University of North Carolina Press Chapter Title: Introduction Book Title: Rightlessness Book Subtitle: Testimony and Redress In

University of North Carolina Press

Chapter Title: Introduction

Book Title: Rightlessness Book Subtitle: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II Book Author(s): A. Naomi Paik Published by: University of North Carolina Press. (2016) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9781469626321_paik.4

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This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Introduction

“If you want a definition of this place, you don’t have the right to have rights.” —Nizar Sassi, 2002

In January 2002, the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay received its first so-called enemy combatants—detainees of the War on Terror. Five months later, one of those inmates, Nizar Sassi, defined his new sur- roundings as a place where “you don’t have the right to have rights.”1 He was neither making a public critique about the camp nor trying to enter the contentious global debates surrounding it. He was merely describing his life in an otherwise mundane postcard written to his family. While intended for his parents and siblings, Sassi’s message was also a political statement, its power amplified by his deeply embedded call to “you” that transcended Guantánamo’s boundaries and evaded a basic purpose of the camp: to remove him from any community that might receive his act of bearing witness. Indeed, his seemingly simple remark implicated his addressees in his predicament, but only under the condition that “you” care enough to want to know about “this place.” Though it is Sassi who is imprisoned, he draws you, the recipient of his address, into the place of his removal—where he does not have rights, not even the right to have rights. Eventually, his call beyond the camp’s boundaries was heard. Sassi found release from Guantánamo in July 2004, when France, the country of his citizenship, brokered his transfer home, along with that of three other detainees. As he exited the camp, detainees left behind implored Sassi and his compatriots to “tell the world what is hap- pening here.”2 In the decade since, Sassi and other released detainees have borne witness to the violence at the heart of the camp, and yet the plight of those still in Guantánamo has intensified. As of June 2015, 116 men remain locked in a place where they do not have the right to have rights: their never-ending imprisonment has become a normalized background to the troubled political present. Although lamented by detainees and

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms their advocates who continue to make impassioned cries against it, Guantánamo remains for much of the public a taken-for-granted reality confined to a remote corner of Cuba. And the predicament to which Sassi and other detainees speak is not confined to Guantánamo alone. Rather, they stand as the most recent, and most dramatic, examples of a particularly modern, and particularly disturbing, trend: the United States has created a peculiar place with an ambiguous relationship to the law— the camp—and has created a peculiar kind of person to be imprisoned there—the rightless. We live in a time of expanding individual rights. Since the end of World War II, both the United States and the international community have prioritized the rights of individuals, and the protection of those rights. Rights, in other words, have become an ascendant political discourse. Yet Sassi’s testimony sheds light on the underside of this remarkable historical trajectory: the deepening limits and contradictions of rights, a reality that stains the seeming ascension of rights around the globe. By closely reading testimonies from Sassi and others held by the United States in camps, this book grapples with the reality of this parallel world. Its narrative is built on examinations of three camps and their detainees— Japanese Americans interned during World War II, who then fought for redress in the late 1980s; HIV-positive Haitian refugees detained at Guantánamo in the early 1990s; and Guantánamo’s enemy combatants from the War on Terror. The following pages reflect on these episodes in paired chapters. The first chapter examines the legal and historical conditions that rendered each group of people rightless; the second chapter uncovers the efforts of each group of rightless people to challenge their dispossession and testify to this dark reality in the hopes that someone would listen. This pairing structure elucidates, on the one hand, how the state’s legal apparatus renders rightless subjects unworthy of being lis- tened to, and on the other hand, the ways that these subjects speak out and contest their disappearance. Moving through these three episodes in chronological order, the book’s narrative reveals how the United States has adapted to shifting historical conditions, continually renewing its ability to deploy the technology of the camp and maintain populations of rightless subjects. These three rich sites of investigation comprise not isolated examples, but linked, portentous manifestations of state power as the United States has ascended to global dominance. Focusing on the decades between the twilight of the Cold War and the present emphasizes the historical

2 Introduction

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms connection between these camps and two other crucial, and similarly interrelated, developments—the rise of rights as a privileged political discourse and the rise of the United States as the world’s most dominant superpower. While this period has witnessed the expansion of rights discourses, it has also witnessed an expanding imprisonment regime, including the use of camps. Imprisonment and extralegal detention have become central to U.S. governance, and in the process they have produced a proliferation of rightless people. The concept of rightlessness— both a theoretical vantage point and a lived experience—confronts and interprets this seeming paradox.

The Roles of Rightlessness

Rightlessness is made possible by the convergence of multiple factors. Rightless subjects are defined in part by the deprivation of rights. Denied due process like access to a trial and subjected to mass imprisonment, they are removed from the rest of the world to the world of the camp, where the protections that many of the rest of us take for granted do not apply. A spectrum ranges between the rightful and the rightless, spanning from persons who enjoy protections of the law and rights, to prisoners who are subject to the law as convicted felons, to camp inmates who are swept into these spaces of removal—with many gradations in between. Even camp prisoners are not identical to each other, falling on different points on this spectrum. And yet they cluster toward the rightless extreme. Rightless subjects are also defined by the violence that their removal requires, a violence that can be both mundane and extraordinary—in capture and transport, surveillance, enforced boredom, interrogations, (coerced) medical treatment, and torture. But as I argue, what lies at the very center of rightlessness, following subaltern studies scholar John Beverley, is “not mattering, not being worth listening to.”3 The position of rightlessness renders the knowledge of its subjects unbelievable, or even worse, unthinkable. Rightless subjects exist at the edge of understanding, not just our understanding of rights but of the human (the subject of rights) and of politics (how we determine who gets to have rights). While clearly exerted in the abuses prisoners endure within the camps and in the very fact of their imprisonment, the violence of rightlessness is also epistemological. It is a problem of knowledge. When what they know does not matter, to seek recognition, these prisoners must begin with the overwhelming challenge of breaking through the utter disregard of the

