Domestic containment: Japanese Americans, Native Americans and the cultural politics of relocation

2011-08-01Domestic Containment: Japanese Americans, Native Americans and the Cultural Politics of Relocation, is a comparative ethnic and cultural studies project that examines narratives of government-sponsored relocation programs. Domestic Containment expands the limited comparative ethnic studies work that makes connections between Asian American and Native American Studies with a discursive analysis of the pamphlets, manuals and reports of two government agencies: the War Relocation Authority (WRA), which was created in 1943 to encourage and assist residents to move out of Japanese internment camps, and the Voluntary Relocation Program, an agency modeled after the WRA and created in 1956 in order to encourage Native Americans on and near reservations to move to distant cities. While much scholarship that addresses mid-century U.S. race relations has focused on civil rights and integration, little attention has been paid to the U.S. government's attempts to change its method of control from physical containment to policies of containment through ideology, as well as these policies’ long-term effects. ❧ Domestic Containment interrogates the government agencies' creative retellings of historical events that sought to prove the state's benevolent role in the displacement of Japanese Americans and Native Americans. An analysis of government agency training manuals and relocation propaganda illuminates how specific racial and gender formations were endorsed during the post war era of nation building, and became central tenets in the state’s attempted integration of both groups into mainstream American culture. I then turn to Julie Otsuka's novel When The Emperor was Divine and Kent Mackenzie's docudrama The Exiles to consider the lingering effects of dispossession and dispersal felt by those pushed into a diasporic space within a nation state. Reading these three forms of narratives -– government agency documents, fiction and film -– alongside one another provides insight into the psychic costs of belonging amidst mid-twentieth century understandings of citizenship