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Impossible Diplomacies: Japanese American Literature from 1884 to 1938

Abstract

This dissertation examines writings by and about Japanese men---students, gentlemen, vagrants, and servants---who lived and worked in the United States prior to 1938. The goal of this dissertation is to outline what "Japanese American literature" might look like if its basis was not a subject position but a series of diplomatic relations.

The central argument of this dissertation is that during a time when the "Japanese American" was an "impossible subject" from the vantage of the laws of the United States, Japanese men who lived and worked in the United States staged---through literature---an "impossible diplomacy." The writers I consider in this dissertation---Sadakichi Hartmann (1867-1944), Arishima Takeo (1878-1923), Nagahara Shoson (1901--??), and Kato Saburo (??--??)---were not official cultural brokers, but subjects estranged both from their country of origin (Japan), and the nation where they lived and worked (the United States). As aliens ineligible to citizenship in the United States as a "republic" of letters, these writers turned to literature as a means to mediate their estrangement from both Japan and the United States.

The four chapters trace a historical arc through key shifts in the diplomatic and legal paradigms which governed the status of Japanese residents in the Untied States: the Treaty of Amity and Commerce (1858), the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907-1908, the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924, and the Neutrality Act of 1935. In Chapter One, I read Sadakichi Hartmann's Conversations with Walt Whitman (1895) in concert with Whitman's Calamus sequence, tracing how the logic of ``engrafting" in the texts parallels structures of equality and inequality in the Treaty of Amity and Commerce. In Chapter Two, I read Arishima Takeo's Labyrinth(1918) arguing that the novel describes an economy of tears shared by men which reveals underlying contradictions of the Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907-1908. In Chapter Three, I recover Lament in the Night (1925), a novel written by Nagahara Shoson (1901--), a young immigrant who entered the United States ten years after the institution of the Gentlemen's Agreement. I construct an ``epistemology of the pocket" to address the intimacies and exposures of the Japanese American urban vagrant. In Chapter Four, I read a short story by Kato Saburo (??-??) titled, ``Mr. Yama and the China Incident" (1938). I argue that the story stages a form of ``vernacular diplomacy" which counters, through script and gesture, the discourse of ``national people's diplomacy" formed during the Second Sino-Japanese War. In turn, Kato's introduction of a third party---a speaking Chinese subject---opens the field of impossible diplomacy from the bilateral scheme of the Japanese American to the multilateral question of Asian American literature.

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