Bad Day at Black Rock is a Western set just after the end of World War II. The desert town of Black Rock, teetering on the edges of both a failed frontier and postwar disillusionment, was once home to a Japanese American man named Komako. At Black Rock, Komako had found water where others had failed – and water is worth killing for. After murdering Komako and burying him beside his well, Black Rock masks the deed by claiming Komako had been “shipped off” to an incarceration camp during the war. Examining the layered machinations at play in Black Rock's lie, this chapter turns to earth: it reads the landscape as a vital surround through which Komako and the incarceration of Japanese Americans physically and hauntingly manifest at Black Rock. It links the Western and the West to narratives of Japanese American incarceration, both bound to the settler colonial impulse that seeks to consolidate US power and authority over land, water, and people in the West. Simultaneously indebted to ecocriticism and comparative race studies, this chapter explores the ways Black Rock’s Hollywood Western becomes an incarceration tale – which in turn becomes a narrative of settler colonial eco-imperialism.

Instead of assuming it as a given or an inherent good, this chapter examines cross-racial solidarity in Asian American literature through an emphasis on what historian David Roediger calls “productive uneasiness over solidarity.” It focuses on three flashpoints of racial consciousness: (1) post-civil rights reckonings of Japanese American incarceration, (2) the cultural nationalist search for Asian American identity, and (3) reflections on the Asian American social and political position after the 1992 Los Angeles uprising. These flashpoints encouraged Asian American writers to envision commonalities across racial difference and notice singularities that bespeak the construction of Asian racial difference. Asian American literature’s “productive uneasiness over solidarity” appears in the process of seeing and articulating these commonalities and singularities, not as fixed products but as fluctuating and shifting processes. As writers ask probing questions about Asian American identities and identification, Asian American literature brings into focus both a historical Black–white racial binary and a new but vexing multiculturalism as the fulcra of imagining cross-racial solidarity.