Imaging Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and the Body / Edition 1

by Elena Tajima Creef

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814716229
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	01/01/2004
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	245
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Elena Tajima Creef is Associate Professor of Women's Studies at Wellesley College.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Carving Japanese American Memory into Place
1 The Representation of the Japanese American Body in the Documentary Photography of Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and Toyo Miyatake
2 Beyond the Camera and between the Words
Inserting Oneself into the Picture and into Japanese American
(Art) History—Mine Okubo’s Citizen and the Power of Visual Autobiography
3 The Gendering of Historical Trauma in Wartime Films and the Disciplining of the Japanese American Body
4 Museums, Memory, and Manzanar
Contesting Our National Japanese American Past through a Politics of Visibility
5 Another Lesson in “How to Tell Your Friends Apart from the Japs”
The Winter Olympics Showdown between Kristi Yamaguchi of the United States and Midori Ito of Japan
Epilogue
Imag(in)ing the Multiracial Japanese American Body at the Turn of the Millennium
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"[Creef] examines myriad genres of visual and linguistic representation in order to understand the historical and contemporary 'imaging' of Japanese Americans."

-Kent A. Ono,University of Illinois

"Imaging Japanese America examines myriad genres of visual and linguistic representation in order to understand the historical and contemporary 'imaging' of Japanese Americans. It is both an artful writing project and an exemplary scholarly work within the field of visual culture studies. Readers will appreciate the interdisciplinary methodology, the rich detailed analysis, and Creef's powerful voice. A joy to read—one learns something new at every turn."

-Kent A. Ono,University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"An astute and lucid study of visual representations of Japanese Americans and an important original work for understanding American history in the second half of the twentieth century. Creef elegantly reads the myriad interdisciplinary contexts in which dynamics of race, gender, class, and nation frame Japanese Americans as foreign or the same, alien or national, while revealing the hidden costs such representations extract from individuals and communities."

-Shirley Geok-lin Lim,University of California, Santa Barbara

"In engaging and lucid prose, each chapter moves through sensitive and nuanced analyses of a carefully chosen juxtaposition of biographies of individual artists and writers, cultural productions, academic texts, institutional practices and discourses, and material artifacts."

-Feminist Studies

Editorial Reviews

"In engaging and lucid prose, each chapter moves through sensitive and nuanced analyses of a carefully chosen juxtaposition of biographies of individual artists and writers, cultural productions, academic texts, institutional practices and discourses, and material artifacts."

Feminist Studies

"[Creef] examines myriad genres of visual and linguistic representation in order to understand the historical and contemporary 'imaging' of Japanese Americans."

Kent A. Ono

"An astute and lucid study of visual representations of Japanese Americans and an important original work for understanding American history in the second half of the twentieth century. Creef elegantly reads the myriad interdisciplinary contexts in which dynamics of race, gender, class, and nation frame Japanese Americans as foreign or the same, alien or national, while revealing the hidden costs such representations extract from individuals and communities."

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Creef (women's studies, Wellesley Coll.) investigates how the popular images of Americans of Japanese ancestry were formed by their World War II incarceration and relocation into camps and how the images derived from this act of history still greatly influence the ways Japanese Americans are categorized and perceived in popular culture. She begins by analyzing the camp photographs of Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and Toyo Miyatake and the sketches of Mine Okubo. She then discusses Hollywood's representation of Japanese Americans in recent movies and concludes with a case study contrasting how the media portrayed Japanese American figure skater Kristi Yamaguchi and Japanese figure skater Midori Ito. Unfortunately, the book spans too great an intellectual landscape and touches too lightly on many facets that need further elucidating. If this book is meant to be an introduction, we can anticipate greater works to come from this scholar. Recommended for academic libraries.-Glenn Masuchika, Rockwell Collins Information Ctr., Cedar Rapids, IA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

"[Creef] examines myriad genres of visual and linguistic representation in order to understand the historical and contemporary 'imaging' of Japanese Americans."

-Kent A. Ono,University of Illinois

"An astute and lucid study of visual representations of Japanese Americans and an important original work for understanding American history in the second half of the twentieth century. Creef elegantly reads the myriad interdisciplinary contexts in which dynamics of race, gender, class, and nation frame Japanese Americans as foreign or the same, alien or national, while revealing the hidden costs such representations extract from individuals and communities."

-Shirley Geok-lin Lim,University of California, Santa Barbara

"Imaging Japanese America examines myriad genres of visual and linguistic representation in order to understand the historical and contemporary 'imaging' of Japanese Americans. It is both an artful writing project and an exemplary scholarly work within the field of visual culture studies. Readers will appreciate the interdisciplinary methodology, the rich detailed analysis, and Creef's powerful voice. A joy to read—one learns something new at every turn."

-Kent A. Ono,University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

”In engaging and lucid prose, each chapter moves through sensitive and nuanced analyses of a carefully chosen juxtaposition of biographies of individual artists and writers, cultural productions, academic texts, institutional practices and discourses, and material artifacts.”

-Feminist Studies

From the Publisher