Enemy Aliens Research Articles

Patriotism and Culture during World War I

Patriotism and Culture during World War I Colleen M. Moore V. B. Aksenov, Slukhi, obrazy, emotsii: Massovye nastroeniia rossiian v gody voiny i revoliutsii (1914–1918) (Rumors, Images, Emotions: The Mass Moods of Russians in the Years of War and Revolution [1914–18]). 992 pp. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2020. ISBN-13 978-5444812105. K. A. Tarasov, ed., Kul´tury patriotizma v period Pervoi mirovoi voiny: Sbornik statei (Cultures of Patriotism in World War I: A Collection of Articles), ed. B. I. Kolonitskii. 318 pp. St. Petersburg: Izdatel´stvo Evropeiskogo universiteta v Sankt-Peterburge, 2020. ISBN-13 978-5943802850. During World War I, Russian officials seemed obsessed with assessing popular moods. The police were required to compile monthly reports that summarized the moods of the population under their jurisdiction, in addition to the separate incident reports that documented criminal activities.1 Starting in October 1915, the Ministry of the Interior ordered the empire's provincial gendarme administrations (the secret police) to fill out a monthly questionnaire that solicited Russian subjects' attitudes on a wide variety of issues connected with the war effort: the food supply situation, the resettlement of refugees, the presence of prisoners-of-war in the rear, and the spread of the cooperative movement, to name just a few.2 [End Page 425] Still reeling from the events of 1904–6, during which Russia experienced a disastrous defeat in its war against Japan and a revolution that weakened the power of the autocracy, the tsarist regime's objectives in surveilling public opinion were twofold: to ensure Russia's victory in the current war, and to stave off another revolution.3 Based on subsequent developments, the regime appears to have failed on both accounts. Russia was not alone in conducting such assessments. Most belligerent powers, to a greater or lesser degree, attempted to gauge popular attitudes during the war. This preoccupation with moods stemmed from the fact that World War I required the mass mobilization of civilian populations that were deeply divided politically, economically, and often ethnically. To overcome the atomization associated with modern society and unite the people, to each other and to the state, for the realization of war aims, political and military leaders tried to foster and appeal to their subjects' patriotic sentiments. Similarly, political parties, classes, and ethnic or national groups participated in patriotic demonstrations to solidify their membership in a given polity or community at war. But what does patriotism look like, and how does one harness it? These questions concerned Russia's ministers and military high command, who debated whether their country's mostly peasant conscripts would fight for a Russian national idea or required material enticements.4 They have also concerned historians. Writing in 1995, Hubertus Jahn argued that the failure of Russian patriotic culture to articulate a unified vision of the Russian nation explained the success of the revolution: in popular imaginations, there existed no concept of Russia worth preserving.5 Subsequent English-language histories of World War I in Russia evaluated the tsarist regime's (in)ability to foster a Russian national identity, whether through military conscription, the identification of enemy aliens, or the resettlement of refugees.6 The two books examined here offer new approaches and answers to these questions [End Page 426] and suggest that patriotism assumed complex, sometimes paradoxical, and often unpredictable forms. ________ Cultures of Patriotism originated from an international conference that was held on the occasion of the centenary of World War I in June 2014 at the European University in St. Petersburg and organized by Laura Engelstein and Boris Kolonitskii. The volume includes chapters on patriotic culture in Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany, Belgium, France, the United States, Italy, and the Ottoman Empire, which, taken together, highlight three key patterns or trends in wartime manifestations of patriotism across national (or imperial) borders. The first of these trends concerns the coexistence and interdependence of loyalty to a national community and loyalty to an imperial polity. The postwar creation of new nation-states across much of East-Central Europe retroactively imposed a false antagonism between national and imperial identities that did not necessarily exist during the war proper. Conversely, for some national minorities, allegiance to an imperial...

