Whiteness in Another Color: Winnifred Eaton (Onoto Watanna) and Intra-Racial Citizenship

The Montreal-born author Winnifred Eaton (1875-1954) wrote under the supposedly Japanese pseudonym Onoto Watanna, despite the fact she was of Chinese-British ancestry. She lived in Montreal until she was seventeen, where she began her writing career, then moved to Jamaica for a year, then to the United States. In 1917 she moved to Calgary with her second husband. The author of this article explores the global formations of race and politics of Asian American identity through Winnifred Eaton's Japanese writings. The author shows how Eaton's work emblematizes the idea of American citizenship as an "intra-racial" construct by vying various racial subjects against one another for political and economic inclusion. Particularly, Eaton represents her Japanese fictional heroines as desirable subjects and the embodiment of the ideal Asian femininity and American citizenship.

Tamkang Review

Vol. 48

no. 2

19-41

June 2018

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