Nikkei in the Americas

Japanese Americans Writing to Redress Mass Incarceration

Mira Shimabukuro

• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781607324010
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Relocating Authority examines the ways Japanese Americans have continually used writing to respond to the circumstances of their community's mass imprisonment during World War II. Using both Nikkei cultural frameworks and community-specific history for methodological inspiration and guidance, Mira Shimabukuro shows how writing was used privately and publicly to individually survive and collectively resist the conditions of incarceration.

Examining a wide range of diverse texts and literacy practices such as diary entries, note-taking, manifestos, and multiple drafts of single documents, Relocating Authority draws upon community archives, visual histories, and Asian American history and theory to reveal the ways writing has served as a critical tool for incarcerees and their descendants. Incarcerees not only used writing to redress the "internment" in the moment but also created pieces of text that enabled and inspired further redress long after the camps had closed.

Relocating Authority highlights literacy's enduring potential to participate in social change and assist an imprisoned people in relocating authority away from their captors and back to their community and themselves. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of ethnic and Asian American rhetorics, American studies, and anyone interested in the relationship between literacy and social justice.

1
Writing-to-Redress

Attending to Nikkei Literacies of Survivance

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Much of the past is, of course, irrevocably silenced: gestures, conversations, and original manuscripts can never be recaptured. Silence and silencing still greet us in every library, every archive, every text, every newscast—at every turn . . . Still, while most of the female and male tradition has been regrettably lost, enormous amounts of material survive.

—Glenn (2004)

As we suspected, contrary to the stereotype, Chinese and Japanese immigrants were a literate people from literate civilizations whose presses, theaters, opera houses, and artistic enterprises rose as quickly as their social and political institutions. They are not few. They are not gone. They are not stupid. They were only waiting to be asked.

—Chan (1991)

T]he more he questioned her, the more he was her accuser and murderer. The more he killed her, the deeper her silence became. What the Grand Inquisitor has never learned is that the avenues of speech are the avenues of silence. To hear my mother, to attend to her speech, to attend the sound of stone, he must first become silent. Only when he enters her abandonment, will he be released from his own.

—Kogawa (1981)

Two years into my PhD program, a bunch of us TAs are sitting around our six crammed-in desks in the windowless office we share talking about dissertation ideas. When I say I’ve been thinking about the political writing in the World War II incarceration camps, about the loud and quiet ways literacy helped Japanese Americans perform rhetorical activity, Adam asks if I’ve read Unspoken, Cheryl Glenn’s (2004) new book on the “rhetoric of silence.” I’m intrigued, having read Glenn’s (1997) Rhetoric Retold and her efforts to “regender” the rhetorical tradition. But I also know that work has now been done in Asian American studies on the issue of silence for several years, as poets, artists, activists, and scholars have long complicated quiet, orientalist model minority–type representations of people racialized as Asian.¹ The litany of titles speak, yell even: Breaking Silence, Breaking the Silence, Shedding Silence, YELL-oh Girls!, Aiiieeeee!, The Big Aiiieeeee!, Tell This Silence.² I ask Adam if Glenn cites Articulate Silences by King-Kok Cheung (1993), one of those lit theorists I read back in the day, not for any class or paper but because I was trying to understand patterns I saw in my life. A highly influential Asian American feminist literary critic, Cheung is the kind of author I would expect to see in a feminist rhetorician’s account of silence’s rhetorical possibilities. Adam hands me a library copy off of his shelf. I search the index. I flip through the text. No Cheung. No Asians. No Asian Americans. A rhetoric of silence.

From Unit 5

Japanese American Internment and the Problem of Cultural Identity: Testimony of the Interned

Writing Analytically

2. Write a paper in which you discuss the options open to people who suffer injustice because of their membership in a particular group . . . You should also consider which Nikkei responses (if any) might be useful to other oppressed groups. Alternative: Write a dialogue between X and Y concerning what people ought to do in response to an injustice . . . Write yourself into the dialogue if you wish.

(Bizzell and Herzberg 1996, 748)

This absence. This presence. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised by Glenn’s negligence. It’s just that, as Elaine Richardson so perfectly recalled Fannie Lou Hamer, I’m “sick and tired of being sick and tired” (Richardson 2003, ch. 1). I didn’t enter the PhD program with plans to focus on Asian American writing, didn’t enter with great concern that the first voice I heard wasn’t “my own.” Tired of the navel-gazing expected of so many US-trained poets, I wanted the right to reach beyond myself, wanted to recognize myself in others, wanted to come back to writing through the ways I had come in—through that felt identification with the lives of other people. Not lives of the Other, just lives beyond my own skin: El otro soy yo, el otro soy yo . . . rhetorics of solidarity integral to the political life in which I had been raised, I wanted them back . . . el pueblo unido, panethnicity, common ground, International Examiner, coalition politics, internacionalismo . . .

