Artifacts of Loss: Crafting Survival in Japanese American Concentration Camps

Notes

167 Notes chapter 1 — visual accounts of loss 1. Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, on July 18, 1906, of Japanese immigrant parents. Hayakawa immigrated to the United States in 1926 and received a Ph.D. in English and American literature from the University of Wisconsin in 1935. Hayakawa supported the internment of Japanese Americans but avoided imprisonment himself, instead spending the years between 1939 and 1947 at the Armour Institute of Technology (now the Illinois Institute of Technology) in Chicago as an English professor. Best known academically for his work in linguistics, Hayakawa published Language in Action in 1941. Between 1955 and 1968 he was a professor of English at San Francisco State College, and in 1968 Governor Ronald Reagan appointed him president of the college. Hayakawa quickly garnered national attention by severely restricting student protests on campus. After retiring from this position in 1973, Hayakawa successfully ran as a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in 1976. As a single-term senator from California, Hayakawa introduced a constitutional amendment designating English as the official language of the United States. In 1983, he founded U.S. English, Inc., an organization presently comprised of 1.8 million members. See the organization’s Web site, http://www.us-english. org (accessed March 21, 2008). Biographical Directory of the American Congress, 1774–1996, s.v. “Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa,” http://library.cqpress.com (accessed March 21, 2008). 2. The power of language is a central issue in internment research, with scholars and the public debating use of the words internment, relocation, evacuation, and concentration camp. I use internment and concentration camps interchangeably , but by this choice I do not intend a comparison with Nazi concentration camps, which I would argue are more accurately described as death camps. Japanese American internment camps were spatial expressions of race based on concentrating people of Japanese ancestry in geographically specific sites. With this definition in mind, it seems to me that concentration camp best describes the outcome of Executive Order 9066 signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt on February 19, 1942. 3. Sam Hayakawa, testimony before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Los Angeles, August 4, 1981, reel 2, 5–22, National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD. 4. My understanding of reterritorialization is grounded in the work of Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, who urge scholars to consider the conditions of globalization and postmodernity as they relate to the relationships among geography , culture, and identity formation. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, “Beyond ‘Culture’: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference,” Cultural Anthropology 7 (1992): 6–9. Rick Bonus took up Gupta and Ferguson’s challenge by studying the experiences of first-generation Filipino Americans in San Diego and Los Angeles. In his work, Bonus suggests that identities be conceptualized as fluid and contingent upon movements between physical locations. In this context, a singular, unifying Filipino American identity is reconceptualized as multiple Filipino American identities formed in specific times and spaces. Re-territorialization thus becomes the process by which hostile spaces are altered into arenas of identity articulation where marginalized people declare differences and enact subjectivity. Rick Bonus, Locating Filipino Americans: Ethnicity and the Cultural Politics of Space (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 4–5, 77. 5. Gupta and Ferguson, “Beyond ‘Culture,’” 17. 6. Miranda Joseph, Against the Romance of Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), xxiii. 7. I base my thinking here on Sigmund Freud’s theory of mourning and melancholia and recent scholarship pointing to the intellectual, cultural, and political meanings of loss. Freud described mourning as a temporary reaction to loss. Whereas mourning is a process in which the mourner eventually moves on, melancholia is a loss that one cannot get over. Melancholia is an enduring condition, a mourning without end, and according to Freud, pathological. But some cultural scholars such as David Kazanjian and David Eng suggest that melancholic attachments to loss encompass creative impulses that reveal social contexts and political possibilities. By reinterpreting Freud’s melancholia, we are offered new views of unresolvable and politicized struggles with loss. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, eds., Loss: The Politics of Mourning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 168 notes to pages 1– 5 8. Cambridge Dictionary, http://dictionary.cambridge.org (accessed March 21, 2008). Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines art as the “conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in...