Julia Shizuyo Popham

“Uneasy Intimacies” interprets Japanese migrant Fukunosuke Kusumi’s collection of visual art as a touchstone by which to theorize aesthetic ambiguity and seeing irei within contexts of racial disposability in the American West. By tracing Kusumi’s art through prewar exclusion in Washington (1908-1913), interim detainment in California (1942), indefinite incarceration in Colorado (1942- 1945), and afterlives of loss and healing (1945-), the dissertation examines how seemingly innocuous aesthetics reveal marginalized histories, in which dispossessed subjects construct agency and even freedom via the very systems built to keep them down. Drawing from Asian American and Black feminist visual culture, this project explicates Kusumi’s artworks not as fungible illustrations but as lifeworlds that dream beyond nationalistic platitudes like “never again” and “wartime mistake” and, in turn, teach us to see otherwise.