Introduction 3

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms outside world. Yet as their testimonies show, rightless people refuse to be silenced; they refuse to become abject objects of state power.4 As they struggle against their condition, rightless people reveal the complexity of their existence, elucidating the ways rightlessness exceeds legal status. They thereby show how rightlessness extends contemporary notions of what rights mean. While the term suggests a categorical definition—either a person has rights or not—my analysis of rightlessness challenges its semantic, seemingly absolute meaning. Rightlessness does not denote a strict legal status or essential set of identities. Rather, it is a condition that emerges when efforts to protect the rights of some depend on disregarding the rights of others. The camps examined here, and the rightless subjects forced to live within them, resulted from three particular historical consequences: the color-blind legal reforms that produce racist state violence, the management of perceived crises over “alien invasion” by “diseased” migrants, and the fight against global ter- rorism. The rightful—as worthy, deserving subjects—enjoy the protection of rights only because other, rightless subjects are so devalued that they are excluded from those protections. Put differently, the recognition of rights depends on the denigration of the rightless. Rightlessness is therefore necessary, and endemic, to rights. In their efforts to make sense of their upended lives, the rightless also use the very conditions of their subjugation to leverage trenchant critiques of state violence and the limits of rights. Japanese American internees criticized not only the repression they endured in the camps but also the constrained and even disabling conditions of redress—its limited engagement with internment’s history and its paltry lessons for the future. Indeed, only three years following redress, the Haitian refugees indefinitely detained at Guantánamo condemned the U.S. government’s treatment of them, not as patients, refugees, or humans, but as unwanted carriers of disease. And the enemy combatants of Guantánamo have consistently resisted their imprisonment, its abuse, and the manipula- tions of domestic and international law that enable their rightlessness. As these men and women recognize, people are rendered rightless not as the result of the failures of rights, but as a necessary condition for rights to have meaning in the first place. To understand rightlessness in terms of absence begins from the false assumption that all persons have inalienable rights that are then unjustly evacuated. Yet the existence of rightless subjects reveals that the idea of inalienable rights, no matter how often it is assumed, remains a

4 Introduction

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms fiction. Indeed, Hannah Arendt elaborated the irresolvable paradoxes of inalienable rights in part by drawing on her own experience as a witness to World War II and as a camp inmate. Arendt not only bore witness to the proliferation of stateless people expelled from membership in any nation-state during the war and its aftermath; she also spent the summer of 1940 imprisoned in Camp Gurs in France, becoming, as she put it, “a new kind of human beings—the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and in internment camps by their friends.”5 On obtaining liberation papers, Arendt became a stateless person and fled Europe. Though spared the Nazi death camps, Arendt connected them to the internment camps where she and many others suffered mass detention. In fact, when transferred from French to German control, thousands of Jewish prisoners ultimately perished in the extermination camps. Further, because Camp Gurs, in its five-year existence, held political refugees who crossed the border following the Spanish Civil War as well as Jewish German “enemy aliens,” leftist French political prisoners, and, later, prisoners of war from the Axis powers, Arendt suggests under- lying connections linking these different types of prisoners and different kinds of prison camps. While the death camps are their most brutal and horrifying manifestation, their genocidal violence was enabled by and shared with other camps a fundamental condition of imprisonment and removal from the political community. As Arendt notes, at the very moment when stateless people had to call on the inalienable Rights of Man, they discovered that these supposedly baseline protections could not be secured. What actually mattered was “not the loss of specific rights, then, but the loss of a community willing and able to guarantee any rights whatsoever.”6 If, as Arendt argues, inclusion in a political community stands as the precondition for rights—like those to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—to have meaning, and the camp extricates prisoners from that community, then those prisoners do not have the essential “right to have rights.” What different kinds of camp prisoners share is their removal from political community. My inquiry into rightlessness examines what it means to be sundered from the community that could guarantee the right to have rights, rather than marking how different camps deprive their distinct prisoners of the same specific rights or deploy the same strategies of governance and control. Indeed, in his uncanny invocation of Arendt, Sassi astutely recognized that his rightless condition exceeded the deprivation of substantive rights like due process. Though

Introduction 5

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms still a citizen of France and therefore not a stateless person, Sassi nevertheless found himself in a similar predicament as Arendt, six decades later—removed from any political community, national or international, that could assure his right to have rights. For both Arendt and Sassi, the camp became the site and means for their exclusion. A modern, militarized institution of intense surveillance and domination, the camp constitutes a space set apart, as marked by its barbed-wire perimeter, its armed guards, and its physical segregation. It is, in other words, a space of removal. Camps are removed, in space, from the prisoners’ social communities of friends, neighbors, and family, and removed, in law, from the political communities that could provide the precondition for rights recognition. The War Relocation Authority in charge of managing Japanese American internment during the Second World War set up the camps in deserts and swamps, in austere, undesir- able areas of the West and Arkansas. Further, the U.S. executive branch has established camps at Guantánamo because it lies outside U.S. territory and ostensibly occupies a legally ambiguous zone between the governments of the United States and Cuba. Located in ambiguous spaces designed to remove them from social and political community, these camps are cast as exceptions to the space of the nation, and thus exceptions to the right to have rights. Camps are embedded in a much longer history of spatial exceptions. Like the coexistence and codependence of rights and rightlessness, the use of spatial exceptions stretches back to the origins of the United States, to both imperial spaces like the frontier and the colony, and to internal zones of exclusion.7 These spaces have existed alongside—and have in fact enabled—the country to claim its complete commitment to rights. As the historian Paul Kramer argues: “While the separation of these enclaves is physical and legal, it is also conceptual and moral: cast as wrinkles in an otherwise seamless fabric of sovereignty, rights, and the rule of law, they shield imperial formations whose proponents insist upon their liberalism and universality.”8 Put simply, these spatial exceptions are not exceptional at all, but the U.S. state consistently disavows them as such. Camps mark just one way such spatial exceptions take shape. Thus, although camps, particularly those located outside formal U.S. territory, are understood as extreme and external to the United States, such ideological divides between the normal and the exceptional, or the foreign and the domestic, obscure their co-constitution and connection to each other. Proceeding from internment to Guantánamo, the

