Performance in the Wartime Archive: Michio Ito at the Alien Enemy Hearing Board

Figure 1.

From the Report of the Alien Enemy Hearing Board, February 13, 1942.

Courtesy of World War II Japanese Internee Cards, 1941–1947, The National Archives.

The day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the recently formed Federal Bureau of Investigation ordered the incarceration of 770 Japanese and Japanese American "alien enemies."¹ These arrests came two months before Executive Order 9066, which infamously called for the mass incarceration of 110,000 people of Japanese descent on the West Coast of the United States.² Among these initial 770 alien enemies was the modernist dancer and choreographer Michio Ito. In the documents establishing his detention, the Alien Enemy Hearing Board found Ito to be "an artist of artistic temperament, striking appearance, fine manners, cultured, educated and capable of any and all sorts of propaganda, espionage and sabotage."³ In this essay, I interrogate this sentence's central conjunction, the grammatical choreography that links art, culture, and education to propaganda, espionage, and sabotage.

The story of Ito's remarkable career surfaces frequently, if passingly, in the fields of modernism, theatre and dance studies and, most recently, Asian American criticism. But the period of his incarceration has yet to be addressed; it typically is dismissed as an unfortunate interruption to an artistic life.⁴ I argue that rather than being an interruption, Ito's incarceration and eventual deportation are the troubling culmination of his always-exceptional critical reception in Europe and the United States. My purpose in restaging Ito's makeshift trial is not to exonerate him—although his fate after the war suggests ambivalence if not innocence—but to examine the shared hermeneutics of law and art to indicate how swiftly a performance of otherness can shift from exotic and interesting to dangerous and in need of discipline. By examining the archival traces of his hearing, I show how the same "artistic temperament" that brings Ito to collaborate with W. B. Yeats and to dance for the Queen of England leads to his incarceration as a threat to American national security. Critics applaud Ito's artistic range and his unique combination of influences, and it is this very ambiguity in performance that troubles the Hearing Board. As the records reflect, Ito inspires juridical anxiety, and he is eventually imprisoned not for his actions but for the elusiveness of his character, that is, for being an artist of artistic temperament.

Ito's story recalls that familiar connection between performance and performativity. He is, after all, a performing artist incarcerated with a clear performative statement, in J. L. Austin's sense: The Hearing Board officially names something (Ito as a dangerous alien enemy), and that naming does something (formalizes his indefinite incarceration). Despite the seeming ease of this critical billing, neither the frames of theatrical nor linguistic performativity fully account for Ito's work or for his treatment—and neither does the pun that rhetorically connects them. In their 1995 introduction to Performance and Performativity, Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick expressed relief that finally these intersecting fields were being treated as "an active question," as "something more than a pun or an unexamined axiom."⁵ Yet in light of the widely accepted "performative turn," the rich discursive intersection that Parker and Sedgwick describe now too often retreats to that axiomatic shorthand, to the posture of a passive answer.

To read extraordinary performances and performatives—including those Austin famously discounts as theatrical, "infelicitous," or "parasitic"—requires a flexible set of tactics within and across disciplinary frames; it requires keeping open and returning to active questions.⁶ Recognizing the principles of a "generalized iterability" and "a pervasive theatricality common to stage and world alike," scholars such as Parker and Sedgwick instructively unpack the productive ways in which identity is constructed and disciplined through isolatable features such as speech, acts, conduct, and perhaps even temperament.⁷ Recent scholarship has extended this critical model to examine the interplay of the law, the body, and discourses of performativity in the historical archive. Working with materials from across...