Chapter 18 - A Little Bit of Form Goes a Long Way

Summary

This chapter contributes to the new scholarship on Asian American literary form by considering the novel No-No Boy by John Okada, a foundational text for Asian American literature. A mixed critical reception has resulted from the novel’s vexed relationship to form. Early reviewers rejected it as aesthetically flawed, its original audience ignored it, and, despite its canonical status today, its formal activity has yet to receive sustained scholarly attention. Arguing that this trend may have something to do with the type of form exhibited in the novel – one that is both minimal and unfamiliar – the chapter identifies one such example, designating it as a “formal situation” in which a Japanese American male character is interrupted in the act of speaking for himself. By tracking this “formal situation” in three crucial places in the novel – the internment camp, the colony, the reservation – the chapter demonstrates how the work of literary form, even one that appears barely discernible, can reveal a larger critique of American empire articulating itself as an act of speaking for oneself.