philippines. The novel also constantly shifts perspectives, offering narratives about the same characters sometimes in first person and sometimes in third person point of view. Joey’s story is not delivered in chronological order. The first four sections regarding Joey are presented to the reader in first-person as Joey tells his own story. First, Joey describes his current life as a dance club DJ, child prostitute, and drug addict (31- 40). Only after describing his debasement does he relate his loss of innocence from the time he is orphaned as a child of five or six and taken in by (possibly sold to) an exploitative older Filipino man, Uncle, who initiates him into the world of crime as a pickpocket and into the sex industry as a child prostitute (42-45). Finally, Joey discusses specific details of his relationships with two white, Western, adult male clients—first, an American US Navy sailor (72-78) and, second, a German filmmaker (130-152). Joey’s inability to control his environment and destiny becomes a dominant motif of the novel. Joey’s story is the inversion of the American story of the self-made man who creates his own destiny. His environment and circumstances shape his psychology. 163 The reader receives several clues that Joey may not be a reliable narrator, and he even tells the reader directly, “Maybe I’m lying. Uncle says I was born a liar, that I can’t help myself. Lies pour out of my mouth even when I’m sleeping” (45). This undermining of Joey’s narrative does not call into question the story of his debasement in the Filipino- American sex trade but instead renders incredible some of his claims to agency, such as his claims that he is in control of his sexual commodification and his drug addiction. Joey’s first-person narratives disclose a generational legacy of Filipino poverty and despair in the colonial context as Joey ends up becoming a prostitute for American military men just as his mother had been.66 His first-person narratives also disclose Joey’s never-ending quest for a father figure to replace the US Navy sailor who abandoned him and his mother. Joey fantasizes about filling this void first with Uncle and later with his older male American and European clients. The text explores Joey’s relationships with two white, male, Western clients in depth, the first Neil, a sailor in the US Navy, and the second Rainier, a German movie producer. In each case, the adolescent Filipino trades his sexuality for access to money, drugs and the illusory thrill of being the object of desire of an older white Western man. Since the primary focus of this article is on representations of the US military, this chapter focuses on the relationship between Joey and Neil. Joey is the embodiment of neocolonial anxiety and suffering in the Philippines. It is significant that Joey is a GI Baby, the illegitimate child of an anonymous black American military serviceman who is deployed to the Philippines and a Filipino prostitute. Joey is orphaned at a young age, five or six years old, according to his first- 66 See Michael L. Tan’s “Walking the Tightrope: Sexual Risk and Male Sex Work in the Philippines” (1999) for a detailed description of the culture of male sex workers in the Philippines. 164 person narrative, when his mother commits suicide by drowning herself in a polluted river (42). He then becomes a child prostitute and thief. Joey is both the literal and metaphorical trace of the US military’s occupation of the Philippines. He serves as a metaphor for the ravages of the United States’s colonial and neocolonial exploits with his mother’s Filipina body representing the relatively powerless Philippines, his father’s American body representing the colonizing power of the United States (although this is complicated by the father’s blackness, which I will discuss further in the next paragraph), and his own body representing the economic, physical, and psychological devastation resulting from interactions between colonizing and colonized peoples that continues into the postcolonial/neocolonial era. The blackness of Joey’s American father is significant to the text, and the narrative returns to it repeatedly. On the one hand, as a US military member, Joey’s father represents the exploitative nature of colonizing power, its inherent violence and its indifference to the fate of the Filipino people through his sexual relations with and impregnation of Joey’s mother, Zenaida, followed by his abandonment of both Zenaida and Joey. On the other hand, as a black man, Joey’s father is a member of a historically oppressed American minority group and, therefore, himself directly or indirectly a casualty of the hegemonic power the US nation-state, which privileges European cultural values and ethnicities and has a history of oppressing its black citizens. Thus, the father’s symbolic role as a representative of the US military in the Philippines is complicated by his own racial and ethnic group’s precarious and contingent relationship to the US nation- 165 state.67 As Rachel Lee observes, “In effect, Dogeaters points to the ways in which simultaneously operating hegemonies impinge unevenly upon various subjects, requiring an array of counter hegemonic responses that are, likewise, multiple and uneven” (104). This representation of Joey’s father as a black American in conjunction with the text’s exposure of the violence and corruption within Filipino elite society and government insists on a complex understanding of the complicity of oppressed peoples in the violence required to support Western notions of democracy and modernization. In this novel, the US military facilitates the emergence of mixed race identities as its members’ sexual practices become transnational in the Philippines, take the form of interracial relationships and produce mixed-race children. US military members have also brought to the Philippines their fantasies of racialized sexuality. Joey knows very little about his father, other than that he was black and in the US military, and says to one of his clients: “He was stationed at Subic Bay—that’s all I know about him. Not his name. Not anything” (Hagedorn 146). However, the physical features Joey inherited from his black American father contribute greatly to the construction of his own identity, which is based largely on racial stereotypes about black sexuality. Joey recounts the reaction to his blackness of Andres, his Filipino drag queen employer, who owns the dance club where Joey works as a DJ: “When I told him about my father, he shook his head in admiration. ‘You’re lucky you have Negro blood,’ he said, ‘a little black is good for the soul’” (34). Joey explains that Andres also idolizes Tina Turner and Donna Summer, American 67 See Scott Ngozi-Brown’s “African-American Soldiers and Filipinos: Racial Imperialism, Jim Crow and Social Relations” (1997) for a discussion of the complex relationship between black American military members deployed to the Philippines and Filipino natives. 166 singers Andres associates with racial stereotypes about the excesses of black female sexuality, calling them, “Divine putas with juicy lips” (34). Throughout Joey’s narratives, there are other references to his blackness and sexuality: his US Navy client, Neil, calls him “little pretty black boy” (72). Joey explains, “But I could tell he was fascinated, just like all the rest of them. Joey Taboo: my head of tight, kinky curls, my pretty hazel eyes, my sleek brown skin” (72). Joey has internalized the racialized gaze of his US military clients and other Western clients to the extent that he, himself, associates his identity and sexuality with his racialized features. It is as if Joey is unable to see himself in any other way than with the racialized, sexualized gaze of his clients. As Allan Punzalan Isaac observes, “He realizes that the combination of his youth, color, class and milieu is an eroticized commodity in the international tourist market” (160). In one passage Joey describes himself naked in a hotel room bed, and he references his own racialized features: “I lean back against the pillows, my arms behind my head. My tight black curls are still wet, framing my face” (Hagedorn 77). Immediately following this description, Joey reveals that he is naked and has an erection. This description is unsettling for the reader because Joey is describing himself as if he is gazing at himself, yet there is no mention of a mirror, suggesting that Joey has fully internalized the racialized, sexualized gaze of his customers and is unable to imagine himself in any other way. In this novel, the US military both enforces and transgresses national boundaries; it defends military and economic interests that are defined by nation-state but due to the necessity of controlling resources in other countries through physical occupation, it also produces hybrid cultures and identities that complicate and undermine nationalism. 