Too Sad, Too Diverse, Too Poetic

Abstract

KANDICE CHUH is professor of English, American studies, and critical social psychology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. The author of The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man” (Duke UP, 2019), Chuh is currently completing a volume of essays on pedagogy under the title The Disinterested Teacher. When the Emperor Was Divine, Julie Otsuka’s award-winning historical novel, draws on her family’s experiences of internment. Her grandfather was arrested for suspected espionage on the heels of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and his family was interned at the Topaz, Utah, camp. Narrated through multiple voices identified only as “the woman,” “the girl,” “the boy,” and so on, the novel prioritizes the perspectives of those interned, and in this categorical way gestures to the manifold others who have suffered at the hands of the US state. When the Emperor Was Divine brings forward the disruption to and fragmentation of families and communities, the inescapable dust and heat of the camp that are lived realities as much as signs and metaphors of persistent, assaultive discomfort, together with the incomprehensibility, uncertainty, and anger characterizing the lived experience of internment. Otsuka’s novel is also the book at the center of current politicalcurricular contestation in the Muskego-Norway school district, located in southeastern Wisconsin. After the novel was selected by the district’s curriculum committee for the district’s Accelerated English program, its inclusion was challenged by school board members, including one who ran for election with the slogan “Critical thinking not critical race theory” (Lueders). Wisconsin journalists, situating the book’s critics squarely with “the MAGA crowd,” report that those contesting its inclusion in the curriculum described the book as too sad, too diverse, and too poetic—the charge of diversity related to the efforts of the curriculum committee to identify work by nonwhite authors. Concerns were also expressed over “balance,” given that the curriculum already includes a ten-page excerpt of Farewell to Manzanar, the 1973 memoir by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston that gives us internment as part of her family’s experience of life in the United States. The charge of