Saturday, May 7, 2022

May 7-8, 2022: Scholarship on Internment

[May 3rd marks the 80th anniversary of the infamous broadside through which the Roosevelt administration ordered Japanese Americans to surrender themselves to the internment policy (or incarceration—I’m convinced of the need for that term change, but most folks still know it as internment so I’m using that in my series title). So this week I’ve AmericanStudied images of that horrific history, leading up to this special weekend post on scholars helping us remember it.]

A handful of the many amazing scholars doing the work.

1)      Heidi Kim: Among the many important subjects that my friend Heidi Kim has covered in her impressive and evolving career is internment, most especially through her editing of Taken from the Paradise Isle: The Hoshida Family Story (2015).

2)      Stephanie Hinnershitz: If you want a definitive scholarly history and analysis of internment/incarceration, start with Hinnershitz’s recent book Japanese American Incarceration: The Camps and Coerced Labor During World War II (2021).

3)      Karen Inouye: The best work I’ve encountered on the aftermaths of incarceration, including the kinds of Japanese American activism I traced in many of this week’s posts, is Inouye’s excellent book The Long Afterlife of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration (2016).

4)      Cherstin Lyon: A crucial starting point for my own thoughts (in Of Thee I Sing) on Japanese Americans and debates over patriotism was Lyon’s phenomenal book Prisons and Patriots: Japanese American Wartime Citizenship, Civil Disobedience, and Historical Memory (2012).

5)      Densho Encyclopedia: I didn’t keep track of how many of the hyperlinks in this week’s series sent y’all to Densho, but I know it was a ton. This isn’t just the best scholarly and online resource about internment/incarceration—it’s one of the best scholarly web projects out there, period.

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Scholarly voices—or other stories or histories—you’d add?

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