6 Introduction

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms following chapters trace these camps’ links to each other while simultaneously tracking the shifts in U.S. governance that externalize rightlessness. As the ascension of rights has undermined the legitimacy of creating rightlessness through camp imprisonment, the United States has had to adapt by moving camps beyond its territory and by narrow- ing the scope of rightlessness to focus more intently, though not exclu- sively, on people who cannot claim the United States as the guarantor of their rights. While divisions between inside/outside and alien/citizen bleed into each other, the United States can embrace rights and yet create rightless subjects by pushing camps and rightlessness beyond the forms of belonging conferred by spatial territory and national status. The conceptual separation of camps from the United States is also tem- poral and historical. In representing itself as the exemplary world leader of rights and the giver of freedom, the United States presents a vision of history that elides these scenes of removal, as if they were safely contained in the past. It is this condition of systemic, collective forgetting— of history under erasure—that makes the continued development of actual camps possible. The United States has consistently accounted for such camps as exceptions to the country’s normal functioning; its violent strategy of governance against illiberal, rightless subjects is framed as a perhaps regrettable, but necessary means to preserve its liberal, democratic order. As an institution of removal, the camp frees the state from the constraints of rights recognition and enables the subjection of camp inmates to systemic control over their existence. Just as rights and rightlessness exist in a mutually imbricated relationship, the U.S. state depends on the rightless to establish its authority. The camp is distinct from federal and state prisons, whose captives, while removed from community, have at least nominal access to due process and a trial (though too often a corrupted one). And yet the camp aligns with what the ethnic studies scholar Dylan Rodriguez calls the U.S. prison regime—a system of state practices that seek “absolute dominion” over the captive and that ultimately pervade the camp.9 These efforts at domination crystallize most apparently in the institution of the prison, even as the state exercises such power far beyond the prison’s boundaries. Or, in the words of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “prison is not a building ‘over there’ but a set of relationships that undermine rather than stabilize everyday lives everywhere.”10 While generally imagined as external to normal civil society, the prison regime is integral to U.S. statecraft, its methods of exercising and displaying its power.11 Extending this argument, it is against

Introduction 7

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms rightlessness that U.S. state power—and its ability to bestow rights and freedom—becomes intelligible; rightlessness is therefore essential to the exercise of U.S. state authority. As “a medium of racialized statecraft,”12 the U.S. prison regime has targeted populations of racial others and exploited their “vulnerability to premature death,”13 to cite Gilmore’s incisive definition of racism. The sweeping of particular groups into camp imprisonment has been legitimated through direct and indirect invocations of racism—from the explicit maligning of Japanese persons as “enemy aliens”14 during World War II to their racial rehabilitation as model minorities in the period of redress; to the less explicit, but no less real, rationale that excluded nearly all Haitian refugees from attaining asylum; to the U.S. government’s creation of the “enemy combatant,” a vague band of “terrorists” who are always already “Middle Eastern, Arab, or Muslim.”15 In other words, the rightless person is always envisioned as a racial other. Camps could not exist, and people could not be rendered rightless, without “camp-thinking”—Paul Gilroy’s term for nationalist and racist invocations of difference, structured around categories of self/other and friend/stranger. As Gilroy cogently argues, because we are divided and set against each other by camp-thinking, a direct relationship binds the racism and nationalism that is considered conventional with the camps seen as exceptional.16 Imprisonment is structured by camp-thinking, making certain populations more susceptible to capture. But more important, imprisonment also generates and redefines prisoners’ racial subordination, violently attaching racial meanings to rightless persons. As the sociologist Avery F. Gordon argues: “Racism explains not just who becomes a prisoner (almost everywhere and at all times poor persons of color, members of ethnic minorities, immigrants, and dissidents), but also what the prisoner becomes.”17 The camp, ultimately, constitutes a dense node of state power, one that reveals how the government contravenes the rules that define and enable its authority.18 It therefore provides a focusing lens that elucidates how power operates more broadly—the mechanisms, discourses, actors, and techniques used by the state to maintain its authority. This focused understanding can also shed light on how power permeates other strategies of governance and the parts of the world that are far more familiar than the camp. The power relations that create rightless people are not limited to the terrain of the law, but pervade our social and political culture. The capacity of the state to produce rightlessness extends beyond

8 Introduction

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms racial others and beyond the camp’s borders and inmates. Those who are liminally rightful—like undocumented immigrants, convicted felons (whether imprisoned or released), and those living under heightened suspicion of being criminals, terrorists, or gang members—consistently endure the non-recognition and violation of their rights.19 To reiterate, there are variegations of rights and gradations of rightlessness. Camp imprisonment exposes a basic human vulnerability, which links the fates of the rightful and the rightless: all but the most powerful can be ensnared by the state power that produces rightlessness. And it is the people who do not matter, who are not worth listening to, who in fact foretell the omi- nous direction that our own futures could take. The camp’s perimeter separates us, the relatively rightful, from the rightless, but it cannot fully obscure the ways that we overlap; indeed, the stories that the rightless tell summon us to see their predicament as our own.

