As we have been reminded by the renewed acceptance of racial profiling, and the detention and deportation of hundreds of immigrants of Arab and Muslim descent on unknown charges following September 11, in times of national crisis we take refuge in the visual construction of citizenship in order to imagine ourselves as part of a larger, cohesive national American community. Beginning with another moment of national historical trauma-December 7, 1941 and the subsequent internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans-Imaging Japanese America unearths stunning and seldom seen photographs of Japanese Americans by the likes of Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and Toyo Mitatake. In turn, Elena Tajima Creef examines the perspective from inside, as visualized by Mine Okubo's Maus-like dramatic cartoon and by films made by Asian Americans about the internment experience. She then traces the ways in which contemporary representations of Japanese Americans in popular culture are inflected by the politics of historical memory from World War II. Creef closes with a look at the representation of the multiracial Japanese American body at the turn of the millennium.

Book Information
ISBN 9780814716212
Author Elena Tajima Creef
Format Hardback
Page Count 245
Imprint New York University Press
Publisher New York University Press