Relocating Authority: Japanese Americans Writing to Redress Mass Incarceration by Mira Shimabukuro

Abstract

Reviewed by: Relocating Authority: Japanese Americans Writing to Redress Mass Incarceration by Mira Shimabukuro Elizabeth Miller, Saul Hernandez, and Jessica Shumake Relocating Authority: Japanese Americans Writing to Redress Mass Incarceration Mira Shimabukuro University Press of Colorado, 2016. 248 pp. Click for larger view View full resolution Contemporary work in rhetoric and composition has made moves to address and theorize everyday writing patterns and silences, breathing new life into rhetors and rhetorics previously undertheorized. Mira Shimabukuro in Relocating Authority shifts the conversation to a focus on personal and collaborative writings composed by Japanese Americans forced into internment camps in the 1940s, both situating herself within and critiquing scholarly conversations happening in the field. From the outset Shimabukuro calls into question rhetorical traditions that characterize silence as non-generative, as well as more recent investigations into silence that do not take Asian rhetorics into consideration. Because Japanese Americans, or Nikkei, have been stereotypically portrayed as the "Quiet Americans" (6), in Shimabukuro's eyes, a new terrain must be mapped that acknowledges their experiences and the exigencies they have faced. Mass incarceration during World War II provides the setting for this work, a look at both personal and collaborative "camp-generated writing," to address the ways the Nikkei navigated the system and regained a sense of control over their lives (6). Relocating Authority offers rhetoric and composition researchers two conceptualizations that can be used to ethically and equitably conduct research: the methodological orientation of rhetorical attendance and the literacy tool of writing-to-redress historical injustice. Chapter one, "Writing-to-Redress: Attending to Nikkei Literacies of Survivance," situates Shimabukuro's work amongst scholars of color, such as Jaqueline [End Page 87] Jones Royster; Asian American feminist rhetoricians, such as King-Kok Cheung; and theorists of rhetorical silences, such as Cheryl Glenn. Amidst a discussion of Krista Ratcliffe's rhetorical listening, Shimabukuro introduces a theory of her own: rhetorical attendance. Rhetorical attendance requires that one "pay attention to, be present at, take care of, apply oneself to, or, … stretch toward" (22). Importantly, this stretching toward entails "mental vigilance, with physical readiness, with intent" (22). This is the ethics Shimabukuro applies to her archival research. Writing-to-redress, a central theme in the book, is defined as a use of literacy to attempt to set things right, to alleviate suffering, to relocate authority back into one's culture. Shimabukuro links writing-to-redress to a rhetoric of survivance, a term amplified by Malea Powell in her writings on American Indian Rhetorics: survival + resistance. Shimabukuro insightfully articulates the literate work composed in the camps, showing readers how literacy practices have embodied and continue to embody self-protection and protest. In chapter two, "Recollecting Nikkei Dissidence: The Politics of Archival Recovery and Community Self-Knowledge," Shimabukuro further delineates her project, assessing the problematic nature of relying upon national archives (which were composed and collected by the arbiters of Nikkei suffering) and the simultaneous necessity of needing to do so (because they do indeed house significant artifacts). Tracing the footsteps of those who walked the archives before her, including Densho, an organization explicitly documenting Nikkei internment, the author shows readers what is valuable about her work. For her, "[r]hetorical attendance is not about individual lives but a complex interacting array of knowledge still being collected, still being shared, still being redistributed back to the people whose material lives served as the source of that knowledge" (44). Thus, while Shimabukuro offers up new and engaging theoretical and rhetorical insights about archival research, she primarily does so in service of the communities with which she identifies, infusing personal memory and cultural knowledge into the book. Returning to the historical communities themselves, chapter three, "ReCollected Tapestries: The Circumstances behind Writing-to-Redress," offers readers insights into the "rhetorical situation" of those living in the internment camps. The author characterizes common areas within the prisons as a public sphere for literacy-in-action, and we see the ways in which the American government sponsored certain forms of literacy, since many of the incarcerated enrolled in camp classes and had at least limited access to typewriters and other writing tools. We also learn more about some of the exigencies for the collective...