"Manzanar, the eyes of the world are upon you": Performance and Archival Ambivalence at a Japanese American Internment Camp

In this essay, Emily Colborn-Roxworthy explores the self-conscious construction of Japanese American identities and internment performance in the internee-run Manzanar Free Press, which epitomized the camp newspapers independently published in each of the ten US relocation centers during World War II. In the face of political spectacularization and racist media slander, Colborn-Roxworthy argues that internee-journalists created a "spectacle-archive" that recorded the ambivalent scrutiny imposed upon them from all sides. At the same time, she shows how internees staged intercultural performance festivals in defiance of the government's mono-Americanist assimilation policy, which pitted second-generation Nisei against their "Japanesey" parents and criminalized displays of Japanese culture. Having opted out of the spectacle-archive by receiving few mentions in the Free Press publicity machine, the festivals' performed resistance lived on mainly through embodied memory, which has meant that progressive narratives of American triumph over adversity—epitomized by the National Park Service's celebration of internees' festivity at Manzanar National Historic Site—have appropriated only the Asian American "model minority" interpretation of camp performances as rehearsals for assimilation and endorsements of the government's policy.