Estranging Citizenship: U.S. Prison Camps Since World War II, Forms of Memory and Address

Snow, Jennie Natalya

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Year:: 2021
Contributor:: Snow, Jennie Natalya (creator); Kim, Daniel (Advisor); katz, Tamar (Reader); George, Olakunle (Reader); Brown University. Department of English (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: Citizenship; Lyric poetry; Graphic novels; World War (1939-1945); Concentration camps; Prisoner-of-war camps; Korean War (1950-1953); Vietnam War (1961-1975); Refugee camps; War on terrorism; Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp; Okubo, Miné; Bui, Thi
Extent:: viii, 163 p.

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Abstract:: This dissertation examines innovative forms of memory and address that emerge from U.S. prison camps since World War II, the camp being a deployment of the military-humanitarian state to regulate citizenship. “Estranging citizenship” considers the violations of citizenship the camps represent, when the citizen is estranged from the promise of rights; the creative rearrangements of civic relationality negotiated by the prisoners therein; and ultimately, the estrangement from citizenship as an essential structure of identity and collectivity. Through the movement of “estrangement” and various forms of address (civic, familial, diasporic, lyric), I analyze alternative political formations arising from the camps and literary memories of them. These texts introduce other modes of relation, affiliation, and intimacy that estrange the ideal of citizenship as it underpins the military-humanitarian state and its claims on national identity. Altogether, this dissertation presents a linked history of U.S. prison camps from Japanese internment during World War II (chapter 1), the POW camps of the Korean War (chapter 2), refugee camps in the aftermath of the American War in Vietnam (chapter 3), and the indefinite detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay Prison (chapter 4). Each chapter also considers a distinct form of address: In Chapter 1, I examine the political address of the citizen-subject in Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660 and her use of documentary illustration to instantiate an alternative civil collective. Chapter 2 relates two memoirs of POWs during the Korean War, Clarence Adams’ An American Dream and Ha Jin’s War Trash, both of which contest the right of repatriation and extend political addresses through the inheritance of memory. Chapter 3 considers the training of gazes in family and diaspora through an analysis of Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do and lê thi diem thúy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For, memory texts that challenge the “official” representations of the American war of intervention in Vietnam. Finally, in Chapter 4, I offer a new reading of Poems from Guantánamo through the lyric address which displaces the assumptions of the humanitarian conscience and invites a different form of solidarity through the indeterminacy and opacity of relation.
Notes:: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2021

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Citation

Snow, Jennie Natalya, "Estranging Citizenship: U.S. Prison Camps Since World War II, Forms of Memory and Address" (2021). English Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:fhm6bpss/

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English Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the English department.
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