167 Joey’s own black-Filipino mixed-race identity becomes a metaphor for this postcolonial confusion, much as the tragic mulatto is a dominant metaphor for the uncertainties and failures of black-white racial identification in American literature. However, Joey’s blackness also references a transnational narrative of black resistance and survival in the face of intense suffering. Through its representation of US military members as consumers of Filipino sexuality, the novel shows how the imbalance of socio-economic power in colonial relations has contributed to the commodification of the sexuality of third-world women and children. Joey exploits his sexuality to provide for his psychological and socio- economic needs and derives a sense of power from his sexual activities: “I come alive at twilight, refreshed by my sleep and the cooling effects of the oncoming darkness, the setting sun. I’m energized and electric, a vampire ready for action” (37). However, Joey’s rhetoric of power becomes ironic as the text narrates his perpetual abandonment by his clients and his disregard for his own emotional needs and sexual preferences. He is willing to trade sex for money, drugs, or citizenship. Like Joey’s mixed-race identity, his sexuality highlights the unstable and contingent nature of identity both in his alternation between the roles of sexual predator and victim and in his bisexuality. His sexuality is flexible and negotiable; he is willing to be with men or women, depending on which will be most advantageous to him socioeconomically: “I’ll hit the jackpot with one of these guys. Leave town. I’ll get lucky like Junior. Some foreign woman will sponsor me and take me to the States. Maybe she’ll marry me. I’ll get my green card. Wouldn’t that be something?” (40). Although Joey’s sexual relations as described in the novel are exclusively with men, he expresses 168 willingness to engage in sexual relations with women as well, “If I met a rich woman, a rich woman who was willing to support me . . .” (44). Ultimately, Joey’s sexuality is reduced to a commodity that is tailored to the needs of his clients, who are predominately homosexual US military members. The ironic instability that characterizes the text as a whole is an essential part of Joey’s character, which becomes evident in the book’s narration of the sex trade supported by the US military. In the context of his work as a sex laborer, Joey is presented to the reader simultaneously as victim and predator; thus, his character is ambivalent in the sense that he is presented as neither good nor bad. In fact, the narrative refers to him and the entire class of child prostitutes that he represents as both “ominous” and “holy”: “Joey knew he was one of them—the ominous and holy children of the streets” (202). The children are ominous because out of desperation, they have become predators, pickpockets and prostitutes concerned primarily with survival and so focused on their own survival that they are ruthless in their exploitation of others. However, they are also holy because they are corrupted at such an innocent young age in such horrible circumstances that they cannot be held fully responsible for their actions. Their desire to survive by any means necessary despite the horrors that surround them becomes evidence of their humanity: “He knew he wanted to live: it was that simple and basic” (205). In this way, the novel absolves Joey of guilt for his own exploitation of others and perhaps suggests also that the Philippines is not responsible for the corruption of its culture due to inequity of the power relations of colonization and global capitalism. Through its narratives of Joey’s relationship with Neil, the US Navy sailor, the text explores the dynamics of power at work in colonial relations. One way the text 169 reveals the power relations at play is through representations of gazing. Postcolonial gazing practices are frequently discussed in the discipline of film studies and this scholarship is useful in considering the postcolonial gazing that takes place in Dogeaters. Building on Robert Stam and Louise Spence’s now frequently cited 1983 article “Colonialism, Racism and Representation,” E. Ann Kaplan’s 2012 book Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film and the Imperial Gaze discusses the significance of postcolonial gazing practices. Kaplan notes, “Like everything in culture, looking relations are determined by history, tradition, power hierarchies, politics, economics. Mythic or imaginary ideas about nation, national identity and race all structure how one looks, but these myths are in turn closely linked to class, politics and economic relations” (4). In this way, at one very significant point in the text, dynamics of power are revealed through gazing as Joey and Neil gaze at a spectacle together yet see and react very differently. Joey and Neil are at the Hilton hotel lying in bed together watching a television show singing contest that features novice singers, a Filipino talent show similar to American Idol. A young Filipino girl contestant on the show is extremely anxious and overwhelmed by her objectification as a spectacle on the show. The text provides a powerful comparison of the very different reactions of the two voyeurs. As Myra Mendible comments, “This comment on the interactive and interdependent relationship between the spectacle and the spectator, the passive observer and the perpetrator forms the basis of Hagedorn’s social and political critique of representation” (297). Through first person narration, the text follows Joey’s thoughts about watching the young girl perform: “I can’t bear to watch her, it’s too painful. Her awkwardness makes me angry” (76). Joey’s identification with the Filipino girl’s objectification, 170 anxiety and fear troubles him and he rejects it, saying aloud to Neal, “Look at her – how stupid!” thus distancing himself from her vulnerability (76). However, Neil, replies, “Poor thing . . . she needs to be rescued – quick” (76). Neil’s comment not only demonstrates his empathy for the girl’s plight, it also implies that he may identify himself with the role of potential rescuer. Through first-person narration, the text reveals Joey’s reaction to his client’s comment, “Impatient, I make a face. There he goes again, upset: he identifies with everyone and everything. Probably why he likes to stay drunk. I can’t be like that. If I was on TV, I’d be the coolest guy. Mr. Heartbreak, talaga: the one that got away. Cool calm collected” (76). While the American is attracted to the vulnerability of the contestant and her potential as one to be rescued, presumably by him or someone like him, Joey uses the Tagalog word “talaga” to emphasize the extent of the heartbreak that he would try to impose if he were the vulnerable object of the gaze in order to restore the balance of power. In Tagalog, the word “talaga” can carry a range of meanings and could be translated to English as “really” or “truly” or “very” or “indeed.” Although Dogeaters is narrated predominately in English, it also incorporates Tagalog and Spanish throughout the narrative. In this way, the language of the text traces the colonial legacy of the Philippines, the cultural and linguistic influences of Spanish and American colonization on the native Filipino people. Thus, we return to Chakrabarty’s idea that the very narrative structures of the text may reveal the violence inherent in colonial relationships—that which is repressed or lost as a result of colonial oppression. The text’s incorporation of Tagalog reminds the reader of the colonized Filipino subject position from which Joey gazes at and interprets the girl on television. 171 As a US military member, Neil’s own role in colonial power relations is reflected in his desire to rescue the girl from her humiliation as a spectacle. His desire to rescue the girl mirrors his desire to see himself as a paternal rescuer and protector of Joey. However, it is Neil’s demand for the commodity of entertainment that links him to the girl and his desire for the commodity of sex that dominates his relationship with Joey. Joey later recalls Neil’s “doggish look” of desire and how it made him angry to see the American’s lust for him yet how his anger only increased the American’s sexual appetite for him: “My anger always fueled the American’s desire . . .” (142). Joey’s anger at his own degradation only heightens Neil’s attraction to him as helpless and in need of rescue. Due to his US citizenship and employment in the US military, Neil occupies a position of power and economic security from which he is able to gaze with paternalistic pity on both Joey and the girl attracted to their vulnerability and need while simultaneously exploiting them both, the girl for entertainment and the boy for sex. However, from Joey’s position of insecurity and poverty, he is unable to feel empathy for anyone else. He is focused on trying to maintain control and dignity in a situation in which he has no dignity and no control. Joey maintains a false sense of power by leveraging his sexuality as a commodity, trying to remain emotionally detached from his clients, and treating his clients with disrespect and stealing from them