Migrant and Minority Nostalgia in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Circle K Cycles

This essay explores the concept of nostalgia through an analysis of Circle K Cycles (2001), a creative (auto)ethnographic text in which the Japanese American writer Karen Tei Yamashita portrays Japanese Brazilians’ ethnic return migration to Japan in the 1980s and 1990s. In the face of social marginalisation and the hegemonic pressures of Japanese culture to conform to a standard of ‘pure Japaneseness’, Japanese Brazilians reinforce their attachment to Brazil, which they express in the form of nostalgia, or saudade. Yet Yamashita criticises any idea of cultural separateness and ‘purity’, both by experimenting with form and by describing phenomena of cultural hybridisation.

“Take A Good Look At It”: Seeing Postcolonial Medianatures with Karen Tei Yamashita

Plastic remains one of the most ubiquitous forms that oil takes as a mediating force in our everyday life. This article tracks the way in which this function of plastic has been obfuscated, particularly within the discursive space of academia, by way of a close reading of Karen Tei Yamashita’s 1990 novel Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. After contextualizing the author’s vision of a neoliberal media culture through a brief history of the recent disciplinary convergences of media studies, ecocriticism, and postcolonialism, I argue that Yamashita’s novel functions as a proleptic, literary articulation of the kinds of insights made possible by the combination of the three. Through its particular attention to the lifecycle of media—the transformation of plastic from raw material into technical object and then into trash—I argue that the novel offers a theory of plastic as media that usefully emphasizes its relation to the natural world as much as it does its connection to technology and culture.Image Credit: From the cover of Karen Tei Yamashita's book, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, Coffee House Press (2017), https://coffeehousepress.org/products/through-the-arc-of-the-rain-forest.