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Sumiko read in the Chronicle that Poston was the only Nikkei relocation center administered by the Office of Indian Affairs. Maybe that was why security seemed rather lax here. Supposedly, the other relocation centers were run by the War Relocation Authority. The camps for Issei like Jiichan and Uncle were run by the Department of Justice and were more like prisons.-Cynthia Kadohata, WeedflowerIn her 2006 children's novel Weedflower, Cynthia Kadohata depicts an unlikely friendship between Sumiko, a Japanese-American girl, and Frank, a Mohave boy, in a time of war. The novel's portrayal of this friendship mobilizes a critique of militarism by suggesting the potential of cross-racial encounters to transform the logic of state power in settler colonialism. Kadohata explores militarism's reach into the social and familial fabric of Americans' lives outside the traditional battlefield. By considering how military rule shapes friendships and the encounters of everyday life, Kadohata imagines how individuals living in these spaces can both sustain and challenge military efforts. This broader perspective on war echoes feminist scholar Cynthia Enloe's (1983) longstanding work on querying the battlefield as just one locus of militarism and as a specific expression of patriarchy more generally. Looking at militarism through everyday encounters instead of exclusively through the battlefield thus allows a consideration of not just war itself but also other structures of power and domination that underlie war and extend from it. Instead of detailing the exceptionalism of World War II and therefore of the internment of Japanese Americans, Kadohata connects both to a longer social and political history that has shaped relations between racial groups within the United States. Though Kadohata foregrounds war as the enabling condition for unlikely friendships, those very friendships also challenge the logic of defining people outside one's own community as enemies or simply outsiders, undermining the militarized vision of war as a clash between different groups of people. In an imaginative fictional account, then, Kadohata enacts the transformative potential of alternative contact between Asians and Natives in the United States.Motivated by her father's internment at the Colorado River Relocation Center, Kadohata sets her novel in this very camp, which was nicknamed "Poston" after Charles Debrille Poston, the first Superintendent for Indian Affairs in Arizona. Poston was the only war relocation center administered by a separate federal agency, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA); even the Gila River Relocation Center, the other camp located on Indian reser vation land in Arizona, remained under the administration of the War Relocation Authority (WRA).1 This setting allows for the possibility of contact between a Japanese-American internee girl, Sumiko, and a Mohave boy from outside the camp, Frank; more importantly, it connects the war camps to the context of Native removal and dispossession. Focusing on the encounter between Sumiko and Frank, Kadohata shifts attention away from the uniqueness of war internment for Japanese Americans to the longstanding histories of incarceration that have characterized the US government's treatment of nonwhite peoples.In this essay, I argue that the militarized friendship narratives at the heart of the novel enable a critique of settler-colonial militarism. While focusing on Kadohata's novel, I also turn to a range of cultural and critical conversations in political theory, literary criticism, historical research, and documentary film to explore how this militarized friendship narrative resonates with broader discourses on alternative contact. I consider how Kadohata's fictional narrative offers an open-ended consideration of war that both engages radical critiques of the US nation-state and reveals the possible co-option of difference into liberalism's narratives of freedom and equality. …

P Lai: In spring 2009, I offered a junior-level English seminar on Literatures of American Imprisonment, a course that surveyed writing that emerges from or reflects on various historical moments and forms of captivity. Rather than considering such imprisonment as anomalous to the United States of America, the course forwarded an argument about the constitutive quality of such captivity for American national character. We read captivity narratives from colonial America in the contact between European and Native Americans; African American slave narratives; Indian boarding school memoirs; Japanese American internment poetry; contemporary prison writing and neo-abolitionist discourse; and poetry from the Guantanamo Bay prison detainees. While the readings covered a span of over three hundred years, we read them out of chronological order to avoid creating a progressive narrative of increasing freedom or decreasing restrictions on the individual body. Instead, we considered how imprisonment has functioned variously to delimit who belongs to the national body and where boundaries can be drawn for the nation-state. The class began with a focused consideration of prison abolition by way of Angela Y. Davis’s succinct, provocative Are Prisons Obsolete? and selections from Joy James’s Brown, Michelle. The Culture of Punishment: Prison, Society, and Spectacle. New York University Press, 2009.

Eclipsed by other islands incorporated into the United States after the Spanish-American War of 1898, Guam has nevertheless played a crucial role in the development of the American Pacific as a strategic military site. Like other territories of the United States, Guam’s ambiguous legal status and the presence of native peoples, cultures, and histories signal the paradox of unincorporated territories that troubles the issues of belonging and identification as “American.” This essay takes up poet-scholar Craig Santos Perez’s work to assert the primacy of Indigenous Chamorro histories, languages, and cultures in understanding the island’s place in and out of the American Empire. Perez’s experimental, decolonial poetics fracture narratives of America as a benevolent force in the Pacific; of English as the only relevant language of the Mariana Islands and America; of Spanish and Catholic domination as a relic of the past; of environmental transformations wrought by the intimacies of empire; and of simplistic accounts of assimilation or resistance to militarization and colonialism. Furthermore, by foregrounding “Discontiguous States of America” as an organizing trope for comparative understanding of unincorporated territories in the Caribbean and Pacific, American Indian reservation spaces on the continent, and the outlying states of Alaska and Hawai‘i, this essay argues that transnational American Studies must look within its territorial possessions to Indigenous sovereignty claims as well as outside to global flows in order to offer a truly critical, transnational American Studies.