in order to obscure the true power relations in place. The power relations between Joey and Neil are emphasized not only by their differences in nationality but also by the age difference between them. When Joey describes Neil, he comments on the physical signs of aging: “When he wasn’t drunk, his face and eyes didn’t droop as much, and you’d notice his big body and muscular arms, 172 pretty strong and firm for a man his age” (72). When Neil became interested in Joey, he would come to the dance club where Joey worked and ask, “Where’s the little GI baby?” (73). Joey also recounts Neal’s initial inquiries about his age: “You’re kind of young, aren’t you?” (72). Finally, Joey describes taking Neil and another American military man to see a live sex show that featured “a skinny young girl” and “a well-built young man, close to my age” (74). This repeated emphasis on the age differences between Joey and Neil as well as other older Western male clients and younger Filipino prostitutes again symbolizes the power differentials of colonial relations. The age differences between Western client father-figures (albeit only the most incestuous and corrupt of fathers) and Filipino child prostitutes reference a colonial narrative in which third-world natives and nation-states are infantilized and referred to as in an earlier stage of development while the colonizers and the colonial power are represented as benevolent, paternal, mature and sophisticated caretakers, looking out for the native people. One assurance that the text is meant to metaphorically shuttle back and forth between the personal and the national in this way is the text’s ironic inclusion of President William McKinley’s 1898 Address to Methodist Churchmen in which he claims a divine edict to colonize the Philippines on these grounds: . . . we could not leave them to themselves – they were unfit for self-government – and they would soon have anarchy and misrule over there . . . There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died. And then I went to bed, and went to sleep and slept soundly. (71) Although McKinley’s address contains religious overtones not found in Neil’s more secular worldview and language, McKinley conveys the same admixture of pity and 173 exploitation found in Neil’s character, an admixture characteristic of the language of colonization. In addition, McKinley’s representation of the Philippines as a dependent and needy country justifies US colonialism by infantilizing the nation, which is also reflected in the age difference between young Filipino prostitutes and older Western clients. Through this inclusion of text from a political speech as well excerpts of text from other genres, both fictional and nonfictional, the novel undercuts the naturalization of storytelling and the authority of any single narrative, highlighting the complexity of lived experience and textual translation of that experience. This is one example of how the text’s multiple genres respond to Chakrabarty’s call for a “politics of despair” by incorporating narrative strategies that reveal that which is repressed. As suggested by the novel’s reference to McKinley’s paternal narrative, Neil plays a father figure to Joey. He is attracted by Joey’s beauty and vulnerability and simultaneously pities and exploits the boy. Joey, in contrast, is attracted to Neil’s wealth, which provides access to food, drugs and nice hotel rooms and does everything he can to exploit Neil for those resources and remain emotionally detached from his own exploitation. However, the US Navy sends Neil home to America, and he leaves Joey behind to continue living in poverty until the next Western client comes along. This eventuality is foreshadowed earlier in the text when Joey is driving around Manila in a car with Neil and another US Navy sailor and inquires about a US Navy ship he sees anchored in Manila Bay. Joey describes the interaction: “‘Is that your ship?’ I point to the ghostly carrier floating in the middle of the dark sea. The men don’t respond” (74). Joey is interested in geographical mobility and his own dreams of escaping Manila and 174 traveling to the United States, but his American clients are interested primarily in the evening’s sexual transactions. In this context, one might see clearly that the story of Joey, the Filipino child prostitute, and Neil, the US military man, might be read as an allegory of colonialism, in which Neil represents the United States and Joey represents the Philippines. This interpretation of their relationship is supported by the context of the rest of the book. The text, as a whole, focuses on the oppression of the Filipino people by the violently repressive, US supported, right-wing Philippine government and on Filipino culture’s glamorization of and obsession with Western culture. In Dogeaters, there is a direct link between the US military presence and US foreign policy. The text illustrates this by including the diplomatic presence of the Goldenbergs. Although the Goldenbergs never interact directly with Neil or Joey, the link between US foreign policy and the US military is unmistakable. The US government, represented by its diplomats as well as its military, supports the corrupt Filipino government, which uses its own power and military to control the Filipino population at all levels. The Filipino government’s human rights violations and political repression are facilitated by the cooperation and support of Filipino elites who benefit from existing socioeconomic relations between the Philippines and the United States.68 The Goldenbergs establish social relationships with the wealthy, elite Filipino families who benefit from the existing political climate in the Philippines. They seem blissfully unaware of the corruption, poverty and misery that surrounds them, including the plight of Filipinos caught up in the sex trade designed largely for US military consumers. 68 Again, see Go, referenced in footnote 66. 175 Therefore, there is a direct link between the apathetic superficiality of the Goldenbergs’ engagement with the Philippines, the exploitative presence of US military members like Neil, who provide a demand for the Filipino sex industry, and the exploited Filipino poor, like Joey, who remain marginalized and victimized due to a combination of circumstances perpetuated by the US and Philippines governments and socioeconomic and political arrangements between the elites of both countries. The teenage narrator describes for the reader the reasons why elite Filipinos socially embrace the Goldenbergs: “My mother claims Mrs. Goldenberg is a madwoman. Functioning, but crazy all the same. She is tolerated because she is the American consul’s wife and her powerful husband intervenes on behalf of my parents” (237). As with the uneven power relations between US military members and Filipino prostitutes, the American diplomat has access to resources that the local elite do not. The narrator, a teenage Filipina named Rio, details the types of favors the American diplomat is able to extend, which includes access to military resources. For example, Mr. Goldenberg arranges for a US Army plane to fly special food in for an ill member of an elite Filipino family (237). Likewise, he arranged for another elite Filipino to stay at the American hospital when ill for which he was awarded with “membership to the Monte Vista Country Club, boxes of Tabacalera cigars, cases of aged Spanish brandy, and gleaming tins of pale yellow Mango Tango ice cream” (238). Thus, there is an exchange of commodities between American and Filipino elites. It may not be accidental that this diplomat was given the moniker Goldenberg as he represents the presence of US wealth and power in the Philippines. Like the US military, the Goldenbergs serve as a metaphor 176 for the imbalance of power between the United States and the Philippines and as a symbol of the collusion between American and Filipino elites. Ultimately, the novel implies that the people of the Philippines are the victims of both Western colonial exploitation and their own corrupt government, propped up by Filipino elites. Joey’s rehabilitation is contingent upon both the severance of his relationships with his US military and other Western clients and his escape from mainstream Filipino society. The novel’s conclusion features Joey’s retreat to the mountains with a band of antigovernment guerillas and his close friendship with Daisy Avila, the daughter of the leftist Senator Domingo Avila, whose assassination Joey witnessed: “They are together all the time. She teaches him how to use a gun” (233). This conclusion suggests that the only hope for the liberation of the Philippine people and their recovery of control over their own country and culture is a social and military rebellion against both colonial powers and the existing Philippine government. Because Daisy comes from the elite Filipino class while Joey is the child of a prostitute and orphan of the streets, their collaboration suggests that Filipinos of all socioeconomic classes join in overthrowing the corrupt government and reclaiming the country.69 Although the first four narratives about Joey are delivered in the first-person, about three quarters of the way through the novel, the narratives shift to third-person narration of Joey’s story as his life is threatened after he witnesses the political assassination of left-leaning Senator Domingo Avila by the corrupt right-wing 69 Since the time of this novel’s publication, during the twenty-first century, the Filipino government has implemented a wave of assassinations targeting leftists. See William N. Holden’s “Ashes from the phoenix: state terrorism and the party-list groups in the Philippines” (2009) in which he argues the refusal to allow left-wing groups to participate in mainstream politics may lead to armed revolution. 