Colorado College Special Collections maintains collections of rare books, special editions, manuscripts, and published and archival material about Colorado, Colorado Springs, and Colorado College. The department supports CC’s thematic minor in book studies, collecting materials showing the history and future of the written word in material form. Some of the featured books in the collection were part of the CC library before 1882, when the entire library sat on shelf or two in a room in Cutler Hall. Others have been acquired or donated since. Additionally, the department recently digitized their entire collection of CC publications, including many discontinued literary magazines and newspapers. View the collection here.
Recent Acquisition
A First Edition of No-No Boy by John Okada
The 1957 novel, a staple of Asian American literature, tells the story of Ichiro Yamada, a man who answers “no” to the two so-called “loyalty” questions in a 1943 questionnaire for Japanese Americans: “Are you willing to serve in the armed forces of the United States on combat duty wherever ordered?” and “Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, to any other foreign government, power or organization?”
Why this is an important acquisition for CC…
Thoughts from Aline Lo, Assistant Professor of Asian American Literature, English Department
Okada’s No-No Boy is an important work in American literature on so many levels. In terms of literary representation, it is remarkable in that it, very early on (it’s first published in 1957), tries to complicate rather than simplify Japanese and Japanese American incarceration and the direct aftermath of that. The text also reminds us that Colorado participated in this history with Camp Amache only three hours away from the college. The novel’s publication history reveals a lot about how Asian American literature developed and the desperate need to have stories like this. If it were not for the collected efforts of a few young Asian American writers, we might not have this seminal book. No-No Boy is also the only novel that Okada published, which points to the difficulty of sustaining a writing life as an Asian American in that period.
Having the first edition on campus is a privilege, especially as it allows my courses to have deep conversations about what books and stories are allowed to survive, about how marginalized communities often have been forced to rely on a single text, about how we need to keep searching and writing. First editions are often prized for their rarity, so it’s critical that we emphasize the reasons behind that and the pressure that results from being a “singular” text.
Thoughts from Brandon Shimoda, Assistant Professor, English Department
The acquisition of John Okada’s No-No Boy is a beautiful affirmation of the significance of what is largely considered to be the first Japanese American novel. It is, for that reason alone, an important/indispensable acquisition – for CC and for any institution. No-No Boy is a groundbreaking work not only of Japanese American and Asian American literature, but American literature in general, because it tells the story, in a complex and uncompromising way, of the immediate aftermath of one of the US’s most profound injustices, the mass incarceration of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans during WWII, and it tells it from the perspective of that time (it was written in 1956, published in 1957). The novel centers the perspective of a Japanese American dissident, someone who opposed the war, which, at the time, was a stigmatized perspective. And it focuses on the psychological impacts suffered by the Japanese American community, which is also a subject that took society, in general, and the JA community, in particular, approximately twenty more years to confront. No-No Boy was, in these ways, ahead of its time. Lastly, because of its mournfully enduring relevance to the understanding of US immigration policy/legislation, histories of surveillance and dispossession, exclusion and detention, Japanese American incarceration will continue to be a subject of primary importance, and No-No Boy should be recognized as being central to that study.
I teach a new class at CC, Literature of Japanese American Incarceration, in which we read the history and the ongoing afterlife of Japanese American incarceration through literature – fiction, graphic novels, poetry. A central quality of the class is that everything we read was written by a survivor or a descendant of JA incarceration. No-No Boy is absolutely essential to this study and to an understanding of this growing tradition. John Okada was incarcerated in the Minidoka concentration camp, in Idaho; his experience informed the writing of the novel, especially the portrait he creates of the fractured postwar Japanese American community. My class addresses and contextualizes issues/realities such as intergenerational trauma and anti-Asian racism, while examining the corrosive, destabilizing effects of assimilation, Americanism, and white supremacy. More generally, No-No Boy is becoming a mainstay of literary study at CC. Professor Aline Lo teaches No-No Boy in her Asian American literature class and No-No Boy was recently the subject of a senior literature thesis (by Tia Vierling, class of 2022). It is also worth mentioning that other professors (i.e. Danielle Sanchez, Jason Weaver, among others) incorporate the study of various aspects of Japanese American incarceration, including site visits to the Amache concentration camp, here in Colorado, into their courses, which suggests the enduring relevance and importance of this history.