Interracial Solidarity and Epistolary Form in Precarious Times: Karen Tei Yamashita's Letters to Memory

Abstract:Karen Tei Yamashita's Letters to Memory (2017) is a familial memoir about Japanese internment told indirectly, repetitively, and recursively through letters directed to modern-day versions of Homer, Ishi, Vyasa, Ananda, and Qohelet. The memoirdemonstrates cyclical patterns of nation- or state-based injustice throughout ancient and modern history, demonstrating what Judith Butler describes as the "precarity" produced by governmentality. At the level of form and theme, the epistolary memoir models ways of resisting the hegemonic and normative logics of state power. The memoir identifies serial moments of possibility where inter-racial identification did lead or might have led to meaningful coalition-building. Simultaneously, the text's recursive structure and nonlinear approach to temporality shares key features with queer theories of utopia and failure. In this way, Yamashita's memoir imagines interracial solidarity as a means to resist racialized precarity. In the process, she opens up new ways of thinking about Japanese internment and life writing.