177 government and then as he escapes into the mountains to join a band of Filipino guerillas. In this way, the reader first makes intimate acquaintance of Joey, learning how he thinks and becoming sympathetic toward him through the first-person narratives. Then, as the denouement of the novel begins to draw all of the novel’s myriad individual narratives together to make a larger political statement by narrating the Filipino people’s rebellion against both their corrupt government and Western influence, the retreat of Joey’s narrative into the third person effectively places Joey and his story in the larger context of Filipino society and politics. Dogeaters, taken as whole, relies on metaphorical representation to illustrate the utter failure of US colonization to improve the lives of Filipino people in any meaningful way. The US military becomes representative of both the US nation-state and US foreign policy, and the removal of the representations of the US military’s contribution to the construction and maintenance of the Filipino sex trade would significantly impoverish the novel’s ability to convey the destructive nature of the relationship between the United States and the Philippines. Dogeaters uses this metaphor of the US military in conjunction with other narrative strategies that enact the “politics of despair” for which Chakrabarty calls. In this way, the novel undermines the narratives that legitimize of the modern nation-state and its attendant institutions. Odyssey to the North’s Representations of the US Military While Hagedorn’s novel examines US military presence and foreign policy in the Philippines, Bencastro’s novel focuses on relations between the United States and El Salvador and finds fault with US military Cold War-era support for El Salvador’s oppressive, right-wing totalitarian regime during the Salvadoran Civil War (1979- 178 1992).70 There are two ways in which this novel uses the US military as a metaphor for US foreign policy and its support of El Salvador’s right-wing government. First, the novel specifically references the military training of Salvadoran government soldiers at Fort Benning, Georgia at the School of the Americas and then traces the activities of those soldiers in El Salvador after they graduate from the school, specifically the formation of death squads that used brutal tactics against innocent Salvadoran citizens, such as disappearances, torture, imprisonment and execution, producing an exodus of Salvadoreños fleeing political oppression. Second, the novel ironically figures undocumented immigrants wearing US Army uniforms while held in a US immigration detention center for illegal immigration. In this way, the novel constructs a relationship between the US military, US foreign policy, and the undocumented immigration of people from El Salvador to the United States.71 Through these representations of the US military as an invisible force in El Salvador rendered visible through the novel’s revisionist history, Odyssey to the North enacts Chakrabarty’s “politics of despair” by disrupting contemporary narratives about undocumented immigration to the United States and calling for new ways of conceiving the relationship between US foreign policy and human migration. Like Hagedorn, Bencastro was born in 1949; however, he was born in El Salvador but migrated to the United States near the beginning of the Salvadoran Civil War. While 70 See Andrew J. Bacevich’s American Military Policy in Small Wars: The Case of El Salvador (1988) for a description of US military support for El Salvador’s government during the Salvadoran Civil War. 71 See Susan Bibler Coutin’s Nations of Emigrants: Shifting Boundaries of Citizenship in El Salvador and the United States (2007) for analysis of emigration from El Salvador to the United States. 179 his earlier works focus primarily on historical events in El Salvador, his later works focus on the experiences of Salvadoran immigrants living in exile communities, particularly those in the United States. Odyssey to the North was first published in English in 1998 and then in Spanish in 1999 by Arte Publico Press in Houston, Texas. A note in the text acknowledges that the volume was made possible through grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Lila Wallace – Reader’s Digest Fund and the City of Houston through The Cultural Arts Council of Houston, Harris County. Although Bencastro has received critical attention for his other works, which have been published in Spanish and English in the United States, Mexico and El Salvador and included in many international anthologies, Odyssey to the North has received relatively little critical attention although Bencastro had promoted it internationally and it has been published internationally, including in India (Toruño- Haensly 6). Just as Dogeaters uses representation of the US military as a metaphor for US foreign policy in the Philippines, Odyssey to the North incorporates representations of the US military to emphasize the consequences of US foreign policy for El Salvador. However, while the setting of Dogeaters remains in the Philippines, in Odyssey to the North, the metaphorical chickens come home to roost. Although the novel includes scenes in both El Salvador and the United States, Odyssey to the North is primarily a novel of immigration and its dominant narrative is about the immigrant journey from El Salvador to the United States, its hardships and its causes. Bencastro conducts his critique of US foreign policy while narrating the journey of the novel’s Salvadoran-American immigrant protagonist, Calixto, through a series of geographic and temporal dislocations. 180 The protagonist of the novel, Calixto, reluctantly decides to emigrate to the United States from El Salvador, leaving his wife and child behind, because he is falsely accused of political activity and fears his arrest, torture, and execution by Salvadoran government soldiers who had been trained by the US military. As in Hagedorn’s novel, Chakrabarty’s “politics of despair,” the incorporation of narrative forms that resist translation and defy hegemonic narratives, is evident in Bencastro’s work. Here we have a second text that refuses to privilege a single narrative, presents multiple genres and incorporates multiple languages. These strategies in conjunction with Odyssey to the North’s subject matter again bring into question the legitimacy of the modern nation-state and its attendant institutions. As with Dogeaters, this text’s use of the military as a metaphor for US foreign policy highlights the violence inherent to Western liberalism and modernization, both on the part of Western nation- states and on the part of colonial nation-states, particularly in the context of western imperialism. Like Dogeaters, Odyssey to the North incorporates multiple genres and narratives. Although the protagonist Calixto’s immigration narrative dominates the text, he appears in the context of a larger community of undocumented immigrants as their stories are woven into the text also via a variety of genres. In this way, the text calls into question the objectivity and validity of any single narrative, contrasts official and unofficial narratives and emphasizes the humanity of undocumented immigrants and the inhumanity of the conditions and institutions to which they are subjected. The genres exploited by the novel include prose delivered in the third person, fictional newspapers, fictional immigration court transcripts and legal counsel, dialogue 181 overheard in a restaurant kitchen, a restaurant and a bar, letters exchanged between lovers and song lyrics. One might think such a wide variety of genres would be difficult to merge into one cohesive narrative, but on the contrary, the different genres complement each other and work in tandem to undermine the idea that any single narrative or genre could accurately represent the complicated story of undocumented immigration and its relationship to US foreign policy. Like Dogeaters, by incorporating multiple genres, both fictional and nonfictional, Odyssey to the North undercuts the naturalization of storytelling, highlighting the complexity of lived experience and textual translation of that experience. Newspaper articles are one of the