Epilogue

Through personal storytelling, the Epilogue reiterates the ways that studying the life of paper uncovers modes of racialized, gendered, and sexualized embodiment that can be understood within or alongside dominant structurings of human being without being simply derivative of them. From this perspective, within the ultimate mystery of social reproduction as the production of difference, each case in this project has therefore represented dynamics of a basic enigma that are detectable in mediations of the letter and which have been theorized from myriad perspectives as a “poetics,” original acts of making or transformation. In summarizing these arguments, the Epilogue brings such insights to bear on contemporary questions of mass incarceration and decarceration.

“Detained Alien Enemy Mail: Examined”

Chapter Three investigates systematic efforts to dismantle Japanese diasporic communities living on the U.S. West coast alongside the broader emergence of a U.S. wartime security or surveillance state. This chapter explores the expansion of infrastructures to control the limits of human knowledge and information, as it occurred through two interlocked and evolving movements: first, intensified experiments with mass incarceration as dominant mode of organizing public life and culture; and second, the transforming production of racial distinction through conflated languages of geopolitics and nation-state citizenship, culture or ethnicity, and moral affect. In particular, Chapter Three elaborates these movements as they unfolded within a longer history of U.S. warfare in the East Asian Pacific and as they established the physical, administrative, discursive, and subjective forms of censorship conditioning the life of paper for the “Interned.”

Imagined Genealogies (for All Who Cannot Arrive)

Chapter Two begins by illustrating how technologies of the life of paper articulated a distinctive regional geography that diverged from the Eurocentric telos of development. This chapter further investigates the production of “coaching letters,” or documents educating people on how to “pass” Immigration interrogations, examining how the act of ordering and representing knowledge on paper forced a confrontation between different systems of thought that transformed what, and how, people thought of themselves and the world. A final series of close readings demonstrates social transformations occurring through the life of paper, returning to the overarching point: that such movements constitute a creative reinvention of human connectivity under the constraints of racialized alienation and confinement—a poetics, or process of collective self-making, creating an unapparent place inside and between material realities.

The Inventions of China

Chapter One first elaborates the significance of letters to constitute racial capitalism and dominant forms of nation, state, and empire on both sides of the East Asian and North American Pacific. As battles over international infrastructures of letter conveyance and circulation mediated global wars to secure territorial domination, the practice of letter writing itself also played a central role in these struggles: serving as the standard medium of both government and business administration throughout the modernizing world as well as the primary mode of training modern subjectivity and proper citizenship. In this context, and amidst the globalization of colonial and civil warfare, this chapter examines how engagements with paper, print, and postal technologies thus significantly shaped forms of both U.S. white supremacist and incipient Chinese nationalisms as well as evolving forms of Chinese and U.S. imperialisms in this period.

Ephemeral Value and Disused Commodities

Chapter Five clarifies theoretically the overlaps and distinctions between problematizing contemporary mass incarceration in terms of capitalist production, on the one hand, and in terms of social reproduction, on the other. Greater precision in this regard opens out the question rather than assumption of “racial” significance and signification today, specifically with reference to the “prison industrial complex” as a process of genocide—systematic extermination through arrested life and social incapacitation. Chapter Five concludes by examining the manipulation of prison mail in acts of retaliation and torture: wherein punishment does not operate primarily to discipline a labor force but to deaden those who refuse to be neutralized. Considering the letter as sign of living potential in this context, this chapter ultimately views the violence it magnetizes not as the negation but as the most apparent “evidence” of the letter’s social force.

Uses of the Profane

Chapter Six explores letter correspondence across prison walls as under-recognized mode of communal preservation in the face of publicly administered torture and genocide. This chapter shifts our perspectives on social movements by paying critical attention to ruptures in racial epistemology realized by twentieth-century liberation struggles and to interventions of the epistolary form in this context. Ultimately, this chapter argues that the life of paper constitutes a contradictory kind of creative shelter—a sacred place to foster social being, provide for its study, and generate a mode of its inhabitation. Reading archival materials for traces of the intellectual and affective labor they both congeal and augment, this chapter views letter correspondence as reproductive activity that instantiates life-sustaining claims of belonging to one another and enunciates the experience and significance of being human: nurturing forms of connection and conditions of existence that generatively stress the limits of what is currently knowable.

Censorship and the Work of Art (Where They Barbed the Fourth Corner Open

As interned communities were barred from normative channels of communication and self-representation, this chapter argues that the life of paper facilitated distinctive forms of both individual and collective being, in the latters’ essential dialectic. Chapter Four analyzes how this dialectic operates through the letter’s dialogical form in ways that necessarily exceed dominant Anglophonic literary assumptions and processes. With attention to how interned communities thus turned to aesthetic practices to exist through and beyond the terms of “population management,” this chapter places the life of paper broadly within pre-existing Japanese aesthetic traditions and corresponding onto-epistemologies of presence, absence, and the work of art. Close readings of letters focus on how they communicate affect to produce alternate forms of knowledge and truth-value under historical constraint: ultimately creating an archive of material for the re-assertion of social bonds, sutured through difference and across generations.

Introduction

Highlighting the role of the epistolary in the making of Western civilization, the Introduction argues that deep within such movements and the conditions of violent duress they produce, the mundane activities of communities to reconstitute themselves—as manifest in letter correspondence—emerge discernibly as essential to social life rather than seemingly adjunct to it: facilitating a means for people to reproduce themselves at every scale of existence, from bodily integrity to subjectivity to collective and spiritual essence. Methodologically, the Introduction argues that regional approaches to spatial analysis modeled by Black geographies, alongside historical materialist approaches to literary studies modeled by Asian American, Queer, and Black cultural theory, yield unique insights into articulations of difference, power, and globality that have been under-studied while simultaneously opening new epistemological horizons for their investigation.