Neither Here nor There: Passing through Race, Culture, Transnationalism, and Generational Inheritance in Mixed-Race Japanese American Literature

My honors project explores the concept of passing in Japanese American mixed-race literature written after World War II by examining how acts of passing are racially, transnationally, and formally represented in Ruth Ozeki’s novel, My Year of Meats; Asako Serizawa’s novel-in-stories, Inheritors; and Brian Komei Dempster’s poetry collection, Topaz. Through my analysis, I seek to expand traditional notions of racial passing by reconceptualizing the term's connection to physical and spatial mobility, generational inheritances, and literary forms in order to recognize and celebrate mixed-race Japanese American voices within larger conversations by and around Asian American and BIPOC American writing. The first chapter of my project interrogates physical manifestations of mixed-race identity in all three texts, inspecting the ways the experiences of these books' narrators, characters, and speakers, through their shifting understandings of their own mixed-race identities, evoke the discursiveness and instability of social constructions of race. My second chapter considers transnational identity, investigating how movement across the Pacific and within the U.S. impacts sense of self and explorations of family history. Finally, my third chapter analyzes these authors' use of varied literary genres and forms as not only reflecting Japanese American mixed-race experiences, but also as resisting the notion that mixed-race individuals are fractured by their multiple coexistent racial identities.