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  • The Spectacle of Japanese American Trauma: Racial Performativity and World War II
  • John D. Swain
Emily Roxworthy . The Spectacle of Japanese American Trauma: Racial Performativity and World War II. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2008. Pp. 238, illustrated. $35.00 (Hb).

In her book The Spectacle of Japanese American Trauma: Racial Performativity and World War II, Emily Roxworthy re-examines constructions of Japanese American identity and exposes how it is essentialized through the performance of spectacle. Roxworthy's analysis of the World War II Japanese internments as a form of performed spectacle, therefore, provides an important historical and sociological corrective to the accepted domestic U.S. narrative of Japanese Americans as the "model minority." Roxworthy's claim is that trauma reduces the victim to passivity, which can then be read and "spectacularized" by the perpetrator as fatalistic acceptance. She argues that the stoicism displayed by Japanese Americans forced unjustly into concentration camps was not a result of ingrained culture but of trauma inflicted by the United States (115). To make her case, Roxworthy goes back to nineteenth-century history to establish the groundwork of the mid-twentieth-century treatment of Japanese in the United States.

Roxworthy writes about how "in the case of the internment, theories of trauma and theories of spectacle intersect and converge" (4; emphasis in original). In her introduction, she lays out how the book will progress, [End Page 131] defining the three main theoretical terms used in the book: "spectacle," "trauma," and "racial performativity." The second term, "trauma," is Roxworthy's theoretical leverage point for the other two; trauma happens, she claims, partly through the American failure to assume responsibility for the racialization of Japanese Americans put on display during their arrests and removal following the attack on Pearl Harbor. In order to show how spectacle is utilized, perceived, and consumed by the various groups involved, Roxworthy traces the origins of what she calls the "'theatricalizing' discourse around Japanese 'cultural' (racial) difference" (8).

To do so, in chapter one, she starts by reading the performances that Commodore Matthew Perry presented to the Japanese during his 1853 and 1854 Japan missions. Analysing Perry's landings, Roxworthy links the western/American construction of racial discourse to perceptions of traditional Japanese performing arts, especially kabuki and other Japanese theatrical forms, and to anthropologist Ruth Benedict's influential The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. Chapter two describes how the FBI was instrumental in transferring the "theatricalizing stereotype of 'the Japanese'" to Japanese Americans in the 1930s and early 1940s, until the attack on Pearl Harbor (16). Chapter three retraces the role of the William Randolph Hearst media empire in linking "the myth of performative citizenship and the spectacularization of Japanese suspiciousness" during the months of the evacuation of Japanese Americans from the West Coast after Pearl Harbor (17).

Roxworthy then shifts the focus to Japanese Americans themselves: first, their performances as they were arrested by the FBI and shipped off to camps, and then the entertainments they created as inmates in those camps. Chapter four reviews what she calls the "spectacle archive" of these internment camp performances. This "spectacle archive" describes the "self-conscious construction of Japanese American identities" that runs counter to the U.S. National Park Service's construction of Japanese Americans as "model minority" (17). Finally, chapter five compares the performances at the Manzanar and Tule Lake internment camps. Tule Lake was where the United States sent "Japanese Americans deemed especially 'disloyal' to the United States and loyal to Japan" (17). Roxworthy's conclusion in this chapter is that the performances in both places "'talked back' to the theatricalized stereotypes about Japanese culture, the spectacularization of Asian American assimilation, and the scrutinization of Japanese American loyalty" (18). Roxworthy's careful analysis of how Japanese Americans mirrored the sartorial choices of the FBI – and carefully selected performance pieces for their internment camp shows – reveals a group struggling to find its voice in the context of a silencing trauma. [End Page 132]

Roxworthy's book is fascinating in its interweaving of modern theatrical history and criticism with the specific historical moments of Perry's advance into Tokyo Bay and the FBI round-ups of Japanese Americans immediately...

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