Materializing the Incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The mass removal and imprisonment of over 110,000 people of Japanese descent during WWII relied upon an interconnected infrastructure of materials and technologies. These camps were not spontaneous creations, but the result of numerous strategies of immigration control and confinement with their own histories of use within the United States. The deployment of these technologies was often governed by economic and political logics, not accounting for the experiential qualities of such decisions. Here I will discuss the various material qualities of the WWII Japanese American incarceration and the subsequent ways in which they were experienced. While archaeological studies have highlighted the physical manifestations of the Japanese American incarceration camps, they often focus on the strategies employed by incarcerees to build new environments and alleviate the traumas of incarceration. Here instead I will step back to examine some of the seemingly benign qualities of these camps which inflicted trauma in the first place. With a focus on these materials, archaeology can help to illuminate the deep and often unnoticed consequences of such decisions and their impacts on those subject to them. This topic is of growing concern as the technologies of removal, mass resettlement, and confinement become increasingly common.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23569