The Roots of Rightlessness

The camps explored here trace the ways in which rights and rightlessness have become increasingly central to U.S. state power, as they mark the congruent rise of rights discourses and of the United States as global hegemon. This concomitant ascent emerged in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, intensified during the Cold War, and culminated with the latter’s dissolution and the consequent affirmation of the United States as the world’s dominant superpower. On the one hand, rightlessness is not strictly limited to the United States or to more recent U.S. history. Rightlessness encompasses the camps of other empires, such as Spain’s re-concentration camps in Cuba and British camps of the Second Boer War in South Africa. Further, since its very origins as a nation-state, the United States has deployed many strategies of governance that have produced rightlessness, including the use of camps during the Indian Wars of the nineteenth century and in the Philippine-American War of the early twentieth century. On the other hand, however, the dual ascent of rights discourses and of U.S. global power (enabled in part by its affirmation of rights) warrants a particular focus on the rightlessness created by the United States during the height of its influence. The United States, in this period of rights ascension, provides a particularly revealing example of the fusion of rightlessness and a commitment to rights. The destruction and atrocities wrought by World War II, particularly in Europe, created the context in which human rights emerged as a

Introduction 9

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms recognizable and desirable goal, supported by national and international institutions and articulated in international conventions like the Univer- sal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), passed in 1948.20 Previously, states were the only subjects of international law, but in the aftermath of the Second World War, the “human” individual also became recognized as a subject of international law and political discourse.21 The concept that all humans have some fundamental rights—not solely “life, liberty, and security of person” but also “the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law,”22 as the UDHR proclaims—outside and above any membership in a state marked a key shift in human rights history. But human rights were not the only or the inevitable response to the war’s devastation. Alternative utopian visions existed, such as those offered by communism, by socialist states, and by decolonization and the third world movements. By the 1970s, these alternative visions had failed to deliver on the hopes inspired. In the vacuum left behind, the historian Samuel Moyn argues, “human rights emerged historically as the last utopia—one that became powerful and prominent because other visions imploded.”23 As the United States asserted its power as a primary architect of the postwar order,24 it promoted its vision of free markets and democratic governance by claiming the language of human rights. After the war, the United States became the primary patron of global human rights and in this role profoundly shaped the legal institutions that emerged to support and spread rights.25 The expansion of U.S. power around the globe, alongside a U.S.-centered vision of human rights, solidified during the Cold War: human rights were increasingly allied with the liberal free- doms of the capitalist first world, and their violations identified with the communist and ostensibly undemocratic regimes of second world. Ideology, however, did not always match practice. Racially based immigration exclusion and formal segregation, among other persistent forms of oppression, gave lie to claims that the United States was the exemplary sponsor of human rights and equality. The federal government recognized that the contradiction between its ideological image and its legal reality worked against its primary foreign policy objective—“to make the United States an enormous, positive influence for peace and progress throughout the world,” as a 1947 Committee on Civil Rights report states.26 The granting of formal equality through civil rights reforms enabled the state to claim that racism was fundamentally at odds with its founding principles. The ensuing, and astounding, string

10 Introduction

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms of civil rights victories, including Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the Civil Rights Act (1964), seem from this perspective less like proof that determined individuals can better the world, and more like a means for the government to instrumentalize civil rights as a tool in advancing its global ambitions. The advance of civil rights not only furthered U.S. inter- ests abroad but also worked to defuse radical movements for racial and social justice within its own borders.27 The end of the Cold War consolidated the mutual ascent of human rights as a primary political discourse and of the United States as the world’s sole remaining superpower. The collapse of communism has meant “that the ideological controversies of the past have given way to general agreement about the universality of Western values and have placed human rights at the core of international law,”28 the legal scholar Coustas Douzinas argues. The United States has established an unrivaled capacity to exercise power across the globe through multiple means—via its military and economic might, via geopolitical relations, and just as important, via cultural politics. It extends its power and influence glob- ally in part by invoking its commitment to rights, freedom, and capitalist prosperity. Put differently, the United States delivers rights as a desirable, benevolent “gift of freedom,” one that has helped secure U.S. global dominance. However, as the “core proposition” of liberal war, the gift of freedom, as Mimi Thi Nguyen argues, “demand[s] occupations and dis- locations of racial, colonial others in the name of the human.”29 With no alternative to this political lingua franca, the U.S. invocation of rights has enabled global hierarchies of power and violent interventions. The co-constitutive ascent of rights and U.S. global power has given rise to a fundamental contradiction: the United States champions the rights of all and simultaneously renders people rightless. Prevailing, nationalist accounts of U.S. history can explain away this contradiction, however. As I have argued, camps and rightless people are characterized as exceptions to U.S. history and culture. Furthermore, though camps subject their captives to vitiating regimes of depersonalization, the U.S. government has characterized these spaces of confinement as projects of liberal governance. For example, the New Deal liberals who organ- ized Japanese American internment sought to use the camps to instill U.S. culture and democratic values in their inmates; four decades later, the United States rewarded these domesticated model minorities with a redress that again reaffirmed the state’s liberal beneficence. Rather than positing a unity between the internment and Guantánamo camps, the