“An Impulse to Transfigure and Render New”—The Anglo-Austrian Music Society in Wartime and Early Post-War Britain

The Anglo-Austrian Music Society was founded in London in 1942 by Ferdinand Rauter—an Austrian-born musician who had made his name arranging and performing songs from various folk traditions with soprano Engel Lund. Rauter spent much of 1940 interned on the Isle of Man as an ‘enemy alien,’ a designation visited upon some 70,000 refugees and other foreign-born residents in the United Kingdom during the Second World War. In the wake of that internment, he founded and co-founded a series of musically oriented organizations culminating with the Anglo-Austrian Music Society. The Society was born out of and embodied a particular constellation of mobility—an entanglement of patterns of movement, mobile practices, and representations of mobility—that owed its existence to Britain’s geopolitical situation in the years leading up to and comprising the war. Drawing on work by human geographers, this article examines the intertwined elements of this constellation—including migratory movements from Nazi occupied Europe to Britain; ideas about mobility, nation, and musical creativity; and practices of regulating the movements of migrant musicians. Making sense of these entanglements is essential to understanding both the genesis of the Society and the creative successes of the mobile, contingent community its key participants cultivated in Britain.

Humanitarian Initiatives on the Territory of the German Empire during the First World War (on the Examples of Treatment of the Russian Civilians)

The article presents the variety of the humanitarian aid to the Russian enemy aliens in Germany during the First World War. Compositional the author distinguishes three categories of enemy aliens: Russian subjects detained at the beginning of the war, who returned to Russia after some months; confined persons, which means detained, deported and restricted male, who stayed in Germany until the end of the war; internees, who were kept in German camps. Officially, the interests of all Russian enemy aliens were represented by the Spanish Embassy. In addition to the support of the Embassy of Spain, three areas of humanitarian assistance to Russian enemy aliens could be specificated: support from the local population and professional communities, humanitarian initiatives of the International and National Committees of the Red Cross and also actions of other philanthropic institutions. The author describes special aspects of the humanitarian aid to each category of enemy aliens. So the first category receive help from the German professional associations, international and national committees of the Red Cross. It was noted that the support of confined persons is some of the most unknown part: they received help mostly from the professional communities and the local population. The help of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), national Red Cross committees from the neutral states, Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA) is applicable to the interned captive civilians. Initiatives by prince Max von Baden also took their part in supporting the internees. The article also shows the support by the English and American internees, who shared their parcels with Russian captive civilians, discovers the humanitarian actions of the Relief Committees in the internment camps. The author highlights that the perception of humanitarian aid by citizens and governments were often in conflict.

РОССИЙСКИЕ ГРАЖДАНСКИЕ ПЛЕННЫЕ В ГЕРМАНИИ (1914-1918): РЕПРЕЗЕНТАТИВНОСТЬ ДОКУМЕНТОВ ЗЕМЕЛЬНОГО АРХИВА САКСОНИИ

The article considers the informative value of the documents in the Saxon Main State Archive (Dresden, Germany) about persecution and restrictions during the First World War against the “enemy aliens”, subjects of the Russian Empire. The main idea in the documents of the archive funds is the rationale for the need of civilian captivity to ensure national security. The archive funds contain information about how the persecution of “enemy aliens” began in Germany, reveal the specifics in the situation with such categories of civilian captives as the interned and confined ones. The documents illustrate the position that the policy of internment is a mirror policy. It depends on the decisions of the government of the Russian Empire in regard to German subjects, who were deported and interned on the territory of Russia. There is an important information is contained on possible ways of humanitarian support for Russian civilian prisoners. The analysis of documents confirms that the least studied segment of the phenomenon of civilian captivity during the First World War is their repatriation

Enemies Among Us: The Relocation, Internment & Repatriation of German, Italian & Japanese Americans during the Second World War by John E. Schmitz

