American Internment Research Articles

African Americans and Africa: A New History by Nemata Amelia Ibitayo Blyden

Reviewed by: African Americans and Africa: A New History by Nemata Amelia Ibitayo Blyden R. Joseph Parrott African Americans and Africa: A New History. By Nemata Amelia Ibitayo Blyden. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv, 266. $28.00, ISBN 978-0-300-19866-9.) Africa looms large in the imagination of many black Americans. Yet from 1619 to the present, the ways African diasporic identities have coexisted with American ones have been fluid and contested. Nemata Amelia Ibitayo Blyden's expansive and readable African Americans and Africa: A New History explores the varied ideas, perceptions, and attitudes about Africa that have influenced African Americans and how these concepts shaped "what they called themselves historically" (p. 11). The result is a concise volume that serves as an introduction to the complex history of black identity in the United States and as a survey of the broad scholarship that opens doors for future research. Blyden is an ideal guide for this journey. As the child of an African immigrant and a black American, her family story frames her interrogation of the hyphenated African American identity. Blyden finds, rather than a narrative of rising or declining identification with Africa, that attraction to an oft-idealized ancestral homeland ebbed and flowed in response to domestic race relations. Survival and improvement were the primary goals, with African heritage providing a communal rallying cry. Dreams of returning to an Africa free of prejudice provided refuge during periods of fraught race relations, as evidenced in nineteenth-century colonizationism and Garveyism. Yet as these frequently debated examples demonstrate, rarely did black communities cohere around a single identity or mission. Blyden's strength lies in her ability to capture the diverse ways African Americans sought to "(re)connect with Africa" while negotiating their positions within United States society (p. 81). [End Page 681] This duality shaped African American perceptions of the African continent and its peoples. Enslaved persons adapted inherited traditions, and intellectuals from George Washington Williams to W. E. B. Du Bois drew on black heritage to inspire pride. Nonetheless, African American visions of Africa were filtered through the prism of the white-dominated media. Metropolitan, educated Africans who lived in the United States challenged negative stereotypes of a backward continent but could not overturn them. As a result, uplift and civilization remained components of African American internationalism until decolonization reversed the power dynamics of the black diaspora. Blyden thus highlights ideas of Africa as inspiration for both pride and projects in the United States, while illustrating the discrete cultural perspectives that have historically separated black Americans and Africans. Blyden provides a valuable synthesis using the latest scholarship to expand on her earlier work on transatlantic black identity in the nineteenth century. She is an excellent writer with an eye for the telling story or quotation, making the book ideal for classroom use. Experts on African American engagement with Africa will recognize much of the information, but Blyden does yeoman's work in unifying discrete historiographies to highlight comparisons and lasting trends across five hundred years of history. For example, the "mix of pride and hesitation" produced by African identification within the dominant white American culture becomes a repeating theme, which links the post-Revolution decades of the eighteenth century to the post–civil rights era of the 1970s and 1980s (p. 196). Yet Blyden is careful to avoid emphasizing a singular perspective, capturing both historical and scholarly debates on African American identity. My major critique is that this approach occasionally mentions historical and historiographical contradictions—inconsistent settlement patterns of recent African immigrants or Carol Anderson's reassessment of the NAACP during the Cold War—without exploring them in detail. Blyden could have more effectively intervened in these debates by analyzing or disentangling these seeming dichotomies within the longue durée of transnational identity politics and ambiguous diasporic relations, potentially pushing scholarship in new directions as a result. These quibbles aside, African Americans and Africa is an important book, which provides a much-needed and accessible primer on African American identity in a global context. R. Joseph Parrott Ohio State University Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association

