Getting to the Bottom of Camp: The Queer Taint of Japanese American Incarceration

Event Type

Lecture

Sponsor

Asian American Studies

Location

AAS Conference Room; 1208 W Nevada St, Urbana, IL

Date

Mar 11, 2025   5:00 pm  

Originating Calendar

Asian American Studies

Elaborating on camp as a cultural strategy for contesting accounts of Asian American history that overly rely on terms of abjection, Chris Eng reassesses narratives that construe the Japanese American incarceration as an experience of hitting the bottom, a violation akin to sodomy. This talk re-reads Lonny Kaneko’s canonical short story “The Shoyu Kid” (1976) through the bottom. Whereas the story has commonly been interpreted as showing how internment inspires projects of remasculinization that entail acts of homophobic violence, Eng offers a reparative reading of the story’s sticky tropes of brownness and anality as offering an encoded secret about the desirability of organizing around the charge of suspect loyalty. Modeling camp as a reading practice, Eng contemplates the possibility for rerouting queer abjection toward a building a coalitional politics for reparations after internment.