“Landscape and Belonging: Beyond Citizenship in Literary and Visual Culture” explores literary and visual representations of landscapes (whether urban or rural, natural or man-made) to parse out the vexed notion of belonging. Understood as deeply interconnected ideas, land and belonging have been dominated by nationalist imaginaries of the homeland (Nash 1950, Marx 1964). Yet, as numerous scholars in indigenous, ethnic, and postcolonial studies have shown, such narrow notions of land and belonging obscure or completely elide not only the uneven, heterogeneous and contingent shape of US territorial sovereignty, but also political contestations over the racialized, gendered, and sexual processes of exclusions and domination that historically determined such geopolitical configuration (Barker 2005, Byrd 2011, Goldstein 2014, Simpson 2014). Such criticism does not negate the connections between land and belonging as much as it demands a more careful consideration of the relations of power and force at play.

This panel, thus, examines the narrative potential of the literary and visual to explore the question of “Being Human,” empire, nation, and citizenship across comparative landscapes: the Western Hemisphere, the US southwest, the frontier and Japanese concentration camps, and the militarized spaces of South Korea. By foregrounding the historicity of landscapes, the panel responds to Simon Gikandi’s call to explore “citizenship and belonging” by disentangling presumptive links between “humanly” bodies and citizenship. Each paper attends to the way that literary and visual representations of landscapes reveal both dominant geopolitical definitions and alternative genealogies of belonging.

In “Migrant Landscapes and Shifting Borders: Against Belonging in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange,” Pacharee Sudhinaraset explores the ecological and racial landscapes of Los Angeles, California through an analysis of Karen Tei Yamashita’s 1997 magical realist novel, Tropic of Orange. As a text that remaps post-Cold War liberal multicultural political notions of belonging through the collision of black, Asian, and Chicano racial formation, and movements (both human and other-than-human) across the Western Hemisphere, Tropic is a complex narrative that weaves the lives of seven characters from disparate racial, cultural, and national locations and histories to offer a narrative of counter-belonging. Exploring the novel’s politics of mapping, and its layered and elastic geographical terrains, Sudhinaraset contends that Yamashita offers a distinct feminist vision of the intersecting historical conduits of urban protest, extraction (of land, water, waterways, plants, and fossil fuels), migration, and colonialism. By rerouting the interlocking histories of capitalism and globalization through moving lands, bodies, and the US-Mexico border, Tropic offers an alternative genealogy of migration that accounts for the resurgent possibilities of intersecting human and ecological life-worlds.

In “Viewing Internment from Above and Below: Imperial Landscape, Race, and US Empire,” Christian Ravela explores the US landscape tradition in the visual representation of Japanese incarceration, specifically comparing Ansel Adams’s Born Free and Equal and Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660 . Ravela show how they differently revise what Albert Boime calls the “magisterial gaze,” a visual trope characterized by a high angle visual perspective from 19th century US landscape paintings, in their visual rendering of Japanese incarceration. In Born Free, the magisterial gaze forms its predominant visual and narrative grammar in alignment with American frontier universalism. In so doing, Born Free ideally resolves the racial contradiction of incarceration by rendering it as the ‘americanization’ of the Japanese. Citizen 13660 similarly draws upon the magisterial gaze but weaves it in relation to other modalities of spectatorship-- surveillance and ethnography. Citizen, thus, undercuts the ideological hold of the magisterial gaze, positioning its transcendent aesthetic appeal as a cultural technology in the US’s imperial scopic regime.

In “Remapping the Yanggongju and the Camptown in Sin Sang-ok’s Hellflower,” Laura Ha Reizman explores the militarized landscape of postwar South Korea through an analysis of Sin Sang-ok’s film, Hellflower (1958), which narrates a love triangle between two brothers and Sonya, a military sex worker. Produced only five years after the Korean War (1951-53), the film offers numerous on-location scenes of a desolate postwar landscape that underscores the U.S. military base and the camptown that surrounds it. In the spirit of this year’s theme of Being Human, this paper considers the human condition by reevaluating our relationship to space and place within the racialized and gendered context of U.S. and South Korea Cold War relations. Drawing from Smith’s and Katz’s concept of the “interconnectedness of material and metaphorical space,” this paper examines the affective presence of the Korean War—through the character of Sonya, scenes of the city, the camptown, the base, and the surrounding fields and swamps—to explore the sense of loss and displacement of this period. The question of citizenship and belonging is especially germane in unpacking a narrative about the psychic and material fractures of war. In so doing, this work re-situates the film as a postwar epistemology of the yanggongju, or the military sex worker, that reappraises the spatial politics of the camptown.