Reviewed by: Enemies Among Us: The Relocation, Internment & Repatriation of German, Italian & Japanese Americans during the Second World War by John E. Schmitz Steph Hinnershitz Enemies Among Us: The Relocation, Internment & Repatriation of German, Italian & Japanese Americans during the Second World War. By John E. Schmitz. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. Pp. 386. Notes, bibliography, index.) John E. Schmitz’s Enemies Among Us: The Relocation, Internment & Repatriation of German, Italian & Japanese Americans during the Second World War is an ambitious work that sets out to expand and complicate the story of wartime detention in the United States. Using a variety of records on the forced removal of Japanese Americans, German Americans, and Italian Americans, Schmitz “examines the causes, conditions, and consequences of America’s selective relocation and internment of its own citizens and enemy aliens” (2). Schmitz argues that historians have largely focused on the “relocation and internment” of Japanese Americans and suggests that broadening this approach to include German and Italian Americans also globalizes this moment by connecting it to the repatriation of enemy aliens in exchange for American civilian internees abroad. Enemies Among Us also posits that scholars should question the argument that race fueled Japanese American internment. Schmitz provides the first full-length monograph on the policies behind and experiences of detention for all three groups while also highlighting challenges in comparing their internment. Schmitz organizes the book into nine chapters. Chapter 1 provides a useful discussion of the precedent World War I set for World War II internment, while chapters 2 through 4 explain how fears of fifth-column threats from Germans, Italians, and Japanese Americans from the late 1930s through 1940 set the stage for another round of wartime internment. Long before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as Immigration and Naturalization Services, conducted investigations on potentially subversive Germans, Italians, and Japanese Americans. But, as Schmitz explains in chapter 5, Pearl Harbor appeared to validate the fears of political leaders and military officials that fifth columnists were responsible for the attack. Chapters 6 and 7 detail [End Page 408] how rumors and propaganda contributed to relocation and internment policies nationwide and on both the East and West Coasts. Chapter 8 provides a fascinating discussion of the connections between the internment and repatriation of enemy aliens in exchange for American civilian internees abroad, and chapter 9 concludes the book with a disappointingly short yet useful description of internment experiences, particularly the psychological impact of detention in the Crystal City family internment camp in Texas. Schmitz’s in-depth study is a useful and much-needed beginning for a new direction in this period of America’s wartime history: taking a broad view of detention across ethnic and racial groups. His linkage to repatriation and internment policies in the Western Hemisphere will be valuable to many scholars, but his decision to include Japanese American incarceration in his study detracts from his overall goals and undermines his argument in key places. His introduction could provide a more thorough discussion of his choice of terminology for the forced removal and imprisonment of more than 110,000 Japanese Americans (most of them second-generation, American-born Nisei) to clarify for the reader when he is discussing foreign-born Issei and Nisei. This muddies his argument that including Japanese American incarceration within the study of enemy alien internment is useful. Schmitz explains that key figures found it difficult to differentiate between loyal and disloyal Japanese Americans regardless of their citizenship status, which supports other historians’ claims that racism—while perhaps not as key for the internment of enemy aliens—was in fact a crucial factor in the unique set of circumstances faced by Japanese Americans from the West Coast. Schmitz does, however, provide food for thought in interrogating how detention and surveillance across ethnic and racial minority groups created a policy with broad implications. His work will be important for shaping future studies about wartime internment. Steph Hinnershitz National WWII Museum Copyright © 2022 The Texas State Historical Association

Revealing the Maltese Tripolini, Victims of Italian Internment Policies During the Second World War (1940–1945)

Abstract: In June 1940 Italy set in motion a series of provisions for the internment of enemy aliens on the mainland and its colonies. Over the next few years, the entire community of Maltese Tripolini – all British subjects by birth or ancestry who for decades had been settled in Tripoli and Benghazi – faced detention, exile, expulsion, and deportation. The Italian Governor of Libya cited the need ‘to repress the espionage inherent in treacherous elements’ among the ‘political and military reasons’ for the deportations. Despite the nature of the circumstances, historiography has ignored the whole episode. Using untapped primary sources held in Maltese, British and Italian archives, this paper delves into the deportation of whole families from the Italian colony of Libya and explains the spatial, temporal, and legal contexts. These same sources have made possible the naming of all the anglo-maltesi , known to have been placed in concentration camps or subjected to internamento in comune libero . It concludes that 1,672 Maltese Tripolini were deported from Tripoli to Italy, equivalent to nine-tenths of the community. Sources also reveal the names of those born in concentration camps and the circumstances of those who lost their lives during internment.

30 Years Later, Re-Examining the “Pretty Soldier”

December of 2021 marks the 30th anniversary of Naoko Takeuchi’s Bishojo Senshi Sailor Moon (Pretty Soldier Sailor Moon) manga (1991-1997), and March of 2022 will mark the 30th anniversary of Toei Animation’s Bishojo Senshi Sailor Moon anime (1992-1997). The series follows Sailor Moon as she defends Tokyo and the galaxy against alien enemies. While there seems to be controversy over whether Sailor Moon can be read as a feminist text, Sailor Moon still maintains its status as a feminist and queer magical girl series. Although there has been some scholarship on the magical girl genre and gender roles in manga and anime, there has not been much written about Sailor Moon specifically. As an influential series that is still relevant in pop culture, further analysis of this text is necessary to identify its feminist and queer nature. Despite being three decades old, Sailor Moon still maintains its status as a feminist and queer magical girl series. My argument is that on the surface, the Sailor Moon franchise appears to be a heteronormative and an (arguably) antifeminist series with traditional heterosexual relationships and gender stereotypes, but upon closer examination, the manga and anime series subvert patriarchal and gender stereotypes in both obvious and discrete ways.

