Creef:
Elena Creef’s piece discusses the visual politics of photographically capturing the Japanese-American population in the wake of Pear Harbor: a Japanese naval strike which nominally justified widespread racism, namely, the U.S.’s evacuation of people of Japanese ancestry out of their homes in the Pacific region, and into internment camps.

Kozol:
Kozol’s article challenges the authenticity of a government –piloted, photographic archive of Japanese-Americans throughout the 1940s evacuation process, given the nation’s interest in illustrating this population as obedient, loyal and non-threatening in an effort to feel secure on the home-front.

Howard:
Howard offers a panoramic display of the unique disruptions in traditional gender and sexuality roles that internment camp life presented to Japanese Americans.

I was taken aback by a specific section in the Relocating Citizenship article, where Kozol addresses the FBI’s campaign to destroy the artifacts of Japanese- Americans directly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. In referring to the countless Japanese family heirlooms that were seized by government officials, Kozol speculates that “the objects’ ‘realness,’ the materiality of the artifacts made them threatening,” which couldn’t be a more brazen testament to America’s inherently xenophobic nature. This unveils the “difference equals deficit” model that this nation has unabashedly relied on for centuries in their countless campaigns to preserve a pristine American identity that never really existed. Our abstract/undefined understanding of what it means to be an American, may commonly be mistaken as open-ended to an outsider looking for a way in.  However, in truth, the prototypical American: the White- Euroethnic, middle-class male, who we use as our standard of acceptance, will always decide who belongs in this nation, who is defined as the underclass. No matter the history that your family may have here in America.
This reminds me of our contemporary immigration policies that subject hopeful-American citizens to arbitrary Citizenship Tests that I likely would not pass. Regardless of the fact that I am a descendant of slaves that gave their lives building this nation, my failing grade would likely categorize me as un-American.

Kozol: The US government’s gaze creates a visual understanding of Executive Order 9066 and its impact on Japanese American’s that is little more than propaganda.

Howard: This chapter emphasized how internment affected notions of the family, gender roles and sexuality; most notably internment opened employment opportunities for women.

Creef: Professor Creef uses the photographs of Ansel Adams, Dorthea Lange, and Toyo Miyatake in order explain that the twentienth-century history of Japanese American representation, the mass relocation and internment of 120,000 people are defining when discussing the colonization of bodies and is yet to be resolved.

. The reading of Howard’s piece helped conceptualize the series of horrific events cast upon Japanese Americans during World War II. It was especially helpful because as Creef states this history is not taught. She even says that only two American historical events have become virtually invisible. These events are the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and Reconstruction in American South. This is interesting because while it might have been more difficult to create documentary photography images after the Civil War, but the government had no viable excuse during the 1940s. Each of these authors claimed that the history has been lost due to the censorship of the government. Unfortunately, I am not sure if the images in question, depicting the horrors of internments camps even exist, I would not be surprised if the government made efforts to destroy them. The thought that this sort of dehumanizing activity was happen in the United States, so recently is baffling as the country is seen as land of opportunity for those who voluntary immigrated here.

“Camp Life” by John Howard explores the everyday life of people living in interment camps in Arkansas. Howard analyzes how the formation of the Japanese culture in the context of interment camps played a key role in redefining traditional gender roles. Due to the communal structure of the camp women spent less time doing domestic activities and more time delving into once male dominated professions.

While reading “ Camp Life” I was shocked to learn Japanese interment camps existed in Arkansas, prior to reading this article I always associated Japanese interment camps with California. Recognizing my ignorance and lack of knowledge about the history of Japanese interment camps in the U.S. causes me to feel embarrassed. I know that I should know more about this history but the truth is I really don’t. Reading about the everyday routine of the people loved in these interment camp helped to open my eyes and make the history feel very real to me. While reading I was disturbed by the use of the word prisoner used to describe the Japanese people who lived in the camps. What crime did the Japanese people commit? No crime. The only criminals in this case are the American government officials who exploited and falsely imprisoned innocent people. To think the power of stereotypes is so potent that they can lead to an entire generation of people to be falsely imprisoned was heartbreaking for me.

This week’s readings focused on the portrayal of Japanese Americans during their relocation to internment camps as a result of wartime racism during World War II. The lack of documentation of this tragedy presents an issue as it overlooks the history of the minority in America. This creates a sense of present and past invisibility for Japanese Americans as the War Relocation Authority (WRA) transferred the racial group out of the public eye and now, when one attempts to look back towards this dark period of American history, not enough documentation exists to explain the Japanese American experience of racism. The photographs that do exist waver on the line of reality and exaggeration. A conflict occurred among the photographers, government officials, artists, or internees who smuggled in cameras, to depict the reality of the internment experience. In the photographic book Born Free and Equal, Ansel Adams depicts close-up portraits of smiling Japanese Americans as schoolgirls and service, usually military, men and women. The department of WRA, which authorized this book, took a similar approach in its photography, using the smiling internees as war propaganda to show the American public that the program was working to create loyal American citizens out of the Japanese Americans. Adam’s purpose, although different, still overlooked the reality of internment camps to debunk the notion that Japanese Americans were treacherous and dangerous like the Japanese, the enemy of the U.S. in WWII. He sacrifices the authenticity of the Japanese American experience to disprove the racist stereotypes. But photographers, such as Dorothea Lange, an authorized photographer, and Toyo Miyatake, an internee who smuggled in a camera, captured the truth in the racism that existed behind the camp walls. Their concern was not to portray loyal American citizens but rather the unseen emotions and experience of the internees. Thus, the rare documentation that does exist struggles between distorting an unreal image of Japanese American internees as loyal assimilated citizens to hide the discrimination and segregation of the United States government and representing the real (realest to our knowledge) image of Japanese Americans as historical subjects of American hysteria and wartime racism.

Elena Creef analyzes the wartime photography of Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange and Toyo Miyatake to explore the discourses surrounding representations of Japanese Americans.  Both Creef and Wendy Kozol delve into the strategies by which images of the “model minority” were fashioned that stripped subjects of their specificity in an attempt to construct a sense of sameness and familiarity between “real” Americans and these racially suspect subjects.  This strategy coincided with the decline of scientific racism and the rise of “color-blindness,” forging an illusion of sameness across a multiplicity of racialized bodies under the notion that nation trumps ethnicity.  Thus the contradictory aims of Order 9066 to both alienate and assimilate Japanese-Americans was reconciled by photographic projects that momentarily separated out for scrutiny these subjects, only to reincorporate them and hide the evidence later.