Transparent Citizenship: The Racialization of Privacy in Post-World War II Japanese American Fiction

Written in the wake of the Japanese incarceration and the emergence of new Cold War discourses around race, privacy, and democracy, Hisaye Yamamoto's and John Okada's works mark a shift from the specific targeting of Japanese Americans as individuals whose citizenship was contingent upon enforced transparency to the broader suspicion of the more generalized "Oriental" as a figure whose opacity becomes an excuse for racialized surveillance and policing in the name of national security. As formerly interned or imprisoned individuals, Yamamoto's and Okada's protagonists begin their stories already understanding the contingency of their right to privacy and the expectations of transparency that attend their reentry into the mainstream of US society. This article argues that Yamamoto's and Okada's depictions of this transparent citizenship not only critique the limitations and burdens of proof that it places on racialized (and otherwise minoritized) individuals, but also articulate ways to think differently about citizenship itself. What if US citizenship were understood as a formation that did not fetishize the role of individual agency in the process of self-determination? What if the goal of transparency was not to expose or condemn the individual but to better illuminate the parts that individuals play in the construction of our society, and the complexity of their connections to others? And how might transparent citizenship be reconceptualized to empower, rather than infantilize, citizens vis-& agrave;-vis the state, by giving us information we might need to imagine and remake the power dynamics of this relationship?