Violence and Hope: The Aesthetic Force of Infrastructures

27 Field Trip Jessamyn R. Abel and Leo Coleman Violence and Hope: The Aesthetic Force of Infrastructures The essays of this Field Trip use new approaches to infrastructure, especially arguments about the political force of aesthetics and the relation between infrastructures and political violence, to consider the ways that the mapping, projection, and design of infrastructures shape the distribution of power and intervene in political processes. They emerge from a roundtable titled “Imaging Infrastructure,” which we organized for the Global Asias 5 conference held at Penn State in April 2019. Together, they suggest that the forces conveyed and exerted by infrastructures, as either concept or material reality, direct human action, form identities and expectations, and delimit political possibilities. However, these effects , our authors demonstrate, often extend far beyond the intended function of any particular construction. The three essays here address both intangible and concrete infrastructures . Corey Byrnes and Lisa Hofmann-­Kuroda examine representations of potential infrastructures in order to understand the particular political force of maps, propaganda images, and architectural designs. In Byrnes’s study of China’s aspirational mapping of expanded maritime borders and ongoing island construction in the South China Sea, infrastructures that have been “made up” and then “made real” help bolster the Chinese government ’s case in international territorial disputes by lending its claims conceptual, then actual, solidity. In contrast, the imagined infrastructure in Hofmann-­Kuroda’s study was never realized. In the case of Isamu Noguchi’s plans for a recreational space within a World War II Japanese American internment camp, the aesthetic and practical elements of the infrastructure envisioned in his blueprints aimed to change the meaning of the space for its involuntary inhabitants, literally watering down 28 Field Trip its militarized organization and softening the hard grid of its barracks. Finally, Mubbashir Rizvi examines the role that long-­term colonial interventions , legal and physical, in the pattern of agricultural land holding and irrigation, can play in explaining the patterns of violence after the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. His essay shows that categorizations of identity (and rights) and lines on a map give form to even the most sudden and devastating episodes of communal violence. Importantly, these essays collectively highlight the presence of military power and state violence within legal routines of classification or as a framework shaping efforts to imagine and build infrastructures for play and recreation. They thus question the commonsense idea that infrastructures are built to improve people’s lives. Byrnes draws attention to the damage done to ocean ecologies through construction over coral reefs to provide space for airfields and soccer fields alike. Hofmann-­Kuroda notes that Noguchi’s playground was a small and ultimately unsuccessful effort to mitigate the negative effects of a different kind of infrastructure: the regimented barracks that symbolized and enacted the U.S. government ’s effort to control Japanese American bodies. And Rizvi suggests that both legal and infrastructural attempts to provide better lives and increased productivity for rural Punjabi farmers ended up contributing to a climate of violence that erupted with exceptional force during the period of partition in 1947. Political societies build infrastructures to facilitate the mundane activities of daily life: schools and government buildings allow residents of a newly built island to live as they would in any small city; a playground offers a space for relaxation and pleasure; canals help farmers increase their yield. But attention to the aesthetics and effects of infrastructure shows that, intentionally or not, and for better or worse, they often do much more. Jessamyn Abel is associate professor in the Asian Studies department at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of The International Minimum : Creativity and Contradiction in Japan’s Global Engagement, 1933–­64. Leo Coleman is associate professor of anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of A Moral Technology: Electrification as Political Ritual in New Delhi and editor of Food: Ethnographic Encounters. ...

Review: Citizen Internees: A Second Look at Race and Citizenship in Japanese American Internment Camps, by Linda L. Ivey and Kevin Kaatz

Review: Citizen Internees: A Second Look at Race and Citizenship in Japanese American Internment Camps, by Linda L. Ivey and Kevin Kaatz

Erasing, Obfuscating and Teasing out from the Shadows

Three practice-based investigations discussed in this essay—Razing Manzanar II, States of Exception, and Palimpsest—correlate two seemingly separate conditions of invisibility. One is invisibility produced through the making and unmaking of spaces of internment or detention called forth through governmental utterances. The other is hidden labour, specifically related to architecture and built environments. These performance-installations reflect upon government-mandated, and now-demolished, camps and the labour occurring there. The sites of study include World War II-era Japanese American internment camps in the American West, where interned citizens wove camouflage for the US Army, and the Centre d’Identification de Vincennes (CIV) in Paris used to detain French Algerian labourers during their war of independence. Most traces of the Japanese American camps are now invisible—razed long ago—but are acknowledged by government. The camps situated within the Paris city limits are also invisible, but not simply by erasure; they are obfuscated by government obstacles to locating them, with the CIV’s whereabouts, the city’s largest intentional camp, remaining elusive. While seeking to render sensible, or knowable through the senses, these internment camps, and the camp as a recurrent condition, my practices of installation and performing spatial labour also explore rendering visible otherwise-invisible labour. My labour is architectural, employing the discipline’s instruments, such as drawings and models. These labours take cues from Eyal Weizman’s Forensic Architecture (2017) and age-old techniques of descriptive geometry and shadow projection. Juxtaposing these concerns problematizes both the now-razed architectures that once disappeared whole populations and (hyper/in)visibility (Kunst 2015) of spatial labour. Performed and installed spatial labours of erasing, obfuscating and teasing out of the shadows are the three modes of rendering the invisible visible I examine in this essay, arguing that the performative nature of the explorations is critical to rendering sensible what the artefacts normally conceal.