Introduction 11

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms first two chapters of the book reveal how redress has shaped the ways camps are understood—as exceptional, aberrant, external. Moving from internment and redress to Guantánamo then elucidates how the United States continues to deploy camps under the ascension of rights—in part by pushing them beyond formal territories and statuses of belonging. The U.S. military defined its indefinite detention of Haitian refugees as a “humanitarian mission,” one that in fact exposed these captives to conditions suspended between life and death. And the U.S. government has created an entire parallel legal system at the current Guantánamo camp under the pretense of recognizing the rights of the detained. It has also described its role as that of a “steward” over its captives, emphasizing its need to keep these detainees alive—even against their will, even while subjecting them to torture. Thus the state persistently claims that its treatment of the rightless aligns with its commitment to liberal governance. Within this paradoxical logic, rightlessness coincides with the United States’ highest democratic aims. The discourse of rights and its attendant political tools have proven unable to counter the very circumstances of terror and bodily and social disintegration they are designed to guard against. As partner to U.S. global dominance, rights abet the expo- sure of others to violence and death. Even while rights constitute yet another means of exercising state power, rightless subjects nevertheless appropriate this language that explicitly excludes them. For rightless subjects, rights are, in Gayatri Spivak’s words, “what we cannot not want.”30 To refuse rights because of their limits and contradictions is a privilege the rightless do not have. As the prevailing lexicon of national and international governments around the world, rights provide a crucial language for seeking recognition and redress, however insufficient. Japanese American internees deployed rights discourses to call for recognition of internment’s historical injustice and of their suffering at the hands of the state, decades after their release from camp. They sought redress not solely for themselves, but to prevent the recurrence of racially based mass imprisonment in the future. The HIV-positive Haitian refugees drew on human rights language to demand their release from indefinite imprisonment to anywhere but Haiti, the place of their certain persecution. Similarly, even as they remain intensely critical of rights and legal institutions, the enemy combatants of Guantánamo have consistently worked through the language of rights to demand both improved camp conditions, like protection against religious abuse and torture, and, fundamentally,

12 Introduction

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms release from indefinite detention. All these rightless people have had to use the flawed instrument of rights—both rights discourses and specific legal documents of rights, like the U.S. Constitution and the Geneva Conventions—to resist state power. The varied forms of rightless resistance further reveal how the state is not a singular entity but an intricate, multidimensional assemblage of forces: from individuals to the departments and institutions they work for, and from the beliefs and ideologies that motivate those individuals to the tactics they use in the pursuit of the state’s many aims. That cacoph- ony marshals immense force, and yet the work of these many moving parts is inevitably incongruous, sometimes even in direct conflict with itself.31 The state’s internal contradictions create spaces in which the rightless can contest the state’s seemingly overwhelming authority. The chapters that follow show, for example, how certain federal courts and judges have attempted to curtail the prerogative power exercised by the executive branch, while others have affirmed it; how different state agencies within the same camp work to uphold or contest the prisoners’ rightlessness; and how camp administrators negotiate their commanding orders from other sectors of the state against the day-to-day reali- ties of dealing with rightless prisoners. Rightless people have no choice but to resist state violence from within the state’s structures. Indeed, “if agency is the human ability to craft opportunity from the wherewithal of everyday life,” as Gilmore argues, “then agency and structure are prod- ucts of each other.”32 Rightless subjects craft opportunity through the very same mechanisms that have created their rightless condition. While their invocations of rights cannot be equated with justice and do not alter the organization of state power, claiming rights is one of their only means to resist rightlessness.33

The Testimonies of Rightlessness

Against a state that at once legitimizes and disavows its use of camps, the testimony of the rightless constitutes a “counterarchive of struggle”34 that critically interprets both their peculiar predicament and our peculiar historical moment. Offering “an essential moral resource,”35 as Gilroy notes, such testimony challenges the violence and dehumanization at the heart of rightlessness in ways that can work against its persistent reemergence. Again, this violence is not merely physical but also epistemological: the discrediting of the words and wisdom of these witnesses—their “not

Introduction 13

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms mattering, not being worth listening to.” Rightlessness counters this utter disregard and instead acknowledges that the rightless offer a necessary, commanding knowledge of their condition. As a form of what Michel Foucault calls subjugated knowledge, rightless testimonies are rooted in “what people know.”36 They point toward, at times in only suggestive traces, ways of living and surviving within the camp, providing “a pedagogy of finding and making life where death and destruction dominate,” as Gordon notes.37 Excavating the subjugated knowledge of rightless subjects by closely reading their testimonies can sharpen our understanding of the complex predicaments of rights, rightlessness, and state violence. From these testimonies, in which the future appears so very bleak, it is my hope that we can find our way toward an alternative future. Sassi has already offered a bare glimpse of testimony in the postcard to his family. His brief utterance sheds light on his daily reality. But more important, his comment defining Guantánamo as a place where “you don’t have the right to have rights” gestures toward the broader implica- tions of his dire situation—the conditions of rightlessness he and his fel- low prisoners have endured. The category of testimony extends from the postcard to encompass a broad variety of efforts. The following chapters examine testimonies given at the behest of the state, as well as testimonies voiced outside of the official institutions of government. This archive includes both written and oral testimonies, ranging from legal forms like affidavits and testimony spoken during depositions, trials, and hearings; to popular narrative forms like personal letters, opinion-editorial pieces, and statements to the press; to aesthetic forms like testimonial poetry and experimental video. While a testimony can take many forms, all testimonies share several key features. Most generally, testimony is a first-person narrative told from the perspective of the witness who offers it. But just as crucial, testimony is authentic. It conveys its narrative as true, as emerging from the actual lived experiences of the witness. Authenticity proves central to the power of testimony and distinguishes it from other first-person narratives in genres like fiction or satire. Collectivity is also central.38 The extraordinary violence that generates rightlessness simultaneously dis- tills a shared identity and collective memory to which the testifying witness speaks. In other words, each testimony articulates a voice that is at once highly particular and yet situated and communal. It is never given solely for the sake of telling one’s story alone, but seeks to contest the condition of rightlessness. That collective nature of testimony separates

