Event

Takashi Hoshizaki was one of dozens of young men at Heart Mountain Relocation Center who refused military service during World War II in order to protest the unjust incarceration of Japanese Americans.  This presentation examines a diary Hoshizaki kept while awaiting trial, showing that he and the other resisters strategically presented themselves in ways that aligned with a politics of respectability—as refracted through indigeneity, blackness, and sexual non-normativity.  Yet, breaches of this self-fashioning did occur through the resisters’ homosocial play.  The different carceral registers—the internment camp, the municipal jail, and the federal prison—are enmeshed in this imagination.  They also lay bare their own links to the military.

Cynthia Wu is an associate professor of Gender Studies and director of the Race, Migration, and Indigeneity program at Indiana University.  She is the author of Chang and Eng Reconnected: The Original Siamese Twins in American Culture (Temple, 2012) and Sticky Rice: A Politics of Intraracial Desire (Temple, 2018).