“This Isn’t Your Battle or Your Land”: The Native American Occupation of Alcatraz in the Asian-American Political Imagination

Abstract

This article assembles a historical narrative about the Asian-American presence at the Native American occupation of Alcatraz in the earlly 1970s by examining three sources: a series of contemporary articles from the newspaper Gidra , Shawn Wong’s novel Homebase (1979), and Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel I Hotel (2010). In contextualizing this moment within the larger history of cross-racial coalitional politics during the 1960s and 1970s, this paper illustrate how minority nationalisms of the time emerged in “mimetic dynamism”: a process of contiguous interchange that changes the conditions by which it exists. This paper focuses on the Asian-American appropriation of the concept “self-determination” and its relation to land occupation.

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