“To Build a New World”: Black American Internationalism and Palestine Solidarity

This essay traces the arc of Black American solidarity with Palestine, placing the phenomenon in the context of twentieth-century African American internationalism. It sketches the evolution of the political imaginary that enabled Black activists to depict African Americans and Palestinians as compatriots within global communities of dissent. For more than half a century, Black internationalists identified with Zionism, believing that the Jewish bid for a national homeland paralleled the African American freedom struggle. During the 1950s and 1960s, however, colonial aggression in the Middle East led many African American progressives to rethink the analogy. In the late 1960s and the 1970s, African American dissidents operating within the nexus of Black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Third Worldism constructed powerful theories of Afro-Palestinian kinship. In so doing, they reimagined or transcended bonds of color, positing anti-imperialist struggle, rather than racial affinity, as the precondition of camaraderie.

Exception(al): Apprehending the Unexpected in Japanese American Internment Literature

Research Article| July 01 2019 Exception(al): Apprehending the Unexpected in Japanese American Internment Literature Anthony Sze-Fai Shiu Anthony Sze-Fai Shiu University of Missouri-Kansas City Anthony Sze-Fai Shiu is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He has published essays in Extrapolation, the Journal of Popular Culture, MELUS, and Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies. He is currently writing a manuscript on Asian American ethnofuturisms. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google CR: The New Centennial Review (2019) 19 (2): 203–230. https://doi.org/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.19.2.0203 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Anthony Sze-Fai Shiu; Exception(al): Apprehending the Unexpected in Japanese American Internment Literature. CR: The New Centennial Review 1 July 2019; 19 (2): 203–230. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.19.2.0203 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressCR: The New Centennial Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © Michigan State University Board of Trustees Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

10 Social Networks and the Development of Neighborhood Identities in Amache, a WWII Japanese American Internment Camp

ABSTRACTIn 1942 Japanese Americans from the west coast of the United States were forcibly relocated to incarceration camps scattered across the interior of the country. Constructed by the Army Corp of Engineers and designed to house around 10,000 individuals, these centers followed a rigid, gridded layout that allowed for the rapid construction of what were ostensibly cities. Residential sections were laid out in blocks, each containing barracks buildings to which internees were assigned on arrival. Five seasons of intensive pedestrian survey at the Granada Relocation Center National Historic Landmark, Colorado (also known as Amache), accompanied by extensive oral histories, has determined that these residential blocks became neighborhoods with individual character and personalities. Archaeological and archival data are used to examine the development of neighborhood identities and examine the relative utility of different data sets in identifying social interaction as a proxy for neighborhood identities. Archaeological research at Amache reveals the physical modifications and artifacts found in residential blocks. Distinct differences in densities and types of artifacts along with the development of coordinated blockwide landscaping and centrally located communal features show that internees were developing neighborhood‐based communities. These indicate the role that new social relationships, developed within the confines of camp, along with the influences of existing social ties and sets of behavioral traits, had on the formation of neighborhoods. This chapter uses social network data drawn from historic newspapers to examine the levels of interaction occurring between residents of the same residential block and between different areas of the camp. Social network data will be used to explore the role that social interaction had in the creation and maintenance of neighborhood identities. These different lines of data converge to highlight how neighborhoods defined by distinct sets of activities and residential traits were being formed within the institutional setting of Amache.

Contextualizing macro-level identities and constructing inclusiveness through teasing and self-mockery: A view from the intercultural workplace in Japan

Humor generated through teasing and self-mockery can be both dividing and unifying: It signals intimacy and constructs inclusiveness through playful banter, but also contextualizes differences, denigrates, and draws boundaries. In intercultural workplaces, macro-level identities deriving from linguistic and cultural ideologies are especially salient as both sources and targets of such humor. Using data from American interns in Japan, the present study examines how such sociocultural differences are contextualized to create humor that foregrounds group divides and contributes to potential marginalization, but also constructs shared interactional styles that signal inclusiveness. Prior literature on this topic largely examines Western workplace settings where foreign workers are placed in the periphery. While Americans in Japan similarly represent a type of marginalized outsider, they are also categorically associated with English and Western hegemonies in the global workplace. This tends to position them as targets of fascination as well. The resulting style of teasing and self-mockery thus operates on the boundary of exclusiveness and inclusiveness, thereby contributing an additional perspective on the relationship between humor, identity, and inclusiveness.

