History

History

Chair: Xiaojian Zhao

Committee members: Jean J. Kim, Shelley Lee

Winner:

A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America, by Greg Robinson

Greg Robinson's A Tragedy of Democracy: Japanese Confinement in North America provides an exceptionally valuable synthesis of a large and continually growing volume of scholarly work on the confinement of Japanese Americans during World War II. Robinson argues that despite the continuing proliferation of historical and biographical accounts of the wartime confinement of Japanese Americans in the United States and the dispossession, confinement, deportation, and extradition of Japanese emigrants and their families from Canada, Latin America, and Mexico, popular understandings of why and how these events occurred and, perhaps even more important, what these events meant continue to be widely obscured. Although the amount of existing research on the confinement of Japanese Americans and the hemispheric treatment of Japanese emigrants in North America, Hawai'i, and Latin America has been uneven, it illustrates how the volume of publications on a topic ironically might inhibit the ease with which a topic is understood. This is where Robinson makes one of his most important historiographical contributions and interventions. He provides a synthetic account that cuts through decades of historical debate on the reasons for internment, its scope, its conduct, and its aftermath, and he does this in light of new documents on internment that continue to be declassified and digitally available.

The value of Robinson's synthesis radiates from the expansive and unique chronological and geographical framework he establishes for this topic. First, he traces critical antecedents to internment in events predating World War II, and he connects these to reversals that followed through the period of redress. Integrating political and social history, Robinson demonstrates a remarkable command of existing literature; his accounts of the haphazard process through which political leaders decided to remove Japanese Americans during the war are particularly detailed and well balanced. By geographically comparing the experiences of Japanese Americans in the U.S. mainland with the treatment of people of Japanese descent in Hawai'i, Canada, and Latin America, Robinson shows that the transnational antecedents to confinement of Japanese Americans lay in regional geopolitics, militarism, and white settler colonialism, which shaped prewar patterns of state racism and exclusion directed against Japanese in places such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. Robinson's important geographical synthesis illustrates forcefully that the removal of Japanese Americans on the U.S. West Coast was not an isolated result of wartime hysteria, but an important part of the larger history of American and regional racism.

Throughout the book, Robinson offers fresh insights on existing and newly discovered materials. The underlying scope and implications of Japanese confinement continue to risk widespread distortion and misunderstanding. Contemporary movements to confine civilians suspected as enemies of the United States, rising anti-immigrant sentiment, and escalating national security anxieties following 9/11 indicate the ongoing relevance of the topics of wartime incarceration of civilians and racism, and they underscore the timeliness and value of Robinson's interventions.