Peer-Review: 0
This annotation was written in reference to my paper on Nina Revoyr’s Southland, as yet, still untitled.
Kurashige, Scott. “Introduction.” The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007. 1-12. Print.
In the “Introduction” of his book, Kurashige accentuates the need to examine the complex interrelations between Black and Japanese Americans that helped transform Los Angeles into a multicultural “world city” (11). He traces the historical trajectory of these two minority groups, noting that while both experienced similar forms of racial oppression before WWII, they “were subsequently thrust onto different historical paths” in the post war era (4). Kurashige contextualizes this divergence by demonstrating how white hegemonic discourses that classified Japanese and more generally all Asian Americans as the “model minority” was an “ideological construction” used to uphold the success of US liberal democracy and spur divisive antagonism between minority groups. The myth suggests that if Japanese Americans were able to attain a middle class status in the United States, then Blacks should assume responsibility for their own failure to achieve similar socio-economic success. Kurashige emphasizes that the popularization of the “model minority” narrative not only problematically obscures the lingering, haunting effects of internment on the Japanese American community but also perpetuates the erasure of those who were never able to attain upward mobility. In his “Introduction” Kurashige also attempts to expose and recover the largely overlooked” history of Black and Japanese American solidarity in the Westside, ranging from West Jefferson as early as the 1920s to postwar Crenshaw as late as the 1970s and beyond” (10). He powerfully demonstrates the deep interconnections between these two minority groups in his example of “Little Tokyo,” which after the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans, become a predominantly black community that “African American entrepreneurs and community leaders dubbed Bronzeville” (1).
Kurashige emphasizes that while many people predicted that the with the end of internment and the war, the return of Japanese Americans to Los Angeles would spark “violent turf battles,” the two groups completely astonished the public as activists from both sides began to work together to achieve “interethnic political cooperation” and stimulate more interaction between the two communities (2). Kurashige demonstrates how this cultural exchange and syncretism allowed LA to emerge as a multicultural “world city” that can boast of a “Crenshaw institution like the Holiday Bowl,” where people can order from a menu containing both African and Asian cuisine and bowl in this diverse environment (11).
In Southland, Revoyr presents the story of Jackie Ishida, a Japanese American girl, who is initially ignorant and entirely detached from her family’s past and immigrant roots. She is disturbed to see so many black faces at her grandfather’s funeral and only registers how different they are from her own. As the novel progresses, however, Jackie begins to steadily uncover the complex history she shares with members of the black LA community not only in terms of shared experiences of racism and oppression but also intimate family relations. I argue that in this this respect, Revoyr’s Southland does the same work as Kurashige’s book in tracing the connections between Black and Japanese Americans in LA and how specific historical processes compelled a “forgetting” of these ties.
