Abstract: Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle , perhaps the most canonical alternate-history novel, has been read in terms of its reality’s relation to the actual world without consideration of Japanese racialization, a condition of its alternate world. Conversely, John Okada’s No-No Boy , the first known Japanese American novel, has been read in terms of Asian racialization in America without consideration of an alternate history also chronicled in the novel. This essay intersects the two novels based on the common historical basis of their ontologies (what they designate as real). Against the recent tendency in race studies to generalize history into ontology, I read history from ontology and find that the alternate histories are phantastical reflections of actual racial histories. While The Man in the High Castle renders literal Western modernity’s projection of deception as a Japanese reality in line with World War II–era geopolitical rivalry and domestic insecurity, No-No Boy depicts deception through a Japanese character as an interwar fascist tendency on which modernity as a whole falls back. In ontologizing the (self-)deceptions of modernity as an alternate history, Dick and Okada historicize race as a negative condition of modern phantasy.
Ryan Ku (Sun,) studied this question.