An Absent Presence: Japanese Americans in Postwar American Culture, 1945-1960 (review)

Abstract

An Absent Presence: Japanese Americans in Postwar American Culture, 1945-1960, is an engaging and deeply moving account of how remembering and forgetting the history of Japanese American internment have been fundamental to the postwar articulation of the United States as a democratic nation that was to prevail over its cold war enemies. The state's gross violations left irreparable damage to the nation's self-knowledge. The maintenance of the myth of American exceptionalism and the formulation of the postwar United States as a pluralistic and integrated liberal democracy were contingent primarily on the nation's coming to terms with this indelible trauma. Through her remarkable interdisciplinary command over a variety of texts—social science writings, state-sponsored reports, popular journalism, photo images, fiction, and autobiographies—Caroline Chung Simpson demonstrates how the memory of internment, as a persistent reminder of Japanese Americans' liminality within the U.S. national citizenry, had to be worked through during the crucial years of the 1940s and 50s.