An Absent Presence: Japanese Americans in Postwar American Culture, 1945-1960 (review)

An Absent Presence: Japanese Americans in Postwar American Culture, 1945-1960, is an engaging and deeply moving account of how remembering and forgetting the history of Japanese American internment have been fundamental to the postwar articulation of the United States as a democratic nation that was to prevail over its cold war enemies. The state's gross violations left irreparable damage to the nation's self-knowledge. The maintenance of the myth of American exceptionalism and the formulation of the postwar United States as a pluralistic and integrated liberal democracy were contingent primarily on the nation's coming to terms with this indelible trauma. Through her remarkable interdisciplinary command over a variety of texts—social science writings, state-sponsored reports, popular journalism, photo images, fiction, and autobiographies—Caroline Chung Simpson demonstrates how the memory of internment, as a persistent reminder of Japanese Americans' liminality within the U.S. national citizenry, had to be worked through during the crucial years of the 1940s and 50s.

Simpson's title is inspired by Marita Sturken's Derridean analysis of representations of Japanese American internment as an "absent presence," a concept Sturken used cogently to characterize the containment of representations of events that are constitutive of, yet dangerously disruptive to, the narrative of National History. Simpson then builds on the insights of such scholars as Lisa Lowe, David Palumbo-Liu, Robert Lee, Gary Okihiro, and Henry Yu, who have argued that the process of including Asians as racialized immigrants while simultaneously denying their full presence in the national citizenry has been integral to the capitalist and modern constitution of the United States. During the cold war years, Simpson summarizes, "popular discourse about Japanese Americans no less than many other Asian American groups often became the disavowed means to regenerate and reimagine a postwar national collective" (19). Japanese American internment is characterized not only by its absence and occlusion from U.S. national history, but also by its haunting presence as an absence. Accordingly, An Absent Presence demonstrates both "how the centrality of internment in some discourses 'screens' it from view and how the dismissal or diminution of internment's importance in other cases may sometimes merely underscore its significance" (4).

Following a brief introduction, chapter one analyzes wartime representations of the internment camps. For Simpson, a 1944 Life magazine article by Carl Mydans emblematically shows the wartime ambivalence about the treatment of Japanese American U.S. citizens as disloyal aliens. In exposing the denial of middle class domesticity and other American dreams to those in camps, the wartime representation of internment "threatens to unravel the imaginary of links between the body of the American citizen and the body of the nation by revealing the arbitrary nature of such constructions" (39-40). It is this troubling contradiction and ambivalence inherent in the racialized constitution of the national citizenry that would haunt memories of the internment in the subsequent decades. Japanese American history would then have to be remembered through strategies of containment, displacement and dispersal.

Chapter two analyzes the knowledge produced by the "liberal, white camp anthropologists" who the War Relocation Authority employed to observe the internees' behavior. Since the mid-eighties, critics have interrogated the politics of the anthropological knowledge that camp anthropologists generated and authorized. Simpson takes these challenges further and demonstrates how the camps were seen by the social scientists as a sort of reform center that "while objectionable, might also provide an opportunity to affect Japanese Americans' inclusion as Americans" (71). The internment studies became a site where authoritative knowledge about the "'oriental' unassimilability of Japanese Americans" (53) had to be reconciled with the urgent task of making them attain full assimilation during the cold war years.

While suggesting the possible application of anthropological knowledge about the Japanese Americans in camps to the Japanese under U.S. occupation, thus gesturing in...