Gardening the interior: Odo Strewe inside the 1980s

Odo Strewe arrived in New Zealand in 1938, a refugee from Nazi Germany. After release from internment on Matiu (Somes Island) as an Enemy Alien during World War Two, he married and moved to Auckland where he started a landscape design and construction business. Strewe had explored the idea of plants inside buildings in the very first house that he had made for his family in Glen Eden, Auckland in 1949. An Australian journalist writing about the house described the interior "with tropical paw paws almost coming indoors to join forces with the banana that is really growing and fruiting, right inside the house." Strewe continued to advocate for this disciplinary contest in subsequent years by writing about indoor gardening in New Zealand Modern Homes and Gardens and designing gardens that challenged the boundaries between landscape and the interior. This paper will explore the design strategies of two of Strewe's interior gardens in the 1960s as he developed this aspect of his landscape design practice.

The Scandal and Betrayal at Stade Colombes

Abstract This article examines the French government's mass internment at the start of the Second World War of all adult male nationals of Greater Germany, which included Austrians, Saarlanders, and Czechs, who were now designated as enemy aliens. It focuses on the largest of the assembly centers, Stade Colombes, twelve kilometers northwest of Paris, where the roughly twenty thousand of those who lived in the Paris region were ordered to report. This article makes use of military documents, newspaper reports, diaries, and memoirs to highlight the experience of the men from the first news of the war, through the conditions they encountered in Stade Colombes to their subsequent transfers to other camps. Following the trajectory of the German-born Catholic painter Hans Reichel (1892–1958) from his reaction to the news of the war to his release five months later will enable the reader to grasp more vividly what the men endured.

Port of No Return: Enemy Alien Internment in World War II New Orleans by Marilyn Grace Miller

Reviewed by: Port of No Return: Enemy Alien Internment in World War II New Orleans by Marilyn Grace Miller Daniel Hutchinson Port of No Return: Enemy Alien Internment in World War II New Orleans. By Marilyn Grace Miller. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. Pp. xx, 273. $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8071-7527-9.) Decades of activism and historical research have placed Japanese internment as a central element in the narrative of the American home front during World War II. Less attention has been paid to the incarceration of "enemy aliens" of German and Italian descent under the U.S. government's Enemy Alien Control Program (p. 5). Historians such as Max Paul Friedman and Arnold Krammer have written valuable studies examining this internment experience. Marilyn Grace Miller makes a substantial contribution to this scholarship in Port of No Return: Enemy Alien Internment in World War II New Orleans. This engaging account explores the history of Camp Algiers, an internment facility in New Orleans and an important transit point in the international history of wartime detention. Miller argues that "New Orleans represented a 'port of no return,' a brink that, once crossed, could not be traversed in reverse" (p. xii). As in the Japanese American experience, presidential executive orders authorized the extrajudicial detention of potential spies and those affiliated with pro-Nazi and pro-Fascist political organizations. Yet fears of Axis infiltration throughout the Western Hemisphere prompted a wider dragnet of detention. At the request of the U.S. State Department, governments in Latin America executed their own preventive arrests. However, this process was marred by shoddy intelligence, scant evidence, racial prejudice, expropriation of property, and bribery. Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe were among those detained as potential Axis agents. These refugees were [End Page 801] transported to the United States and interned alongside ardent supporters of National Socialism in a network of detention facilities in Texas, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, and other states outside the South. Camp Algiers became a place of refuge for some of those Jewish internees. After desperate efforts to communicate their plight, many Jewish internees were transferred to Camp Algiers, which gained a reputation for being friendly to "anti-Nazis" (p. 34). The facility had the capacity to hold up to 250 inmates. Miller skillfully reconstructs the biographies of the camp's internees, utilizing case files held in the National Archives, correspondence with refugee aid agencies, and sources from Europe and Latin America. While the conditions of confinement were generally humane, indefinite (and frequently unjust) detentions left enduring trauma. Suicide and the stress of internment took the lives of some internees. Yet Miller complicates the story of what is sometimes called the "Camp of the Innocents" (p. 34). The U.S. military also detained notorious figures such as exiled Nazi propagandist Kurt Ludecke at Camp Algiers. Miller explores how the shifting rationales of U.S. authorities shaped how they classified the political, religious, and racial identities of internees. Such classifications could change quickly. Ironically, the internment process opened a path for some so-called enemy aliens to claim American citizenship. For others, departure from Camp Algiers represented repatriation and an uncertain future. Port of No Return concludes with an examination of the legacies of wartime detention. While the Japanese internment experience prompted redress and reparation, the first congressional hearings on the Enemy Alien Control Program occurred only in 2009. Yet a full reckoning of this history is overdue. Miller notes that the precedent of internment continues to shape policy and law, particularly for detainees captured during the War on Terror and migrants seeking asylum. "Many aspects of that precedent––indefinite detention without hearings, family separation, the manipulation of detention policy and detainee populations for political purposes and economic gain, repatriation of aliens to hostile environments––are still with us in some form today," Miller notes (p. 207). Camp Algiers itself continued to serve various functions within the federal immigration system until 2018. While the buildings were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2019, gentrification threatens the site's future. Nonetheless, the installation's past is well chronicled in Port of No Return, a fitting tribute to the struggles of those...