Racism and Historic-cultural Trauma in Julie Otsuka’s When the Emperor Was Divine

This article examines how American racism-based policies like Executive Order 9066 of the Roosevelt Regime traumatized Japanese Americans before and after their wartime internment by analyzing Julie Otsuk’s When the Emperor Was Divine in the pluralist viewpoint of Michelle Balaev. The findings are: First, the internment of Japanese Americans residing on the Western Coast of America during World War II caused physical and psychological trauma that is repeated over and over, even after their release, through American racist policies mobilized through mass media, such as TV, radio and magazines. Second, the morbid racist gossip circulated through media contributed not only to the repetition of trauma, but also the distortion of Japanese Americans’ identity, which caused them to take it for granted that they should be docile and patient as a model minority. Especially, by describing the process of personality formation through the first-person narration of a seven-year-old boy, Otsuka articulates that the racist policies of the government interrupted his normal growth both psychically and psychologically. In order for young boys and girls to grow up as balanced citizens as well as get rid of misconstrued images of Japanese Americans, groundless racism will have to be reflectively approached. (Chosun University)

Entrenching Retrenchment: The Uphill Struggle to Shrink America’s World Role

In November 2016, Donald J. Trump became the first candidate for the United States presidency since Herbert Hoover to win election on a platform of unabashed opposition to American internationalism...

Jim Crow and Internment in Green Book and George Takei’s Allegiance

Contemporary political and cultural realities make the renegotiating of African American cultural images an urgent matter. A recent movement to improve the position of African Americans in the movie business has produced a new wave of debates. Current movies show a variety of approaches to defining those images. The success of Green Book has been viewed as a major achievement. It offers an oddly cheerful view leading to a happy ending, as strangers become friends. Today’s interracial movies contrast with the scant attention paid to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

Interculturality as social capital at work: The case of disagreements in American-Japanese interaction

AbstractTheories of social capital hold that strong interpersonal relationships can be leveraged to facilitate information sharing, gain trust, and strengthen group solidarity. Thus, it is often predicted that international workers are disadvantaged in these areas because they lack established social ties. Using data from disagreements between American interns and their colleagues in Japanese companies, this study critically examines this prediction by illustrating some ways participants use socially constructed representations of intercultural ideologies in ways that facilitate similar outcomes and substitute for their lack of relational histories. Specifically, these representations temporarily reverse flows of information, resist restrictions stemming from perceived lack of trust, and create shared humor that helps redefine in-group boundaries. By using a formal social capital model to interpret these results, this study helps position socially constructed representations of interculturality within a broader theoretical account of the potentially many forms of symbolic ‘capital’ that enable action. (Social capital, interculturality, disagreements, workplace, social identity)*

Memory and Non-Place: Visual Testimonies of Japanese American Internment During World War II

This article addresses the little-known history of Japanese Latin American internment during WWII. Classified as ‘illegal aliens’ and ‘enemy aliens’, 2,264 Japanese Latin Americans were stripped of citizenship from their home countries, denied rights in the United States, and ultimately deprived reconciliation due to their undocumented status. Using the traces of this history as a case study, I explore the strategic memories Japanese Latin Americans create about non-place – spaces of statelessness or states of exception – that allow them to make claims about state violence committed against them under these conditions, and, second, argue that demands for justice against political violence entail not only bringing light to erased histories but also developing engaged acts of reception that account for survivors’ claims to the memories of non-place. Visual testimonies, such as the Denshō Digital Archive and the short documentary Hidden Internment: The Art Shibayama Story (2004), affectively connect a viewer/listener to the memory of trauma, to an inexpressible haunting, and thus are critical platforms for creating a collective memory between survivors and the digital generation of postmemory.