genres featured in this text. The novel offers fictional and nonfictional news article chapters that contain factual and historically accurate descriptions of Salvadoran immigrant life. Seven chapters take this form, featuring excerpts from actual, nonfictional newspaper articles that represent historical events and conditions as well as fictional newspaper articles. Bencastro reveals in the text’s introduction that the text combines fiction and nonfiction and that some of the newspaper excerpts are fabricated while others are not: “This is a work of fiction. Certain events have been commingled with situations and characters of my own invention to create this narrative. With the exception of the content of some newspaper articles, any similarity to actual events, places, or people (living or dead) is coincidental” (Author’s Note). The newspaper articles contain coverage of the plight of homeless and destitute undocumented immigrants living in New York City, the death by dehydration of immigrants crossing the desert in Arizona during their journey to the United States, a historically accurate description of the May 1991 Mount Pleasant riots in Washington 182 DC, and statistics regarding Salvadoran immigration to the United States due to economic and political hardship in the years during and following the Salvadoran Civil War and the desire of most Salvadoran immigrants to eventually return home.72 While all of these news articles serve to educate and generate sympathy in the reader for Salvadoran immigrants, there is one article from a newspaper entitled The Los Angeles Watch that is particularly relevant of the text’s attempt to construct a relationship between US foreign policy, the US military, and the United States’s experience of Salvadoran undocumented immigration. This article describes an interview with “Soldier X.” Soldier X is an unnamed and undocumented immigrant and a Salvadoran army deserter, who is seeking political asylum in the United States. During the interview, the soldier describes his fear for his life as a result of his military activities as a government death squad soldier in El Salvador. Soldier X also says he “belonged to a special battalion that received military training in the United States” (123). He then describes his participation in the torture and execution of suspected guerillas in El Salvador and subsequent desertion from the Salvadoran government’s military after he and his family received death threats from Salvadoran guerillas. The chapter with the newspaper article that describes the interview with “Soldier X” is complemented by chapters in another genre, court transcripts, that deliver the story of twenty-one-year-old Teresa de Jesús Delgado, a Salvadoran immigrant, who is seeking political asylum because she believes her life to be in danger. Teresa’s family is caught in the political crossfire between the Salvadoran government and Salvadoran guerillas 72 The 1991 Mount Pleasant riots in Washington DC began when a rookie police officer shot a Salvadoran man whom she was attempting to arrest for public drinking during a Cinco de Mayo celebration. 183 trying to overthrow that government. Teresa fears repercussions from government forces due to guerillas’ use of a well near her home, and she fears repercussions from guerillas due to her husband’s prior service in the government military. The description of Soldier X’s military service in the newspaper interview is an exact match to Teresa’s testimony about her husband during her immigration hearings. Soldier X is quite likely Teresa’s husband. The eight chapters set in an immigration court articulate the plight of undocumented immigrants. In these court chapters, the dialogue follows the conventions of a play script with the speaker’s name and a colon preceding his or her speech. These chapters show the vulnerability of individual undocumented immigrants facing the overwhelming institutional power and bureaucracy of the US immigration system.73 The speakers in these chapters are Teresa, Judge, Interpreter, Ms. Smith (Teresa’s attorney), and Trial Attorney (Mr. Hammer, US government attorney). Significantly, Teresa and her attorney are represented by their names while the government officials, the judge and the US government attorney, are only represented by their official roles. This contrasts the impersonal nature of the judicial system with humanity of undocumented immigrants and the disastrous personal consequences of legal decisions for individual immigrants. One of the difficulties that Teresa faces is her lack of fluency in English, the language used in the courts by the judge and the attorneys. These chapters contrast the legal jargon and impersonal proceedings of immigration courts with the inability of 73 In 1996, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 made it easier to deport non-citizens from the United States. See Jacqueline Hagan et al.’s article on the effects these deportations had on Salvadoran deportees, “U.S. Deportation Policy, Family Separation and Circular Migration” (2008). 184 undocumented immigrants to speak for themselves or understand the immigration process. In this way, the text generates sympathy for the vulnerability of individual undocumented immigrants. The transcripts of her hearings emphasize the language barrier with which Teresa struggles by the presence of an interpreter, by Teresa’s frequent misunderstandings of what the judge is saying and by Teresa’s inability to communicate her own experience and position. JUDGE: Do you speak and understand Spanish? TERESA: Spanish, yes, but no English. JUDGE: The interpreter, then, will translate from English to Spanish so that you will understand. Do you understand? TERESA: No, not English. (37) Not only does Teresa’s lack of fluency in the language of the courts leave her unable to speak adequately on her own behalf, her plight is compounded by her lack of understanding of immigration law and court processes. As she is unable to complete her application for political asylum herself, “the man from the church” prepares it incompletely and after a lengthy delay that puts Teresa in jeopardy of having the application rejected entirely (54). Teresa’s attorney later notes that the application was submitted in a generic format used for all similar situations and does not describe the relevant details of Teresa’s specific situation. Again, by having her situation reduced to a form letter, Teresa is subjected to the depersonalization of the immigration court processes. Teresa’s petition for asylum rests on her hope that the judge will be sympathetic to her fears of violence due to the political unrest in El Salvador. She fears for her life 185 due to her husband’s service in the Salvadoran government military, which resulted in death threats against him and their family by guerillas, and his subsequent desertion of the government military, which generated the threat of imprisonment and/or execution by the Salvadoran government. However, the judge interprets the law in a conservative way. MS. SMITH [Teresa’s attorney]: Correct. We’re dealing with her fear of returning to her country. JUDGE: It’s her fear. Subjective fear. You know her subjective fear is irrelevant unless you can show that she has objective facts to substantiate the subjective fear. . . . (102) The last of the eight chapters set in immigration court features the judge’s order for Teresa’s deportation, which states that Teresa does not have adequate evidence of “fear of persecution” (175). Although this is the end of the text’s recreation of US immigration courts through court transcripts, a later chapter in the format of an excerpt from a fictional Salvadoran newspaper, La Tribuna, shows that Teresa was found dead in El Salvador: “It is believed that her death was due to political retaliation” (188). The objective evidence required to support Teresa’s fear of persecution came too late; the US government and US immigration courts failed to protect Teresa. Teresa’s story emphasizes the inhumanity of the immigration courts by focusing on the triumph of bureaucratic processes and anti-immigrant sentiment over human needs. Through Soldier X’s narrative and the immigration court narratives, the novel repeatedly emphasizes the relationship between the United States’s intervention in El Salvador’s politics and military operations and undocumented Salvadoran immigration to the United States. To emphasize this point, near the beginning of the novel, one minor American character makes a comment regarding Latin American countries, “We used to be the ones who invaded their countries; now they invade ours” (3). While comparing US 186 military intervention in El Salvador to undocumented immigration by Salvadoreños to the United States is an unfair comparison between the imperialistic foreign policy and military strategy of a wealthy, powerful nation-state and individual human beings struggling to survive and improve quality of life, it is the relationship between these two “invasions” that the novel attempts to trace, and the representations