Resilient ImagiNations: No-No Boy, Obasan and the Limits of Minority Discourse
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Critical attention has recently focused on the ways in which discourses contest the exclusionary tendencies of nationalist consolidation. This paper draws on the theories of Homi Bhabha as well as the fiction of Joy Kogawa and John Okada to trace the license and limits of discourses. A significant development in the field of recent interdisciplinary inquiry has been the convergence of literary studies and studies of discourses of nationalism. This convergence can in part be traced to the insight that as a compelling narrative of social cohesion, a discourse of official nationalism is structured not unlike a realist novel. As a result of this insight, discourses of official nationalism have been subjected to intense and instructive literary scrutiny. At the same time, nationalism has become an invaluable but contested interpretative paradigm in literary studies. Much of the discussion has hinged on the manner in which discourses of official nationalism, through their narrative power, homogenize the disparate entities that comprise a nation into a singular people. The process of national homogenization necessarily elides historical, social and cultural differences among the peoples of the nation. Critical attention has focused increasingly on the racial, sexual and gender differences efface d by social narratives of official nationalism. In particular, critical attention has focused on ways in which literary narratives constructed from perspectives outside or marginal to the discourses of official nationalism--what are referred to as minority discourses--may provide opportunities for contesting the exclusionary social narratives of national consolidation. In this essay I examine the license and limits of certain formulations of discourses in the face of the homogenizing impulses of the modern nation. The paper proceeds, in the first instance, as a critical engagement with Homi K. Bhabha's DissemiNation: time, narrative and the margins of the modern nation, which presents a trenchant and spirited articulation of the resistant and dissident possibilities of discourses in the context of the modern Western nation. Minority discourses, in this formulation, encompass voices and texts constructed from the sites of irreducible cultural difference and inequality, from the perspective of the nation's margin. Bhabha avers that such texts and voices possess the disruptive capacity to continually evoke and erase the nation's totalizing boundaries (both actual and conceptual) and to disturb those teleological maneuvers through which 'imagined communities' are given essentialist identities (149). This essay examines the conceptual and actual limits o f Bhabha's claims and of the claims of discourses in general. Against the background of Bhabha's contentions, I explore the disparate conceptions and/or contestations of the modern nation in two Western contexts--Canada and the U.S.--as authorized by two seminal 'minority texts': Obasan by Canadian writer Joy Kogawa and No-No Boy by American writer John Okada. Written in two distinct historical, geographical, political and discursive contexts, the two texts represent the processes of racialized migration and settlement that, according to Bhabha's arguments, at once construct(ed) and threaten(ed) Canadian and American nationalities. Both texts take as their point of departure the Second World War, a war that pitted Canada and the U.S. against the Empire. The two texts examine the effects of the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Asian American and Asian Canadian life in the margins of the two nation-spaces. The internment, dispossession, imprisonment and deportation of ethnic Japanese in the wake of the bombing of Pearl Harbor pres ents, for the two writers, compelling demonstrations of the instrumentality of race in the definition of both Canadian and American national identities. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.042 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".