American Internment

American Internment

Against Witness: Anti-commemorative Asian/American Poetics

76 Field Trip Against Witness: Anti-­ commemorative Asian/American Poetics A Pile of Past: Lawson Fusao Inada’s Anti-­commemorative Poetics Timothy Yu Cathy Park Hong’s essay “Against Witness” offers a critique of a commonplace about poetry: that its primary political function is to bear witness to historical events. “In an era when eyewitness testimonies, photos, and videos are tweeted seconds after a catastrophe,” Hong (2015) writes, “poetry ’s power to bear witness now feels outdated and inherently passive.” Hong cites the example of Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue,” which became so institutionalized as a poem memorializing the Holocaust that Celan himself wearied of it: “Rather than an act of remembrance, the recitation of ‘Death Fugue’ turned into a mantra to ward off difficult engagement with the past.” Hong calls this a movement from witness to commemoration : “It becomes all pious gesture and drained of meaning. When a poem becomes commemorative, it dies” (Hong 2015). What are the implications of Hong’s critique for Asian American poets ? Many well-­ known Asian American poems are, in fact, grounded in accounts of historical injustices. Perhaps the most prominent example of such injustice is the internment of Japanese Americans by the U.S. government during World War II, a historical trauma evoked by poets such as Janice Mirikitani, Mitsuye Yamada, and Lawson Fusao Inada—­all of whom were themselves interned. One might argue that the history of Japanese American internment has not even reached the level of “commemoration ” in American public awareness that would render its poetry clichéd; many Americans remain ignorant of the facts of internment, and supporters of recent efforts to block refugees and Muslims from entering Field Trip 77 the United States have even cited Japanese American internment as a positive precedent. There is little risk, it would seem, of the American establishment trotting out remembrances of Japanese American internment as a “pious gesture” anytime soon. Nonetheless, many poems of internment do display a consciousness of the risks of commemoration. Such poems do not offer an easily digestible narrative of historical experience, nor do they present a pious moral clarity . Indeed, many complicate the very notion of witness itself by injecting uncertainty into the act of recollection or by refusing to speak for the totality of internee experience. These are anti-­commemorative poems of self-­ critical remembrance, acknowledging the complications of the language of witness while also engaging directly the continuing resistance of audiences to the true historical lessons of internment. Lawson Fusao Inada’s Legends from Camp offers a remarkable, book-­ length example of an anti-­ commemorative poetics. Published in 1993, Legends from Camp is grounded in Inada’s experience of being interned as a child. Yet the very title of the collection signals that something more ambiguous than remembrance or commemoration is at work in these poems. What Inada offers are not “stories” or “experiences” from the internment camps but legends. This may seem a curious choice: a legend is not, after all, usually a story from one’s own experience but a story received from others. Moreover, it is a story whose relationship to historical fact is unclear—­“a traditional story sometimes popularly regarded as historical but not authenticated,” as the Oxford English Dictionary has it. But Inada also plays on a second meaning of legend: an inscription, a piece of writing. His title calls attention to his poems not as transparent acts of witness but as moments of writing, focusing our attention less on historical facts than on linguistic acts. The book’s title sequence is a series of short poems with headings such as “The Legend of Protest” and “The Legend of Flying Boy.” A reader looking to this sequence for a poetry of witness is likely to be disappointed; these brief pieces are understated, telegraphic, and aphoristic, often marked by dry humor. Many of the poems do not have a first-­ person speaker, and many fulfill their title of “legends” by presenting stories that seem to have circulated in camp, overheard rather than directly witnessed. And most are quotidian, chronicling seemingly minor incidents rather than dramatic events. The dramatic title “The Legend of Flying Boy” heads a poem that turns out to...

Why Study the Early American Women’s Rights Movement?

Historians have been playing a central part in explaining Trump’s America. From the Muslim travel ban and debates over Confederate monuments, to migrant children being taken away from their families, parallels with past policies and practices such as the separation of enslaved families in the antebellum South and Japanese American internment camps during World War II are drawn in traditional and social media. What has been interpreted as Americans’ inability to come to terms with their past has also made historians’ intervention in the public debate, helped by social media, more visible in recent years for both political and economic reasons.

Article II and Antidiscrimination Norms

The Supreme Court’s opinion in Trump v. Hawaii validated a prohibition on entry to the United States from several Muslim-majority countries and at the same time repudiated a longstanding precedent associated with the Japanese American internment of World War II. This Article closely analyzes the relationship of these twin rulings. It uses their dichotomous valences as a lens on the legal scope for discriminatory action by the federal executive. Parsing the various ways in which the internment of the 1940s and the 2017 exclusion order can be reconciled, the Article identifies a tension between the Court’s two holdings in Trump v. Hawaii. Contrary to the Court’s apparent assumption, the internment cannot easily be rejected if the 2017 travel ban is embraced. There is no analytically defensible and practicably tractable boundary between the two. Recognizing this disjunction and explaining why the Court’s effort to separate past from present practice cannot prevail, I argue, reveals what might be called an “Article II discretion to discriminate.” By identifying and mapping this form of executive discretion, the Article offers a critique of the Court’s recent construction of executive power in light of historical precedent and consequentialist justifications. It further illuminates downstream distributive and regulatory consequences of executive power in the context of ongoing judicial constriction of Article II discretion over regulatory choices.

