Abstract In a 1997 review, James Berger not only clearly points out the proliferation of trauma study in the 1990s but also professes that the representation of trauma would be more easily detected, analysized, and understood with immersion in literary texts. Therefore, in this thesis, I draw upon the ideas of historical trauma, psychological trauma, structural trauma and trauma responses in the five theoretical works¡XJudith Lewis Herman¡¦s Trauma and Recover (1992), Ronald Granofsky¡¦s The Trauma Novel: Contemporary Symbolic Depictions of Collective Disaster (1995), Tedeschi, Richard G. and Lawrence G. Calhoun¡¦s Trauma and Transformation: Growing in the Aftermath of Suffering (1995), Cathy Caruth¡¦s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996) and Dominick LaCapra¡¦s Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001)¡Xto analysize the issue of trauma as revealed in John Okada¡¦s No-No Boy and Joy Kogawa¡¦s Obasan. The two texts differ in time and space but share the same historical trauma evoked by the aftereffect of the war and the violence of the governments¡¦ racially-oriented discrimination policy that results in the Nikkei¡¦s psychological trauma. Okada presents white American racial ascendancy in the 1950s, while Kogawa tackles Canadian governmental dominance in the 1980s. Both writers are concerned with the relationship between collective persecution and individual trauma during/after World War Two and both try to empower as well as give voice to those who have been traumatized by social and familial forces. Reading the two novels as an exploration of the Nikkei¡¦s postwar experience, this thesis first contends that underlying the Nikkei¡¦s trauma is the internment experience that leads to the occurrence of racial discrimination and identity crisis in the Nikkei community. Secondly, in the light of historical trauma and psychological trauma, this thesis analyzes the trauma responses which normally take shapes in the forms of conflict, avoidance, guilt, flashbacks, dreams, numbing or amnesia in the minds of traumatized people after long years of struggling. However, instead of regarding these responses to be obstacles, this thesis proposes that the trauma responses are great reinforcement for the survivors to cope with the trauma memory and to reconcile with the trauma history. Through discussion of trauma response, this thesis suggests that the Nikkei would work through the process of experiencing the symptoms of trauma and slowly reach the level of recovery and transformation. That is, a resolution of the Nikkei¡¦s rebirth would be possible when the Nikkei overcome the threat of trauma and develop a hope of reconciliation for their upcoming future.

Testing the Seams of the American Dream: Minority Literature and Film in the Early Cold War delineates the concept of the liberal tolerance agenda in early Cold War. The liberal tolerance message of the U.S. government, the Democratic Party, and others endorsed racial tolerance and envisioned the possibility of a future free from racism and inequality. Filmmakers in often disseminated a liberal message similar to that of the politicians in the form of “race problem” films. My shows how these films and the liberal tolerance agenda as a whole promises racial equality to the racial minority in exchange for hard work, patriotism, education, and a belief in the majority culture. My first chapter, “Washing White the Racial Subject: Hollywood’s First Black Problem Film,” performs a close reading of Arthur Laurents 1946 play Home of the Brave, which features a Jewish American protagonist, in conjunction with a reading of the 1949 film version, which has an African American protagonist. The differences between the two texts reveal the slippages in the liberal tolerance agenda and signal the inability of filmmakers to envision racial equality on the big screen. “The American Institution and the Racial Subject,” my second chapter, discusses the 1949 film Pinky as well as Américo Paredes’s George Washington Gómez and Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter. All of these works suggests that the attainment of education promises entry into the mainstream by racial minorities, yet Paredes and Sone question this process by interpreting it as resulting in the dual segregation of their protagonists. My third chapter, “Earning and Cultural Capital: The Work that Determines Place,” looks at the promise that with hard work anyone can attain the American Dream. I show how the 1951 film Go for Broke!, Ann Petry’s The Street, and José Antonio Villarreal’s Pocho work to dispel this American myth. My final chapter, “The Regrets of Dissent: Blacklists and the Race Question,” examines the 1954 film Salt of the Earth alongside Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go and John Okada’s No-No Boy to reveal the dangerous mixture of race and dissent in this era. / text