of the US military in Odyssey to the North suggest that US foreign policy is a primary contributor to undocumented immigration from Latin American countries. The novel implies that the primary causes of immigration from El Salvador to the United States are political repression and human rights violations by the right-wing Salvadoran government and military. The novel also suggests that the United States shares responsibility for both the oppressive rule of the Salvadoran government and the stream of undocumented Salvadoran immigrants to the United States due to US foreign policy and military support. The US military serves as a significant metaphor in constructing this link. As discussed above, both Teresa’s testimony in the immigration court chapters as well as Soldier X’s interview recounted in a newspaper article chapter reference the American training of Salvadoran government soldiers, some who later become death squad members. These are references to the US Army’s School of the Americas, which trains Latin American government soldiers in combat skills and counterinsurgency doctrine. The training program and facility were originally established in the Panama Canal Zone in 1946 just as the Cold War was beginning following World War II. In 1984 when the Panama Canal Treaty was signed, the school was relocated from Panama to Fort Benning, Georgia. Over time, the people of Latin America dubbed the institution “la 187 escuela de asesinos” (the school of the assassins). In 2001, due to its execrable reputation, the school was renamed Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC). As its Latin American moniker, “la escuela de asesinos,” suggests, the school has been criticized as a site through which the United States has provided political and military support to some of the most undemocratic, corrupt and brutal regimes in Latin America. Lesley Gill summarizes these complaints in her book The School of the Americas: Military Training and Political Violence in the Americas: “From Chile to East Timor, Congo, Guatemala, El Salvador, Colombia, and many other cold war battlegrounds, ordinary people who desired land reform, better wages, improved health care, education, and the basic right of self-determination were labeled communists by US-backed regimes and murdered, tortured, and disappeared by shadowy paramilitary death squads and state security forces trained by the United States” (2). Calixto, Teresa and the other undocumented immigrants in Odyssey to the North are these ordinary people struggling to survive and prosper under the brutal US-backed regime that dominated El Salvador during the Salvadoran Civil War. In this novel, the US military training provided to Latin American military members at the School of the Americas becomes a metaphor for broader US foreign policy during the Cold War era. As Gill asserts, “. . . the experiences, skills, and understandings developed in military training become transnational and tied to an imperial project that has consequences for people throughout the Americas” (16). Odyssey to the North insists on the link between US foreign policy toward El Salvador during the 1980s and the undocumented immigration of Salvadoreños to the United 188 States. The novel generates sympathy for individual characters and undocumented immigrants as a group and insists that the US accept responsibility for its contributions to its own problems with undocumented immigration by returning to this argument over and over again using different genres and multiple narratives. In this way, the novel enacts Chakrabarty’s “politics of despair” by using narrative strategies to present a revisionist history that calls into question dominant American narratives about the presence of undocumented people, commonly referred to in public rhetoric as “illegal aliens.” The text questions whether it is the undocumented workers or US foreign policy and military operations that are immoral and unethical. Gill reminds readers of this disconnect between dominant American narratives and historical US foreign policy: Dealing with the dark, seamy side of U.S. involvement in global affairs has never been easy for the citizens of the United States because of widespread amnesia about twentieth-century U.S. empire building. A broad cross-section of Americans like to think of their country as a land of freedom, a beacon to the oppressed, an exemplary democracy, and most recently, a righteous crusader against global terrorism. This nationalist vision has deep roots in American exceptionalism and distinctiveness, but U.S. citizens and policy makers cling to it at their own peril. (4) Odyssey to the North reminds American readers of the ways that US foreign policy and US military operations have influenced the governments and people of Latin American countries, specifically focusing on El Salvador. In April 2015, the US government deported Salvadoran General Eugenio Vides Casanova from the United States to El Salvador under a law designed to prevent people accused of atrocities in their home countries from seeking asylum in the United States. Ironically, Casanova protested his deportation on the grounds that his military tactics were backed by the United States at the time he held power in El Salvador (Preston A8). 189 His claim is substantiated by the facts that he lived in Florida for over 25 years, since 1989, and that he was invited to be a guest speaker at the School of the Americas in 1985 (Cooper and Hodge). His long stay in the United States and his invitation to be a guest speaker at an American institution designed to facilitate US-Latin American foreign relations later followed by his involuntary deportation for human rights violations conducted during the Salvadoran government’s campaign against Salvadoran guerillas during the 1980s suggests widespread amnesia about the role of US foreign policy and the US military in the corrupt regime of which Casanova was a part. In addition to its repeated references to Salvadoran military training at the School of the Americas, the text constructs a link between undocumented migration and the US military in its description of life in an undocumented immigrant detainee camp. The detainees in the camp, who lack seasonally appropriate clothing, are issued discarded US military uniforms to wear for warmth: “The detainees wore US army pants and jackets, especially in the winter, since they did not have appropriate clothing for the cold weather. The jackets had labels bearing the names of their former owners, and the prisoners would jokingly call each other by those last names. It sounded comical to them to call a Mexican, Peruvian, Guatemalan or companion with indigenous features Smith, McDonald, or Peterson. The last names, most of them Irish, Scandinavian or Polish, such as Joyce, Hutchinson and Kosikowski, were impossible for them to pronounce” (Bencastro 153). Not only is this military metaphor a humorous and creative reference to racial exclusion and discrimination in American democracy, it is also historically accurate. According to US Army demographics, in 1985, only 3.5% of the US Army was Latino and an even smaller percentage of the officer corps (US Army). Although many 190 Latinos, particularly Mexican-Americans, served as enlisted men in the US military during World War II, the Korean War and Vietnam, in 1985 the percentage of Latinos in the US military was disproportionally low compared to the overall percentage of Latinos in the US population. Using this description of undocumented immigrants wearing US military uniforms, the novel links military service and national identity; service in the US military becomes a metaphor for inclusion in the US body politic. The metaphor suggests that while white immigrant groups are able to become American, as represented by their legal citizenship status and military service, Latinos are excluded from the opportunities of American democracy, as indicated by the scarcity of military uniforms bearing Hispanic names and undocumented immigrants’ location in the detention camp. Using the metaphor of the US military, specifically the representations of the School of the Americas and US military uniforms discussed above, Odyssey to the North establishes a direct link between US foreign policy and undocumented migration to the United States. The text overtly references US Cold War defense strategy against left- leaning political groups in Latin America; in particular, the text references and critiques United States support for the Salvadoran government, which used its power and its military to oppress Salvadoran guerillas and civilians fighting for democratic ideals and better living conditions during the Salvadoran Civil War. By humanizing and creating sympathy for individual undocumented immigrants as well as critiquing US foreign policy that supported a corrupt regime in El Salvador, Odyssey to the North, taken as whole, relies on metaphorical representation to illustrate the utter failure of US foreign 191 policy to encourage the spread of democracy in Latin