Displacement, Diversity, and Mobility: Career Impacts of Japanese American Internment

One of the largest population displacement episodes in the U.S. took place in 1942, when over 110,000 persons of Japanese origin living on the West Coast were forcibly sent away to ten internment camps for one to three years. Having lost jobs and assets, after internment they had to reassess labor market and location choices. This paper studies how internees' careers were affected in the long run. Combining Census data, camp records, and survey data I develop a predictor of a person's internment status based on Census observables. Using a difference-in-differences framework I find that internment had a positive average effect on earnings in the long run. Chiefly due to strong pre- WWII anti-Asian discrimination, the comparison group is composed of non-interned Japanese and Chinese Americans. The evidence is consistent with mechanisms related to increased occupational and geographic mobility, possibly facilitated by the camps' high economic diversity. I find no evidence of other potential drivers such as increased labor supply, or changes in cultural preferences. These findings provide evidence of labor market frictions preventing people from accessing their most productive occupations and locations, and shed light on the resilience of internees who overcame a very adverse initial shock.

Enemy Child: The Story of Norman Mineta, a Boy Imprisoned in a Japanese American Internment Camp During World War II by Andrea Warren

Reviewed by: Enemy Child: The Story of Norman Mineta, a Boy Imprisoned in a Japanese American Internment Camp During World War II by Andrea Warren Elizabeth Bush Warren, Andrea Enemy Child: The Story of Norman Mineta, a Boy Imprisoned in a Japanese American Internment Camp During World War II. Ferguson/Holiday House, 2019 [224p] illus. with photographs Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-8234-4151-8 $22.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-8234-4197-6 $13.99 Reviewed from galleys R Gr. 5-8 Norman Mineta, youngest child of a Japanese immigrant father who worked his way from agricultural laborer to independent businessman, was eleven when Pearl Harbor was bombed and residents of Japanese heritage were forced by executive order to leave their homes and report to camps. The Minetas were first transported to temporary housing at the Santa Anita racetrack, an assignment that had a touch of glamor for the boy who was excited by the novelty of the situation. Their final destination, at the Heart Mountain War Relocation Center in Wyoming, was the real awakening, as the cold assaulted the Californians, the war dragged on, and the uncertainty of ever leaving the barbed wire encampment settled in. Warren bases her narrative on interviews as well as other primary and secondary resources, and although readers who have read other work on the internment camps will find much that is familiar, the Mineta family story offers particulars that do not emerge with such clarity in other accounts. Norman’s older siblings and his father, for example, secure work in other parts of the country and are released from camp, leaving only Norman and his mother to remain through 1943. The Minetas’ eventual reunion and their relatively smooth transition back into their post-war community (neighbors and church members secured their home and personal property) are contextualized in contrast to experiences of less fortunate returnees. Norman Mineta later served as a U.S. Representative, and his effort to gain recognition of and restitution for injustice toward internees is an essential part of his personal and America’s larger story. Black and white photographs are included, as well as multimedia recommendations, bibliography, source notes, index, and historical notes. Copyright © 2019 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Shōka and Naniwa-bushi in Inoue Hisashi's Manzanar, My Town (1993): Violence, Vulnerability, and Women's Solidarity / 井上ひさし『マンザナ、わが町』における唱歌と浪花節：暴力、脆弱性、女性の連帯

This article explores Inoue Hisashi's 1993 play, Manzanar, My Town (Manzana, waga machi), as both his critique of the Japanese imperialist past and his exploration of women's solidarity in the context of Japanese American internment during World War II. Unlike many literary works depicting internment, the play mainly targets Japanese audiences in the 1990s. In light of the Reagan administration's official apology in 1988 for internment, the play, at a glance, addresses women's solidarity against the injustice of internment. However, by depicting the simultaneous singing of two types of Japanese popular songs symbolizing Japanese imperialism—a shōka song authorized by the state to nurture schoolchildren's national pride and naniwa-bushi chanting that promoted patriotism for adult audiences—Inoue also situates internment as a site where the female Japanese American characters uncritically celebrate their homeland Japan while revealing their ignorance of how other Asians suffered from Japanese imperialism. The latter revelation emerges when one of these female internees turns out to be a Chinese American "spy" whose father was killed by the Japanese authorities in China. The collective singing of the Japanese songs leads them to mobilize their vulnerability derived from their Japanese ancestry, the sole reason for them to face persecution, and to eventually protest against both American and Japanese imperialism. The harmonized voices of the Japanese American women illuminate how Inoue recreates the story of internment to challenge the Japanese public of his time on selective forgetting of empire, while addressing the importance of women's solidarity against injustice.