Atom

This chapter reads Julie Otsuka’s Japanese American incarceration novel, When the Emperor Was Divine (2002), through three nuclear contexts. First, the chapter delves into how Japanese American incarceration has been disconnected from the spectacular violence of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, showing the erasure of interimperial violence. Second, it turns to the history of nuclear testing on Indigenous land, using shared geography to explore how Native American dispossession underwrote Japanese American incarceration. Third, the chapter examines how the Global War on Terror precipitated by the unfounded threat of nuclear weapons of mass destruction revived the U.S. state’s use of the racialized category “enemy combatant.” The chapter shows how the novel’s choice to leave the Japanese American family at the center of its story unnamed multifariously de-exceptionalizes the Japanese American incarceration in favor of reconnecting it to other genealogies of racialized violence.