America and to suggest the injustice of US immigration policies for Salvadoran immigrants. Conclusion Both Dogeaters and Odyssey to the North deal with histories that still refuse to be silenced even though they have long been repressed by hegemonic narratives and myths about colonial relations. Although Hagedorn and Bencastro’s novels were published over twenty years ago in the 1990s, the issues they raise, such as the ongoing political and economic relationships between the United States and other nation-states within its sphere of influence and the effects of US foreign policy on the lives and psyches of people within those countries, are still relevant today. In both Dogeaters and Odyssey to the North, the US military serves as a powerful metaphor representative of both the US nation-state and US foreign policy. The removal of references to the US military from these novels would significantly impoverish their abilities to convey the destructive nature of US foreign policy for the people of the authors’ native countries. Both novels use the metaphor of the US military as part of and in conjunction with other narrative strategies that enact the “politics of despair” for which Chakrabarty calls. Each novel provides an alternative history while simultaneously questioning the authority of any single narrative, including hegemonic narratives, through its subject matter, content, refusal to privilege a single narrative, presentation of multiple genres and incorporation of multiple languages. 192 EPILOGUE Inquiries about what it means to be American are still useful in considering current configurations of American nationalism and reconciling them with our personal and national values. For example, sociologists Bart Bonikowski and Paul DiMaggio conducted research on American nationalism that used data collected in 1996, 2004 and 2012 and determined that over fifty percent of Americans defined American identity in ethnically and culturally exclusionary terms and believed that a person was “truly” American only if they were Christian, spoke English and had been born in the United States (Bonikowski and DiMaggio). These attitudes clearly manifested themselves in November 2016 when the American people elected Donald Trump as President after he ran on a campaign platform of anti-immigrant sentiment, anti-Muslim rhetoric and thinly veiled racist appeals to non-college educated, blue-collar whites (who had not forgotten his birther campaign against President Barack Obama, which lasted from 2011 until 2013).74 The longstanding white American racial nationalism with which ethnic American authors have historically grappled lives on today albeit predominantly in different forms and configurations than in the era of the Jim Crow South.75 Representations of the US military, shows of military force and inflammatory martial rhetoric have been deployed by the current administration to project images of power and authority domestically and internationally. President Trump has decisively 74 Additionally, Christopher S. Parker et al. argue that during the 2008 election, President Barack Obama’s race stigmatized him with a perceived lack of patriotism, arguing that symbolic racism and patriotism dampened his support among whites, particularly working-class whites. 75 Matthew H. Hughey traces early 21st century white nationalism in his book White Bound: Nationalists, Antiracists and the Shared Meaning of Race (2012). 193 affiliated himself with the US military and has filled four top positions normally held by civilians with retired and active duty military generals.76 The appointment of high- ranking military officers to posts usually filled by civilians could potentially lead to US foreign policy being unduly shaped by military interests, particularly given President Trump’s lack of experience with foreign policy. Likewise, Trump consistently uses inflammatory martial rhetoric in his promotion of American nationalism and his attempts to influence the governments of other countries. In August 2017, President Trump, in response to similar rhetoric from North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, threatened, “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” Since then US warplanes have flown missions further north of the demilitarized zone than usual to reinforce his message. The same month President Trump threatened military action against Venezuela after Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro seized power. Since he was elected President Trump has threatened to undo the Iran nuclear deal, and in his recent December 2017 tweets about the need for regime change in Iran, he referenced the “vast military power of the United States” as a force to be feared by Iran’s leaders. These shows of military might and rhetoric are integral to both President Trump’s international campaign of “America First,” which undermines the spirit of international cooperation, and his domestic campaign to “Make America Great Again,” which involves 76 Marine Corps General (Ret.) Jim Mattis serves as Defense Secretary. Marine Corps General (Ret.) John Kelly served as head of the Homeland Security Department and then was appointed as the White House Chief of Staff. Army Lt. General H. R. McMaster (still on active duty) replaced Air Force General Mike Flynn (Ret.) as National Security Advisor after Flynn was fired for lying about contacts with Russian officials. Army Maj. General Mark Inch (Ret.) serves as Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. 194 divisive anti-immigrant and anti-minority rhetoric that suggests a return to white nationalism. It is critical that US citizens continue to monitor and analyze the ways these powerful representations of the US military are deployed in service of both democratic and undemocratic projects both domestically and internationally. In this dissertation, I have examined the ways that six 20th century ethnic American novelists deploy representations of the US military to expose the operations of white nationalist American hegemony at home and overseas. Through these representations, these novelists articulate domestic and international relations of power, identify contradictions in the rhetoric of American nationalism and imagine not yet manifest possibilities for social justice coalitions that cross racial, ethnic and national lines. Their novels, published between 1957 and 1999, embark on these political projects through representations of US military involvement in declared and undeclared military conflicts of the 20th century, specifically, World War II, Vietnam, the Salvadoran Civil War and US military occupation of the Philippines. My thoughts now turn to future possibilities for scholarship on representations of the military in ethnic American literature, and I consider further explorations of 20th century ethnic American literature as well as what political work representations of the US military are doing in 21st century ethnic American literature. 21st century ethnic American novels continue to powerfully revisit 20th century military conflicts and forms of racism. For example, Anthony Grooms’s Bombingham (2001) returns to the Vietnam War, embarking on an exploration of American nationalism comparable to those of Okada and Williams and using similar narrative strategies, such as wartime setting, flashbacks of experiences of military service, 195 narrative hooks related to wartime trauma, and combat-related plot twists. The novel was well-received and captured the 2001 Washington Post Notable Book of the Year Award as well as the 2002 Lillian Smith Award for Fiction for writing about the South that explores social inequity and provides a vision of justice. Bombingham’s protagonist and first-person narrator, Walter Burke, an African American soldier from Alabama who is serving in Vietnam, is struggling to write a letter to the parents of a fallen comrade, Haywood Jackson, also a black man from Alabama. Using the device of the letter, the novel incorporates multiples genres and travels through time in a manner similar to Captain Blackman. During his struggle to write the letter, Walter experiences flashbacks of his childhood in Birmingham during the time of the Civil Rights movement. In fact, the flashbacks of Walter’s childhood in Birmingham form most of the narrative with only a very small portion of the text devoted to his drafts of the letter to Mr. and Mrs. Jackson. At the end of the novel, the dominant theme of universal human suffering is fully developed and seizing upon this theme, Walter is finally able to complete the letter. Through this theme, Grooms synthesizes the text’s narratives of the larger social struggles of African Americans as targets of racialized oppression in the United States and of Vietnamese as targets of racialized oppression during the war in Vietnam with narratives of personal suffering, such as the deaths of several people Walter loved as well as the Jacksons’s loss of their son. In developing these multiple narratives both broad and narrow in scope, Bombingham, like No-No Boy and