14 Introduction

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms it from autobiography.39 And finally, while speaking to the past and the present, testimony is invested in the future. The giving of testimony constitutes an event of its own, beyond the mere recounting of what has happened: it forms part of a strategy of survival and self-constitution, and it attempts to seize the listener, to insist that we engage. As Gilroy argues, “their testimony calls out to us and we must answer it.”40 It hails us in ways that “are worth listening to,” offering the possibility of solidarity with—not just charity or sympathy for—the rightless. The testifying act seeks to build a link between the speaker and us (the rightless and the relatively rightful), to reach beyond the camp’s boundaries and connect their world to ours. As the camp seeks a totalizing dominion over its captives, that dominion becomes the foundation for the captives’ knowledge of rightlessness. From their encounters with legal systems to their daily existence within barbed wire, the rightless gather an intimate understanding of the many ways that power functions—the shifting legal categories, the distribution of food and medical care, the vagaries of sanitation, and collective and individual confrontations with guards. Fundamentally, the practices of imprisonment that produce rightless subjects also inscribe them with a profound knowledge, from the banalities of the lumbering mechanisms of the state to the horrors of pain, terror, and death.41 The knowledge articulated in the testimonies, then, exceeds the particularities of the individual testifying subject but speaks to the broader conditions that emerge from the “intersection of the (auto)biographical with the (empire’s) historical,”42 as Rodriguez describes. These testimonies theo- rize and interpret rightlessness in ways that speak beyond their particular point of view. In contesting their subjection, these prisoners challenge the logic of the state and suggest more expansive ways of understanding personhood. Even as the rightless offer these testimonies—and even as the state solicits them—the accounts of the rightless are always subject to doubt. Testimony narrates an assemblage of facts, memory, experience, and material and social context, weaving together a story that evinces the witness’s truth. In other words, testimony tells a person’s individual and collective truth through the vehicle of the story. Thus, while authenticity stands as one of its key features, testimony cannot prove its own authenticity.43 The legal forums that frame many of these testimonies also work against the claims of the rightless. The law regards testimony as evidence and prioritizes not its capacity to tell stories but its clarity, accuracy, and

Introduction 15

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms relevance to the narrowly defined case or issue at hand.44 The law further operates through practices and principles that purport to be objective, impersonal, and neutral, but that are “in fact mired in hidden subjectivities and unexamined claims,” which, as the critical race theorist Patricia J. Williams notes, often serve to denigrate the knowledge of marginalized groups as “‘emotional,’ ‘literary,’ ‘personal,’ or just Not True.”45 Already consigned to silence (or, more precisely, to that which cannot be heard), rightless subjects by definition cannot receive the legitimacy that such “hidden subjectivities and unexamined claims” support. Put differently, the law and its ways of knowing are not neutral but produce the repressive conditions that render rightless people not worth listening to, that “disqualify” their knowledge as “below the required level of erudition or scientificity,”46 as Foucault states. The testimonies of the rightless are subject to doubt precisely because their subjugated knowledge challenges the epistemological frameworks through which we understand issues of rights and rightlessness. The constant doubt that shadows rightless testimony points to a deeper struggle over who has the power and license to tell the story.47 By closely reading their testimonies on their own terms— as more than just evidence—my method and analysis recognize the authority of rightless people to narrate their truth. The demand that rightless testimony conform to the legal apparatus— and in particular, to the legal apparatus of the state that produced rightlessness in the first place—enacts another form of epistemological violence on the witness. In demanding recognition from the state, rightless subjects must reproduce their subordinate position to make their appeals intelligible to an entity not interested in recognizing either their suffering or its own transgressions. Internees, refugees, and enemy combatants did bear witness to various state representatives within and beyond the camp—administrators, social scientists, lawyers, and judges. However, even if sympathetic to the witnesses’ plight, these listeners were in many cases not in a position to build a politics of solidarity with the rightless, who remained objects of knowledge or recipients of services under conditions of confinement. In other words, the rightless remained, even when speaking, “not worth listening to.” As the following chapters show, even successful appeals do not fundamentally change the legal structures or the social, economic, and political conditions that render individuals rightless or that make the camp available for future use. Despite such irresolvable contradictions, finding an audience in the state remains crucial for rightless subjects. Like rights themselves,

16 Introduction

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms recognition by the state is what the rightless cannot not want.48 Witnesses testify to rightlessness in legal settings not for the sake of communicating their experiences to the world—for the sake of storytelling itself—but in hopes that the state will recognize them as rightful subjects. Though they articulate their testimonies in the legal archive, “‘a supreme technology of the . . . imperial state,’” the archive remains a site of knowledge production that “attests to its own contradictions and yields its own critique,”49 as the cultural studies scholar Lisa Lowe lucidly argues. It is both possible and necessary to read the legal archive against the grain and excavate those moments when rightless witnesses break through the limits of the legal structures in which they are spoken. Even though testimony cannot prove its authenticity, it is imperative to recognize that rightless witnesses speak their truth. This recognition of truth is particularly important because their testimony contains within it a challenge to their rightless condition.50 Yet I examine testimonies not to establish their truthfulness. Rather than focus on the unde- cidable question of veracity—risking both romanticizing their words as unmediated access to their condition or subjecting their words to a trial—I am centrally concerned with the ways these witnesses articulate their own camp lives, as well as the fundamental conditions that they confront each day: their subjection to state violence, camp-thinking, and rightlessness.

