Critical Race, Indigeneity, and Relationality

Gendered Public Memories of Japanese American World War II Incarceration

Wendi Yamashita

• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Year: 2024
• ISBN:
  9781439920411
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Japanese Americans have long contended with settler colonization and mass criminalization by the state, most notably during the WWII era when they were forced into incarceration camps. In Carceral Entanglements, Wendi Yamashita asks, how do narratives of worth and success that make Japanese Americans legible to the state come to be? What are the consequences of such narratives? Carceral Entanglements features interviews, archival research, and texts to explore racial violence and patriotic masculinity and explain how Japanese American history and identity are publicly memorialized. Yamashita examines museums, digital archives, pilgrimages, and student-run and performed plays to understand how Japanese Americans occupy a "contradictory location" produced by the state. She also addresses historical erasure, race relations and the struggle for redress and reparations. Carceral Entanglements is about the interlocking relationship Japanese American incarceration memories have to the prison industrial complex and the settler colonial logics that at times unknowingly sustain it.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. From Distance to Proximity, Japanese Americanness and Blackness: The Limitations of Post-Redress Japanese American Incarceration Narratives
• 2. The Intimate Connection among Truth, Memory, and Life: Refusal in the Densho Digital Archive
• 3. The Colonial and the Carceral: Building Relationships between Japanese Americans and Indigenous Groups in the Owens Valley
• 4. NSU Cultural Night and Generational Transmissions of Memory: Performative Disruptions and Other Futures
• Conclusion: The Shifting Futures of Japanese American Memory from 9/11 to the COVID-19 Pandemic
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index