Review: Enemies among Us: The Relocation, Internment, and Repatriation of German, Italian, and Japanese Americans during the Second World War, by John E. Schmitz

As we watch in horror the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we are again faced with the question of how much responsibility individual citizens should bear for the atrocities their political leaders inflict upon other nations. We also are forced to think what should be done with the expatriates supportive of their aggressive homeland, and how the people connected to the adversarial nations through ethnic ties should be treated when they may or may not be sympathetic to their ancestral nations.John E. Schmitz’s Enemies among Us illuminates the complications posed by these questions by presenting how the U.S. government treated enemy aliens and U.S. citizens with ethnic ties with the enemies during World War II. Schmitz uses historical sources as well as personal episodes, including those of his grandparents who were incarcerated in POW camps as naturalized German Americans, to show that warring nations tend to prioritize national security concerns at the expense of individual human rights.The forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans (which Schmitz calls “relocation and evacuation”) is a prime example of the governmental abuse of its war powers. To this tragic episode of human rights violation, Schmitz adds the “internment” of German, Italian, and Japanese aliens and a smaller number of German and Italian Americans, and he tells a larger story of involuntary—and mostly wrongful—confinement of individuals whose loyalty was rendered suspicious. Schmitz’s research on the executive records, the FBI records, and the War, State, and Justice Departments’ archives reveals the comprehensive scheme of the Roosevelt Administration aiming at protecting the nation from fifth-column activities not only within the United States but in the Western Hemisphere. The earlier chapters elucidate how J. Edgar Hoover took advantage of FDR’s fear of the fifth column to transform the FBI into a formidable secret police agency. The book also offers much information on the U.S. government’s intervention into Latin American policies regarding the arrests and deportation of alleged Axis sympathizers and alien enemies.By connecting the “internment” schemes on the East and the West Coasts, this book illuminates the “internment” of Japanese nationals (Issei) in detention centers—an understudied aspect of the wartime Japanese American experiences—as a part of the larger anti-espionage federal policy. The hostage exchange scheme explains the abduction and shipment of Japanese Latin Americans along with German Axis sympathizers to the United States. Schmitz describes how the federal enemy alien policies were confusing and often shifted clumsily. In the case of the hostage exchange policy, the government had to abandon the scheme because it turned out to be more dangerous to deport subversive internees to the enemy nations than to keep them in the United States. The book illustrates the overall injustice that befell those who were labeled potentially adversarial, and the primary sources show how the U.S. enemy alien policies were poorly managed.The major problem of this book lies in its handling of the story of 110,000 Japanese Americans incarcerated in the War Relocations Centers. The book would have worked better if it had focused on the treatment of Japanese, German, and Italian enemy aliens. Schmitz carefully distinguishes the terms “internment” (detention of enemy aliens) and “relocation/evacuation” (involuntary removal of American citizens), but often his arguments become muddled throughout the book. On the latter issue, scholars in Asian American studies—such as Eiichiro Azuma (2005, 2019), Brian Masaru Hayashi (2004), Masumi Izumi (2019), and Erik K. Yamamoto, Lorraine J. Bannai, and Margaret Chon (2020)—have produced many works that explain the complex and significant roles Japanese Americans played in West Coast agriculture and in the debates related to national security and civil liberties. The book’s bibliography and many of the simplistic and faulty descriptions of the state of Japanese America before and during World War II reveal that the author was ill-prepared to explain how issues of national security, loyalty, and race intersected with one another when Japanese Americans were locked up in the inland concentration camps.