The Stakes of Rightlessness

Testimonies of rightlessness contest the nationalism and racism behind camp-thinking. The testimonial act contains within it a call for social change. As they testify to rightlessness—situating their condition in larger, shared histories and in social relations of friends, family, and community—the witnesses challenge their depiction as less-than- human subjects, as enemies, as contagious agents, as threats to the national body. They disrupt the rationale that relegates them to the camp, that makes rightlessness seem logical and legitimate. Put differently, their testimonies work to challenge the very operations of power that create the camps and rightlessness itself. As part of its pedagogy, the testimony of the rightless hails its recipients in ways that might forge relationships connecting the rightful and the rightless. And yet, the respon- sibility for forging these ethical and political connections lies not solely with the rightless witness, but also with the rightful recipient.51

Introduction 17

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms While it is crucial for critical listeners to receive their acts of bearing witness, the rightless testimonies also point to the failure of a politics of representation alone to redress their subjugation. Just as rights cannot offer the solution for the rightless, however, the goal of testimonies is not strictly confined to representation. Rightless testimonies articulate a condition that cannot be represented in terms of liberal democracy, citizenship, or visibility. They instead point to the impossibility of negotiat- ing the limits of political and narrative representation from the condition of rightlessness. But this impossibility is not a defeat. As the following chapters show, the testimonies of the rightless can achieve urgent and immediate goals, like release from indefinite imprisonment. But another goal ultimately proves more important. As Lisa Cacho argues, “Empow- erment comes from deciding that the outcome of struggle doesn’t matter as much as the decision to struggle.”52 The fact that rightless subjects continue to bear witness even under circumstances designed to disregard everything they say elucidates this decision to struggle in the face of certain defeat—at least when defeat is defined as anything more than gaining immediate, strategic goals. Their defiance in spite of failure suggests that the condition of rightlessness challenges our very definitions of success and failure. Their testimonies, in other words, challenge us to think past the horizons of our political imagination. As Cacho highlights, to “mobilize against preserving this way of life” that produces rightlessness, we must also mobilize against “the ways of knowing that this life preserves.”53 Spoken from a bleak present, but oriented toward a different future, these testimonies—as powerful as they are subjugated—can help us not only understand our current condition but also imagine the world we want to live in.

18 Introduction

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms University of North Carolina Press

Chapter Title: Residues of Rightlessness Ghosts and the Afterlife of Internment

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Residues of Rightlessness Ghosts and the Afterlife of Internment

I remember having this feeling growing up that I was haunted by something, that I was living in a family full of ghosts. There was this place that they knew about. I had never been there, yet I had a memory for it. I could remember a time of great sadness before I was born. . . . I had no idea where these memories came from, yet I knew the place. —Rea Tajiri, 1991

The hope of redress is that it will create closure. Those interned during World War II, and their relatives, hoped that the redress movement would ease the pain of those years and provide some measure of resolution. Members of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, and those politicians who sponsored what eventually became the 1988 Civil Liberties Act, hoped to amend a regrettable chapter of U.S. history, while preventing a similar injustice in the future. Others surely also hoped that the act’s passage would seal the issue in a tomb of the past. Yet internment lives on. Beyond the war years, beyond the dusty desert camps, beyond the people who were interned. Internment has an afterlife, residues of rightlessness far less concrete but no less painful, which haunt Japanese Americans and the nation at large. In his essay “The Task of the Translator,” Walter Benjamin articulates a notion of the afterlife in works of art—what he describes as a “stage of continued life” that “comes later than the original.” Noting that “life was not limited to organic corporeality,” he argues that “in the final analysis, the range of life must be determined by history rather than by nature.”1 Following Benjamin’s analysis, rightlessness is not limited to the body’s confinement within a barbed-wire perimeter, but by a history that endures in the U.S. state’s continuing creation of rightless persons via camp imprisonment and in the lived histories that the rightless carry

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms with them. This chapter examines the lasting reverberations of internment, particularly as they manifest in the lives of people shaped by the camps. As the afterlife of internment reveals, rightlessness lives on not only for the interned but also for their descendants. Endowed with an ever-adaptable and expanding capacity, rightlessness can become an inherited condition. And yet, this “stage of continued life” pushes the limits of understanding. It is difficult for the rightless to articulate and for us to comprehend. If rightlessness is recognized strictly by the deprivation of rights, then people who no longer live in camps or who have “only” inherited this condition cannot be considered rightless. Such a restrictive conception once again renders the rightless not worth listening to, even when speaking. As I argue, however, rightlessness is a complex subjectivity that exceeds legal definitions. Examining internment through the lens of redress reveals not only how the U.S. state can cast camps as exceptional to its history and culture but also how rightlessness renders extensive effects. While looking again to CWRIC witnesses, who shed light on how they attested to this opaque reality, even within the confines of the hearings, I explore aesthetic works of testimony that provide a different kind of evidence, driven not by demands for factual information or recognition by the state. Grappling with what defies representation, these aesthetic works offer a useful resource in deciphering a dimension of rightlessness as nebulous and resistant to empirical interpretation as the afterlife.

