Revisiting the Campo: a Biopolitical Reading of Perry Miyake’s 21st Century Manzanar
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Universidade da Coruña
info
ISSN: 1133-309X, 2253-8410
Year of publication: 2016
Issue: 20
Pages: 159-180
Type: Article
More publications in: Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos
Abstract
This article approaches Perry Miyake‟s "21st Century Manzanar", a recent example of neo-internment literature, from a biopolitical perspective. In his novel, Miyake revisits the history of Japanese American “internment” in a near future, when the US is waging an economic war against Japan and Japanese Americans are once more sent to concentration camps. I argue that, far from obfuscating the historical past, this novel teases out its less-obvious truths. First, racist profiling effectively places every single person of Japanese ancestry in a state of exception: as homo sacer, (s)he is beyond legal rights. Once in camp, having been reduced to nuda vita, the prisoners will submit to having their lives biopolitically “managed”. I conclude that "21st Century Manzanar" acts both as an effective lens through which to re-interpret America‟s problematic past and as an astute warning against replicating such mistakes in the future
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