The Spectacle of Japanese American Trauma

Abstract

This book contests the notion that the U.S. government’s internment policies during World War II had little impact on the postwar lives of most Japanese Americans. After the curtain was lowered on the war following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many Americans behaved as if the “theatre of war” had ended and life could return to normal. This book demonstrates that this theatrical logic of segregating the real from the staged grew out of the manner in which internment was agitated for and instituted by the U.S. government and media. During the war, Japanese Americans struggled to define themselves within the web of this theatrical logic. The political spectacles staged by the FBI and the American mass media were heir to a theatricalizing discourse that can be traced back to Commodore Matthew Perry’s “opening” of Japan in 1853. The book provides a detailed reconstruction of the FBI’s raids on Japanese American communities. It also makes clear how wartime newspapers framed the evacuation and internment so as to discourage white Americans from sympathizing with their former neighbors of Japanese descent. The book juxtaposes analysis of these political spectacles with a look at cultural performances staged by Issei and Nisei at two of the most prominent “relocation centers”: California’s Manzanar and Tule Lake. The camp performances enlarge our understanding of the impulse to create art under oppressive conditions. Taken together, wartime political spectacles and the performative attempts at resistance by internees demonstrate the logic of racial performativity that underwrites American national identity.

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