Review: The Shadow of El Centro: A History of Migrant Incarceration and Solidarity, by Jessica Ordaz

Review: <i>The Shadow of El Centro: A History of Migrant Incarceration and Solidarity</i>, by Jessica Ordaz

Enemy Aliens: Sudbury’s Italian Community during WWII

Enemy Aliens: Sudbury’s Italian Community during WWII

The Ambiguities of Being Stateless: Property Rights, Statelessness and Enemy Aliens in the United Kingdom, France, Belgium and Germany, 1914–1930

Abstract By retracing the fate of stateless people of German origin, mainly former Reich citizens, who suffered persecution as enemy aliens during the First World War and in the 1920s, the article examines the ambiguities of stateless status in terms of enjoyment of civil rights and national inclusion (and exclusion). In particular, the essay highlights how statelessness was a resource for many stateless persons of German origin to protect their property rights in administrative and judicial proceedings in the Entente countries, mainly to free their seized assets. Their story was an example of the multifaceted nature of statelessness in postwar Europe. The article focuses on the issue of the recognition of their status in Western Europe—particularly Belgium, France and the United Kingdom—in order to show the variety of criteria that guided the choices of governments and courts. In several national and imperial contexts, there was a tension between the judicial and executive powers that raised issues of sovereignty and rule of law in postwar democracies. Finally, the essay analyses the relationship between stateless persons of German origin and the Weimar Republic. On many occasions, the German state offered its diplomatic and financial support to enable those former citizens to recover their property. By analysing the diplomatic efforts and the provisions on compensation, the article points out the ambiguity around national and legal belonging to the German nation.

How the Second World War and Its Aftermath Shaped a Sense of Identity Amongst Older Italians in the North East of England

ABSTRACT Italian migrants’ experiences of hostility in the UK have remained on the margins of history. However, several older members of Italian communities live with memories of trauma and injustice experienced during their youth or in the early years of migration. Through an ethnographic approach, this study explores the impact of the Second World War amongst members of the Italian community living in the North East of England: those who lived during the war, as well as those who migrated during the following decades (1950–1970). The interpretations of historical events transmitted both down and across generations of migrants reveal how this group of people forged a process of self-definition and everyday construction of identity and belonging. This paper sheds light on how the trope of ‘enemy aliens’ has been absorbed and reiterated over time, by bringing to view the historical and political nature of identification.

Born Traitors：Abe Tomoji’s Reconstruction of “The Treason of Pieter Elberveld” and the Image of Eurasians

This article aims to clarify Japanese South-commissioned writers’ perception of Eurasians in 1940s Indonesia on the basis of Abe Tomoji’s retelling of a tale of treachery in his essay “Chi to Tsuchi to Kokoro— Eruberuferuto no koto nado” (1944.7). The treachery in question is that of Pieter Elberfeld, a Eurasian man accused of plotting a rebellion against Dutch East Indies Company authorities with Javanese assistance, who was then brutally executed. In 1930s Japan, this story was symbolically employed by the “anti-Western” movement. Abe portrays Eurasians as people who act without clear reasons because of their mixed-blood nature, and he represents them as “born traitors.” By employing the notion of the “contact zone” as a conceptual framework through which to interpret Abe’s essay, this article argues that this portrayal of Eurasians is related to the Japanese military policy towards enemy aliens in Indonesia. This policy exempted Eurasians from internment in camps alongside Europeans if they could prove their Asian descent. As a result, many Eurasians who once prided themselves on their European ancestry began to identify themselves as Indonesians. This article’s findings fill the void in previous research on Abe as a South-commissioned writer, which primarily focuses on Indonesian scenic beauty and the eroticization of Dutch women there.

