Reading Rhythmically: Storytelling, Empire, and the Japanese War Bride

Abstract

This dissertation develops a relational and interdisciplinary reading practice to examine, connect, and unravel the narrative construction, and storying, of the Japanese war bride. Building upon Sylvia Wynter’s concept of the science of the word as an analytical and methodological framework that illuminates the dynamism of our scientific-creative storytelling practices, I interrogate a collection of fictive stories which were used to produce the Japanese war bride as a figure of racial-gendered difference and passivity. I emphasize how biocentric logics underpin these representations and come to present her differences as natural and scientific truths. By engaging in a rhythmic reading practice across these narratives and their accompanying histories and representational sites, I pursue three interrelated objectives: first, interrogating the intimate histories, social processes, and relations shaping the materialization of the Japanese war bride; second, destabilizing knowledge hierarchies and the veracity of knowledge through a practice of horizontally reading across stories and sources; and, third, drawing upon diasporic storytelling to complicate biocentric narratives and distill the need for what Sylvia Wynter terms a bios-mythoi understanding of our hybrid storytelling function. Each chapter outlines a different strategy for employing my method, displaying different interplays and dimensions of a rhythmic reading practice. In this way, this project functions both as a close study of the entangled stories surrounding the Japanese war bride, and as a more expansive study of the dynamism of our creative-scientific storytelling practices to interrogate the limits of knowing. A rhythmic reading practice displaces the fictive workings of race, gender, and empire to illuminate otherwise foreclosed conversations regarding the interhuman, relational, and connective nature of humanness embedded across our dynamic knowledge systems and corresponding creative-intellectual practices.