Artifacts of Loss: Crafting Survival in Japanese American Concentration Camps

Chapter 6: Contemporary Legacies of Loss

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C H A P T E R 6 C H A P T E R 6 Contemporary Legacies of Loss As this book concludes, I urge readers to think about art created in Japanese American concentration camps with five ideas. First is the function and purposes of this work for internees, a historical view grounded in the realities of everyday life and imprisonment. Second is the idea of loss, which is critical for moving camp-made art into the present and future instead of understanding these artifacts as belonging solely to the past. Third is the idea of art, broadly defined, as creating portable spaces in which a sense of place can be at least partially recuperated. This framework addresses transnational flows of people as they are forced to ground themselves in often hostile and unfamiliar landscapes. Through this lens, we focus on understanding the historical and cultural contexts that inform global, national, and local movements (or non-movements, as the case may be) of people and resources. The final two ideas involve more intellectual issues that likely will resonate most deeply with students of material culture but are equally applicable for museum goers. Addressing the meanings and uses of artifactual evidence, this fourth idea urges readers to think about how museums often have conservative influences on artifacts by constructing narrow narratives to be consumed by the public. My fifth and final idea proposes a more active perspective, suggesting that artifacts encompass powers that evoke responses from people. Here, we find artifacts encompassing agency. Instead of constructing a singular narrative, artifacts can contempor ary legacies of loss 155 generate ideas and be employed to confront present-day conditions of marginalization and exploitation. As I suggest in these concluding pages, each of these ideas is central to the historical meanings and contemporary uses of art created in Japanese American concentration camps. Camp-made art held critical meanings and served essential functions for both makers and consumers. As internees employed art to remake interior places and outside spaces, maintain and create human connections, and construct new psychic landscapes, they bolstered their prospects of physically and mentally surviving the many traumas encompassed by Executive Order 9066. By studying the lived experiences of internees, we see that art is about more than aesthetics. Camp-made material cultures turned the individual and personal into the social, allowing internees to construct visual conversations about matters perhaps too painful to discuss verbally. Serving as critical spaces of survival and revealing contexts of overwhelming loss, camp-made art encompassed ideas, strategies, and practices ranging from the practical to the political. Drawing on losses rooted in the historical and oppressive histories of Japanese Americans, these artifacts can be connected with injustices occurring in contemporary contexts. In much the same way that internees offered their art to each other for collective consideration, they also provided lasting inheritances for succeeding generations to think with. In this way, those of us interested in advancing progressive social justice causes can reconsider our collective present and future. Although these artful practices were firmly rooted in the past and have specific historical meanings, camp artists also created narratives of loss and melancholic agency for the present. Recent scholarship based on Sigmund Freud’s theory of mourning and melancholia points to the intellectual, cultural, and political meanings of loss. Freud described mourning as a temporary reaction to loss.1 While 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, 156 artifacts of loss pathological.2 But some cultural scholars such as David Karzanjian and David Eng suggest that “melancholic attachments to loss” encompass creative impulses that reveal social contexts and political possibilities. By depathologizing and reinterpreting Freud’s melancholia, we are offered views of unresolveable and politicized struggles with loss. Exploring the practices through which loss is melancholically materialized, we can begin to understand art created by imprisoned Japanese Americans as encompassing half lives that continue to work in the present and future. As much as we may want to escape memories and realities of historical loss, avoidance is an impossible task. In the words of Judith Butler, “the past is not past.”3 This interpretation of melancholia challenges assumptions that loss and grief reside solely in the psychological realm and moves these matters to the social and political...