Citizenship in Suspension
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 19218064 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Maite Urcaregui (0000-0003-1056-1349, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2026 |
| Volume | 2026 |
| Issue | 155 |
| Pages | 134-146 |
| Publication date | 2026-05-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Radical History Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0163-6545 • E-ISSN: 1534-1453 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/01636545-12255783 |
| OpenAlex | W7164504860 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 8 |
This article examines how Japanese American cartoonists have historically been at the vanguard of comic art, creating arguably some of the earliest American long-form graphic narratives to critique dominant ways of seeing citizenship. The author begins by briefly tracing the emergence of American comics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries alongside the legal histories that have shaped American citizenship, in particular laws restricting Asian immigration and barring naturalization. The author then looks at two brief examples of how Japanese American comic artists represent and respond to this national exclusion: Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama’s The Four Immigrants Manga (1931) and Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660 (1946). Both texts work across various comic art traditions—Japanese manga, American newspaper comic strips, graphic memoir, documentary comics, and comics journalism—to expand comics’ potential “as a form of bearing witness to war and historical devastation,” as Hillary Chute theorizes. Through their comics’ witnessing, both texts illustrate that citizenship is not a fixed status but is, in fact, weaponized and suspended in response to national anxieties and crises. Beyond simply representing these realities, these comics also document what the Asian American studies scholar Lisa Lowe calls “immigrant acts” of refusal, creative acts that push against and work in excess of the exclusionary boundaries of citizenship
Citizenship · Comic strip · Comics · Immigration · Narrative · Newspaper · Witness · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Comics and Graphic Narratives · Japanese History and Culture
| Highly cited | No |
|---|