Refuse/Refuge: Castaways on Islands of Exception

At various points in their (post)colonial histories, the border-protective politics of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand have mobilized off-shore islands as spaces of “inclusive exclusion”. Yet, even as spaces of exception and/or exclusion, off-shore islands dismantle inside/outside distinctions. I discuss a selection of Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand novels featuring both literal and metaphorical islands used for removal, internment or containment of Indigenous peoples and wartime “enemy aliens”. Through their attention to the poetics of island form, and coasts as more-than-human spaces, the novels underscore how islands bring the relation between inside and outside into question, complicating the articulation of borders.

People in Cold Storage: The Cruel Limbos of Historical and Current Detainees in the United States

People in Cold Storage:The Cruel Limbos of Historical and Current Detainees in the United States Lori A. Flores (bio) Elliott Young, Forever Prisoners: How the United States Made the World's Largest Immigrant Detention System. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. xi + 280 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95 The Oxford definition of limbo is "an uncertain period of awaiting a decision or resolution" or "a state of neglect or oblivion." Some synonyms are: unfinished, incomplete, suspended, put off, on ice, in cold storage, abandoned, forgotten. In the realm of immigration, the word and act of deportation have a sense of decisiveness to them. Yet half a million people are detained in the U.S. every year, and the conditions of detention are much more mysterious and liminal, and intentionally designed to be so (p. 18). In Forever Prisoners, Elliott Young homes in on case studies of communal and individual detention in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present. He seeks to prove how the country's two vast systems of policing and immigrant detention have been inextricably linked during this entire time period, and not just in recent decades. Over the centuries, the United States has used different places to incarcerate immigrants—prisons, islands, insane asylums, hastily-constructed camps—and maintained an historical and consistent concern about detaining foreigners to the point that "[r]oughly the same proportion of immigrants were deprived of their liberty then as now" (p. 7). Young's book joins other recent works that tie carceral history and immigration history together, including Adam Goodman's The Deportation Machine (2020), Laura Briggs's Taking Children (2020), Jenna M. Loyd and Alison Mountz's Boats, Borders, and Bases (2018), and Kelly Lytle-Hernández's City of Inmates (2017). Structurally, through "select granular experiences of detention" that cross time, space, and different foreign populations, Young shows readers how America "built the world's largest system for imprisoning immigrants" (p. 3). Beginning in the late nineteenth century at the height of anti-Chinese violence and xenophobia, the U.S. government held hundreds of Chinese people in federal prisons off the coast of Washington State, with unpredictable waits [End Page 217] before their deportations. Meanwhile, on the East Coast during the early twentieth century, the intertwined medical pathologization and criminalization of immigrants made insane asylums, hospitals, and "charitable" institutions the new detention centers for thousands of foreigners. Then, during World War II, the U.S. abducted "enemy aliens" from Latin America and Europe and placed them in immigrant detention/labor camps in Texas and New Mexico. The 1980s brought waves of darker-skinned and poorer refugees from the Caribbean, and the U.S. government held over 125,000 Cubans and 23,000 Haitians, prolonging determination on their cases to examine their criminal histories. A confluence of factors in the 1990s—greater militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, governmental expansion of the range of crimes for which immigrants could be deported, and courts' hyper-punishment of low-level offenses—amplified what Juliet Stumpf has termed "crimmigration," or the merging of criminal and immigration law in America (p. 12). With local police now given federal powers to arrest and detain immigrants, millions of people live, work, and parent in fear of being apprehended every day. Ending with the case of a Central American woman haunted by a crime in her California youth that triggered her deportation a decade later and the separation from her U.S.-born children, Young illustrates the plight of numerous mixed-immigration-status families in America. Chapter One drops readers two miles off the coast of Tacoma, Washington on McNeil Island, a territorial jail that opened in 1875 with just three prisoners but soon became "the western birthplace of immigrant incarceration" (p. 24). Angel Island has received more scholarly attention, but unauthorized Chinese, Mexican, Canadian, and other immigrants were sent to McNeil for several decades. The island joined a nationwide network of carceral institutions (jails, workhouses, prisons) that held a disproportionate population of foreigners at the turn of the twentieth century. By the 1920s, Young observes, illegal entry had fallen away as the primary recorded violation for immigrants in favor of...

New books &amp; media

New books &amp; media

Walter Bruno Gratzer (1932–2021): In his own words, as far as possible

Miranda Robertson commemorates the life, remarkable times and witty and erudite writing of protein chemist and biophysicist Walter Gratzer.