Captain Blackman, reveals contradictions in the rhetoric of American nationalism as Grooms juxtaposes representations of African American military service with 196 representations of white supremacist violence against African Americans and nationalist American violence against the Vietnamese. Another example of a 21st century ethnic American novel that powerfully revisits a 20th century military conflict and 20th century forms of racism is Toni Morrison’s novel, Home (2012), which returns to the Korean War era. The novel embarks on an exploration of American nationalism comparable to those of Okada and Williams. It also grapples with racial inequality in institutionalized labor practices, such as military service and low-wage agricultural work in ways comparable to those of Killens and Rodriguez. Home, like many of Morrison’s novels, was well-received by critics and was designated a 2012 New York Times Notable Book, a 2012 Washington Post Notable Work of Fiction and a 2012 NPR Best Book of the Year. In Home, we find the same familiar narrative strategies, such as wartime setting, flashbacks of experiences of military service, narrative hooks related to wartime trauma, and combat-related plot twists. Morrison also incorporates a shifting point of view alternating between third person omniscient narration and interjections by the protagonist, Frank Money, a young African American Korean War veteran who suffers from post-traumatic stress syndrome. Juxtaposing Money’s military service in the racially integrated US Army with his experiences of racism in the still racially segregated American South of the 1950s, Morrison returns to the theme of national hypocrisy regarding democratic ideals manifest as white nationalism and overt racial oppression of African Americans. Alongside these ethnic American novels that revisit 20th century military conflicts and configurations of race, novels that reconceive US military involvement in Iraq and 197 Afghanistan from the early 1990s until the present time have just begun to blossom. For example, Iraqi-born author Sinan Antoon, who immigrated to the United States in 1991, currently lives in New York City and teaches at NYU, wrote about the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 in his novel The Corpse Washer (2014). The novel was translated from Arabic by the author, published in 2014 by Yale University Press and won the 2014 Arab American Book Award, given by the Arab American National Museum, in the fiction category. Like the novels by Bencastro and Hagedorn that I explore in Chapter Three, Antoon’s novel uses representations of the US military to critique US foreign policy and its effects on the people of the author’s native land. The novel’s protagonist is a young Shi’ite Iraqi, Jawad, who is born into a family of corpse washers. Jawad tries to escape this family legacy by attending Baghdad’s Academy of Fine Arts, but upon the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, he finds himself once again washing bodies and considering the physical, psychological and emotional effects of the US military invasion and occupation on the people of Iraq. Antoon explains his attempt to occupy the perspective of an Iraqi civilian in a 2014 interview with National Public Radio’s Kelly McEvers: The problem is that in this country, and in ‘the West’ in general ... we get the American narrative, and in this country we get the narrative of the vets, which is important of course, but we never, or very rarely get the ... civilian point of view. We live in such a militarized society now that valorizes the violence carried out by armies; we never see the world from the point of view of the civilians who are on the receiving end of tanks and drones and whatnot. Like Odyssey to the North and Dogeaters, The Corpse Washer serves as a “self-addressed envelope” published in the United States for an American reading audience to draw attention to the devastating effects of US military operations overseas. 198 As a final example, a unique 21st century ethnic American novel that offers a counternarrative to dominant accounts of US military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan is Maximilian Uriarte’s 284-page graphic novel The White Donkey: Terminal Lance. While the form of the graphic novel departs from more conventional genres, this text, like the others I have discussed, very effectively uses representations of the US military to critique American nationalism as well as US military operations overseas. The novel began as a satirical online comic strip, which Uriarte began drawing while a US Marine deployed to Iraq in 2009. The web comic developed a cult following, and Uriarte eventually self-published the novel with $162,681 of crowdfunding raised through Kickstarter. The novel was then picked up by Little, Brown & Co within one week of its release and stayed on the New York Times best seller list for over 14 weeks. Uriarte’s father is Jewish and his mother is Mexican, and the author asserts that the two protagonists of his novel, Abe Belatzakof and Jesus Garcia, represent his dual ethnic heritages. While the major theme of the novel is to dismantle rhetoric of American nationalism by examining daily realities of the US military occupation of the Middle East as well as the post-traumatic stress disorders that many American military veterans face after combat, the novel grapples with the intersectionality of social issues as well. The novel addresses issues of race by highlighting the socioeconomic disparities between Abe, who enjoys the privileges of a white identity, and Garcia, who is racialized as a Latino and who occasionally finds himself the target of racist slurs. The novel also addresses issues of gender and sexuality in its representations of discourse between its military characters. Finally, the novel considers relations between deployed US military 199 members and Iraqis. Like its more conventional counterparts, this 21st century ethnic American novel offers rich ground for analysis of its representations of the US military. With rare exceptions, such as Elena Rodriguez’s autobiographically inspired novel, Peacetime, it is still difficult to find war fiction that represents the experiences of women veterans. Although women have served both officially and unofficially in both support and combat roles in the US military since the Revolutionary War, military service has traditionally been associated with masculinity in official and mainstream narratives, and most war literature representing the military service of women has taken the form of unofficial narratives with limited circulation, such as diaries or memoirs, for example Susie King Taylor’s memoir Reminiscences of My Life in Camp (1902),77 or more recently Kayla Williams’s memoir Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army (2005).78 The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have coincided with a rise in women’s enlistment in the military since the early 1990s, and in 2015 Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter opened all combat jobs to women. As a result, one would expect to see the emergence of more fictional representations of women’s military service, which will provide another rich field for research and analysis. 77 Jennifer James presents Taylor’s work as a feminist text in which Taylor silences the traditional male subject of war literature and writes herself into that space as a powerful public figure. 78 Belinda Linn Rincón presents Williams’s memoir as an account of the psychological challenges to women serving in a male-dominated military environment as part of a larger argument about the ways “neoliberal militarism is predicated on the debasement of women” (119). 200 In the 21st century American imagination, the US military is predominantly conceived as a venerable institution and site of patriotic celebration.79 Grooms’s, Morrison’s, Antoon’s and Uriarte’s novels are just four examples of myriad 21st century ethnic American texts that continue to deploy representations of the US military to identify contradictions in the rhetoric of American nationalism, articulate national and international relations of power, and imagine not yet manifest possibilities for social justice coalitions that cross racial, ethnic and national lines. These examples and our current political climate confirm the continued relevance and fruitfulness of this dissertation’s focus on representations of military service in ethnic American literature. 79 It is also worth considering, however, the ways that America’s shift to an all-volunteer force in the 1970s has caused a shift from emphasis on military service motivated by patriotism and civic duty to military service motivated by economic factors (Segal). 201 BIBLIOGRAPHY Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New Press, 2010. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised ed., Verso, 1991. Appadurai, Arjun. “Patriotism and Its Futures.” Public Culture, vol. 5, no. 3, 1993, pp. 411-29. 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