Imaging Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and the Body

As we have been reminded by the renewed acceptance of racial profiling, and the detention and deportation of hundreds of immigrants of Arab and Muslim descent on unknown charges following September 11, in times of national crisis we take refuge in the visual construction of citizenship in order to imagine ourselves as part of a larger, cohesive national American community.
Beginning with another moment of national historical trauma--December 7, 1941 and the subsequent internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans--Imaging Japanese America unearths stunning and seldom seen photographs of Japanese Americans by the likes of Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and Toyo Mitatake. In turn, Elena Tajima Creef examines the perspective from inside, as visualized by Mine Okubo's Maus-like dramatic cartoon and by films made by Asian Americans about the internment experience. She then traces the ways in which contemporary representations of Japanese Americans in popular culture are inflected by the politics of historical memory from World War II. Creef closes with a look at the representation of the multiracial Japanese American body at the turn of the millennium.

Author: Elena Tajima Creef
Publisher: New York University Press
Published: 01/01/2004
Pages: 245
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.74lbs
Size: 8.78h x 5.86w x 0.65d
ISBN: 9780814716229

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 01/01/2004 pg. 139

About the Author
Creef, Elena Tajima: - Elena Tajima Creef is Associate Professor of Women's Studies at Wellesley College.