Week 7: Multiracial Spaces and the Politics of Solidarity

(On Yamamoto's "A Fire in Fontana"
and Hong's "'Something forgotten which should have been remembered':
Private property and cross-racial solidarity in the work of Hisaye Yamamoto")

Yamamoto begins the account of his experience after the World War II with stating that "some kind of transformation" with lasting effects took place. He admits that it would be too much for him to say that he, "a Japanese American, became Black." The fact that he even begins his story with such a comparison between Japanese American and Black clearly points out the racial formation of those two races in relation to White, perhaps in the form of Kim's triangulization. It was interesting to note that Japanese Americans would further categorize themselves. When describing the event of getting his new job, he keeps comparing himself to a "Nisei." I learned from last year's World Cultures: Asian Pacific American that Japanese Americans group themselves according to, among other things, the degree of being Americanized. The word itself means second generation, but it represents how much of the Japanese culture they preserve. Third generations are called Sansei. Yamamoto continues to tell the readers about his re-integration into society as he goes to school and what not. At the end of the story, during which he depicts the moment he watches the Watts riot on television, Yamamoto says that he was "inwardly cowering" but "felt something else, a trickle of warmth of which he finally recognized as an undercurrent of exultation" (157). The riot "was the long-awaited, gratifying next chapter of an old movie that had flickered about in the black of his mind for years" (157).

Hong's analysis of Yamamoto's work particularly focused on, as it is evident in her title, private property and cross-racial solidarity. After opening her paper with a story, she states that "A Fire in Fontana" can "be read as a commentary on the relation between race and property" (292). According to Hong, Yamamoto "points to a basis for cross-racial solidarity by showing a relational connection," but "to say that African Americans and Japanese Americans have a common history is false" because "the U.S. nation-state creates and reproduces differences in the experiences of African Americans and Japanese Americans through the different ways in which these groups have been denied property rights" (292). Hong then continues to give specific exmaples and evidences to this difference in denial. At the end, Hong guesses that the intended effect of this memoir is to "remember the impossibility of equality in American democracy" and to "remind us of the unsolvable contradiction in demanding equal rights for people of color from a system created to protect white property rights" (307). Hong points out the "lack of resolution." Hong says that Yamamoto's article "could contribute to the maintenance of the state-sponsored racism of segregation" but does not "critique it" (308). Further, it does not fulfill the potential of being "the basis of an oppositional political project through its creation of an alternative collective memory, its imagining of a space where the cross-race solidarity that did not happen the past could be forged in the future" (308). By this end of Hong's paper I felt that Hong was being too harsh with Yamamoto. Yamamoto perhaps did not have such a powerful stance as she depicted her experience, but I believe that Yamamoto allowed her story to speak for itself, rather than trying to manipulate what happened to achieve her goal.