“America Behind Barbed Wire”

Abstract

War displaces populations, including civilians. In February 1942, war hysteria, racial prejudice, and a failure of leadership, and not military security, caused President Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 9066, enabling the internment of 120,000 people of Japanese heritage living in the United States, two-thirds of whom were American citizens. The decision to exclude Japanese Americans from the West Coast and incarcerate them without due process violated the US Constitution. Significantly, it was not a policy applied to ethnic Germans or Italians living in the United States. Displacement and internment traumatised Japanese-American civilians during the war and for years afterwards, in part because it took 40 years for the government to apologise for this grave injustice. The long-suppressed story of this internment is now being told through many forms of representation, including art. This essay focuses on the artistic representations of the internment by Roger Shimomura, a third-generation Japanese American, whose early years were spent in the Minidoka concentration camp. His lithographs (part of the permanent collection of more than 90 museums) confront the sociopolitical and psychological consequences of war and racial prejudice that he sees still present for Asian Americans. This essay reviews his series Yellow No Same, Memories of Childhood, American Knockoff, and An American Diary. Theoretical approaches are drawn from trauma and memory studies including Anne Whitehead’s (2004) challenge to explore ethical questions raised by representing a traumatic past, and Mick Broderick and Antonio Traverso’s (2010) assertion that images of individual incidents of trauma become synecdoches of the trauma of the broader culture. The essay also draws on work theorising the critical language of images to answer the question: How is Shimomura’s art a trauma narrative of the Japanese-American experience of internment and an indictment of the consequences of war on individuals, ethnic communities, and nations?