But I had thought, perhaps too naively, that by now, by the twenty-first century, by the time I entered the doctoral program in composition and rhetoric, the voices I would hear, at the very least, would include my own. I assumed, by now, in this day and age, when Asian Americans have supposedly made it, supposedly surpassed any gap that exists, supposedly need no affirmative action to ensure that their bodily and historical presence is accounted for in all institutions of higher education, that the voices, the rhetorics, the literacies, and the composition struggles of “my” people (read: our people) would be attended to, would not be relegated to independent study, final seminar papers, individually tailored reading lists for prelims—in short, restricted roads of individual inquiry, special interest topics, segregated study.

Fill in the gap.

This is a text about literacy practice.

This is a text about Japanese American writing.

This is a text about symbolic-meaning making and exchange.

This is a text about yearning for more than what we have now.

This is a text about standpoint.

This is a text about struggle.

This is a text about history.

And this is consciously performative,

strategically essential,

romantically engaged,

and strongly objective.³

Mira Chieko Shimabukuro

Dissertation Proposal

Relocating Authority: Japanese Americans Writing to Redress Mass Incarceration

In spring 1942, a few months after the United States officially joined World War II, the US government rounded up 110,000 of its residents of Japanese ancestry—two-thirds of them legal citizens—and sent them to what has been called, at different times by different people, internment, concentration, or incarceration camps. These incarcerated immigrants and their US-born children have often been culturally and politically constructed as the “Quiet Americans” (Hosokawa 1969), implicitly and explicitly suggesting that they not only passively consented to the institutionalized racism embodied by the camps but fully succumbed to the cultural oppression brought about by the racist hysteria during the so-called good war. However, many incarcerated Nikkei (those of Japanese heritage) resisted the racist logic of internment and often did so in writing. Even as the US government’s War Relocation Authority (WRA) controlled the location of Nikkei bodies, the composition of diaries, poetry, short fiction, petitions, letters, manifestos, and political demands all served as means by which Nikkei writers sought to redress the circumstances of camp and regain the authority to determine the course of their lives. As one body of rhetoric yet to be analyzed in comp/rhet or literacy studies, such camp-generated writing will serve as the focus for this dissertation.

I’m not exactly sure why, within the field of composition and rhetoric, our understanding of the uses of writing by US-based writers racially constructed as Asian has been so under-theorized. Even as some Asian American compositionists began to publicly reflect on their personal teaching and literacy histories (Chiang 1998, Lu 1987, Okawa 1998), for the most part, Catherine Prendergast (1998, 51) was correct when she noted in the late 1990s that “Asian-Americans don’t exist in composition studies.” Nor did we seem to exist in “the rhetorical tradition” (Bizzell and Herzberg 2001), “the legacies of literacy” (Graff 1987a), or “the nineteenth-century origins of our times” (Graff 1987b) despite the fact that people of Asian ancestry have been composing English-language texts in what is now called the United States since at least 1878, when Chinese merchants petitioned the state of California for the establishment of schools their children would be allowed to attend (Odo 2002, 33). As Jamie Candeleria Greene (1994) pointed out, these kinds of Anglocentric biases in and “misperspectives” of US literacy distort perceptions that serve as foundations for current and future policies, practices, and theories related to the teaching and history of writing.

Fortunately, over the past ten or so years, a few comp/rhet scholars have started to account for the “ways with words” (Heath 1983) generated within and out of Asian American communities by examining Asian American writing and rhetoric, as well as their sociocultural histories and contexts, through the lenses of specific genres, contrastive cultural rhetorics, and community-based literacy practices (Mao 2006; Duffy 2007; Young 2004). Subsequent dissertations have continued in this vein, using ethnography, oral history, close readings of literature composition studies, and other cultural texts to highlight the “solidarity” rhetoric of Asian American student activists (Hoang 2004), the multimodal cultural rhetorics of a Filipino American community organization (Monberg 2002), Asian American literary performances of literacy (Hiramine 2004) and “hyperliteracy” (Hasegawa 2004), and subject positions available to Asian American composition teachers (Yoon 2003). And in 2008, LuMing Mao and Morris Young brought us the first anthology on Asian American rhetoric, subsequently honored with an honorable mention for the MLA 2009 Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize. The first anthology to showcase the multiple ways that “Asian Americans use language to perform discursive act...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword: Valorizing the Vernacular
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Usage and Formatting
• 1 Writing-to-Redress: Attending to Nikkei Literacies of Survivance
• 2 Recollecting Nikkei Dissidence: The Politics of Archival Recovery and Community Self-Knowledge
• 3 ReCollected Tapestries: The Circumstances behind Writing-to-Redress
• 4 Me Inwardly before I Dared: Attending Silent Literacies of Gaman
• 5 Everyone . . . Put in a Word: The Multisources of Collective Authority behind Public Writing-to-Redress
• 6 Another Earnest Petition: ReWriting Mothers of Minidoka
• 7 Relocating Authority: Expanding the Significance of Writing-to-Redress
• Appendix A: Heart Mountain Fair Play Committee’s “Manifesto”
• Appendix B: Letter drafted by Min Yasui for the Mother’s Society of Minidoka
• Appendix C: Revision of letter from the Mother’s Society of Minidoka that was sent to authorities
• References
• Index