Common Ground: The Japanese American National Museum and the Culture of Collaborations

2. Home Movies: Cultural Recovery and the Value of Display

HOME MOVIES 25 2 2 Home Movies Karen L. Ishizuka CULTURAL RECOVERY AND THE VALUE OF DISPLAY IF PERSONAL PASSION FOR “OLDIES BUT GOODIES” and civic preference for parking lots over historic preservation are any indication, in the United States Americans are more interested in nostalgia and expedience than in history. Perhaps this is because the United States, in comparison with other countries, is too young to have enough history to care sufficiently about and, therefore, too immature to understand how its present came to be. John Kuo Wei Tchen recalls that Chinese sociologist Fei Xiaotong, in a 1944 visit to the United States, noted that this country’s major problem is that it is a “land without ghosts.” Tchen quotes Xiaotong: “Life in its creativity changes the absolute nature of time: it makes past into present—no, it melds past, present, and the future into one indistinguishable, multilayered scene, a three-dimensional body. This is what ghosts are.” And in the United States, “a world without ghosts, life is free and easy. American eyes can gaze straight ahead.”1 Complicating this already tenuous relationship with the past is the fact that history itself is inextricably entwined with the dynamics of social power. “Why bother with history when you’re rich and powerful?” a Nigerian friend asked KAREN L. ISHIZUKA 26 U.S. historian Michael Frisch. “All it can do is tell you how you climbed to the top. . . . For the rest of us, it’s a lot different. We don’t have the luxury of ignoring history.”2 Like Frisch, many historians, cultural theorists, artists, and others have stressed the necessity of interpreting history within power relations and understanding how it conditions our relationship with the past. Classified into “the West and the Rest” by Chinweizu3 and others, the issue of Eurocentrism has been, and continues to be, discussed and debated in many arenas. Russell Ferguson, in Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, quotes the late poet Audre Lorde who defined the mythical norm as “white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure,” characteristics that have become the tacit standards from which others can then be declared to deviate. Ferguson summarizes: “[T]his phantom center, as elusive as it is, exerts a very real power over the social framework of our culture and the ways we think about it.”4 This center in many ways then determines what becomes history and from whose point of view. In a democratic society, this imbalance of power necessarily results in some of its people being more equal than others. However, as Ferguson points out, “The power of the center depends on a relatively unchallenged authority. If that authority breaks down, then there remains no point relative to which others can be defined as marginal.”5 We have come a long way since the days when U.S. citizenship was confined to white males. We have even gained needed distance from the melting pot imaginary that simply added immigrants and so-called minorities but failed to account for the transformative quality we would have on the whole. Yet those who are not “white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure” still cannot afford the luxury of ignoring history; therefore institutions such as the Japanese American National Museum (National Museum ) have been formed to take up the slack to redefine and celebrate the true American experience. Historian Gary Okihiro contends that although minoritized, Asian and African Americans, Chicanos/as and American Indians, women, gays, and lesbians—in their struggle for equality—have challenged the elusive center and advanced the principles and ideals of democracy for all Americans.6 Together with like-minded institutions, the Japanese American National Museum demonstrates that what fills the center are the margins. HOME MOVIES AS CULTURAL HISTORY The big screen and mass media have created a center outside of which persevere other forms of filmic expression, cinematic documentation, and social commentary . In both popular and academic perceptions, the “movies”—the narrative feature film, itself delimited by Hollywood—have eclipsed other film genres such as the documentary, as well as art and experimental films. On its outermost rim lies the home movie. Introduced to the American public in 1923 by Eastman HOME MOVIES 27 Kodak in half the size of the 35mm feature film stock, the magic of moviemaking became available to anyone, and the genre of home movies was born.7 Too often dismissed as...