Panel: Agency, Imprisonment, and Practices of Memory
Copanelists: Simon Rolston and Deanna Rymhs
A little known fact about the American World War II internment of civilians is that the US Department of Justice targeted, seized, and imprisoned over 7,000 US Japanese residents, as early as December 7, 1941, mainly based on their immigration status as Japanese nationals. Nearly 900 were from Hawai‘i; of those, over 700 were exiled to concentration camps on the mainland and suffered varying effects of unwarranted captivity.
In this illustrated presentation, the speaker will discuss forms of personal and public literacy produced in these camps, particularly by civilian internees from Hawai‘i, among them her maternal grandfather. Although the postwar silence of the Issei (the immigrant generation) on their internment was common in many families and threatens erasure, their leadership, intellect, emotions, and creativity were often manifested most profoundly in writing and other forms of cultural literacy performed in the camps. These media may be interpreted not only as forms of expression, but as matters and manners of personal record and remembrance, and arguably, as forms of resistance to captivity. The process of broadly translating the textual and non-textual production of the Issei internees thus serves as a form of personally negotiated testimony through time and space by descendants as it yields/establishes a public history.
In the context of hegemonic effacement and a post-9/11 world, constructing an American personal and communal memory, as well as a recorded history, of this aspect of the internment is essential to our understanding of the most intimate and human perspectives on the Justice Department’s mass incarceration.
Gail Y. Okawa is Professor of English at Youngstown State University, where she teaches courses in American multicultural studies, life writing studies, and sociolinguistics. She has authored numerous articles on the politics of language, literacy, culture, identity, and pedagogy. Her current work-in-progress, tentatively titled More Than a Mug Shot, is a book-length study of the little known captivity and literacy experiences of Hawai‘i’s Japanese immigrants who were subjected to US Justice Department internment during World War II.