Testimonial Residues

In describing to the CWRIC the trials he and his family faced in the camps, Ikuo Komatsu articulated how, while the passage of time had enabled him to speak about internment, it had not dissipated its dam- ages. “We did not know that a nightmare had descended upon us and wrapped each of us in our own misery,” he stated, “too fearfuly [sic], embarrassed and ashamed to confide in each other.” The nightmare of internment was incomprehensible at the time of its occurrence, but even forty years later it had not become entirely comprehensible. Beyond premature fatalities in his family, with four of eight siblings dead by the age of fifty, Komatsu spoke to “the psychological casualties that I know are in my own family.” As he recalled: “About 30 years after the horror of Manzanar, as my mother lay dying, she would rouse from her delirium and say we have to get ready, the FBI is coming. To see the repressed

58 Ghosts and the Afterlife of Internment

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms fear expressed after 30 years, shocked me out of my rationalizations that it was in the past. It is still with many of us today.” Komatsu’s mother lived as a relatively rightful person for thirty years. And yet, this erup- tion of embodied memory—beyond conscious control, at the crossing into death—reveals how powerfully internment marked her life. It forced Komatsu to see internment’s unrelenting persistence. Further, it made him reckon with the ways in which the next generation, though sheltered from a direct encounter with the camps, nevertheless suffered from their ripple effects. It was primarily on behalf of his nieces and nephews, he told the commission, that he “share[d] this shame with you.”2 Many echoed Komatsu’s emphasis. A constant refrain heard throughout the testimonies was the insistence that, despite the importance of an official redress, no apology or amount of money could amend the damage wrought by the camps. The dominant narrative of redress suggests that the passage of the Civil Liberties Act completes the story of internment, that its achievement heals the damage, confining its injustice in the past. Redress thereby makes other claims of internment’s enduring afterlife—and the impossibility of its redemption—more difficult to recognize. However, CWRIC witnesses spoke to the ways in which rightlessness and life in the camps do not end with the restoration of rights or even with redress; rather, internment rendered irreparable harm that would remain with the internees and their communities without resolution. This point is made clear in the testimonies not only of former prisoners but also of their children and grandchildren, who, though never interned themselves, spoke to the camps’ enduring effects. “I did not leave those barbed wires behind in Tule Lake on August 14, 1945. I carried them with me and I carry them with me still,” asserted Merry Fujihara Omori. “As much as I want to believe that this Commission might be able to rid me of those wires forever, I am not hopeful that any of us will be free from being made victims again.”3 Like Komatsu and multiple other witnesses, Fujihara Omori resisted the temporality of internment and redress, dis- trusting the possibility that recognition by the state would finally heal this wound of the past. Redress cannot guarantee that such a violation of rights will not happen again to “any of us.” Though “any of us” refers here to Japanese American internees, it gestures toward the U.S. state’s expansive ability to strip other persons or populations of their rights. Martha Okamoto articulated the permanent pain she has carried with her from the camps. Though claiming that she “put all this out of my mind,” she nevertheless described how her family could not forget

Ghosts and the Afterlife of Internment 59

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms the death of her brother, James, who, at sixteen years old, was shot in the back by military police during the Manzanar Riot.4 Indeed, the family held on to the shirt James wore on the day he died for more than twenty years, clinging to their memory of him and his violent end. Holding on to a gruesome reminder of their greatest loss, they refused to move beyond the camp’s confines. As Okamoto stated, “my mother and I were talking about him, and we decided that—she decided that we should maybe bury the shirt because the more we saw it we couldn’t forget.”5 Although her mother did bury the shirt, this attempt to lay to rest the memory of James failed. Okamoto suggests her own ambivalence about letting James go, as she corrected a “we” to a “she”—it was her mother’s decision, not their collective decision, to (“maybe”) bury the shirt, even as they both “couldn’t forget.” Okamoto struggled to tell her story throughout her testimony, sobbing from its beginning to the end. Though James’s body and shirt may have been buried, she still lived with the raw pain of his loss. While the testimonies show that many internees could never forget internment, others experienced the opposite. They could not remember the camps. Even Commissioner William Marutani spoke to this paradox. “I remember very vividly leaving Tule Lake in 1942, but try as I might, I don’t remember getting to Tule Lake and Pinedale,” he recalled. “I do know we were put on trains, but I have no recollection of it, and at the time, I was a teenager, not a baby.” What does it mean that he had no memory of arriving at the sites of his rightless condition? While he understood the facts of his experience—he knew he was put on a train—he could not make his memory align with history. He was unable to place himself in his own history. As other testimonies demonstrate, this kind of “mental block” was not atypical, but rather a common psychic strategy of survival among internees.6 For example, Emi Tonooka described the evacuation process she went through in detail, from walking past “the fields being manicured” to keeping vigil on the train that stopped in “the middle of blinding desert.” And yet, she described what happened next as “slipping into a void so profound I can hardly speak of it now.” As she stated of her arrival to the camp: “The immediate period which followed is lost because I fell into a psychotic state induced by the weeks of dread and apprehension climaxing at Manzanar.” Tonooka still had no memory of her initial stay in the camp, not because she forgot, but because it never registered in her consciousness. Yet her remaining memories of the camps continued to vex her life. “There is not a single night since when I can close my eyes without fearing that tomorrow my rights will be taken

60 Ghosts and the Afterlife of Internment

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms away,” she asserted. “The effects, the damage, are so far-reaching that insecurities resulting from imprisonment are passed on from generation to generation.”7 This simultaneous pairing of intense, vivid memory— so intense that it can jolt a person on her deathbed—coupled with its absence, resonates throughout the CWRIC testimonies and speaks both to the shock of evacuation and imprisonment and to the lasting pain they produce. As Tonooka and multiple Sansei witnesses suggested, this durable condition further leaches into the lives of future generations. Official redress sought to ensure that the damage of internment was safely put to rest. If the nation-state has already acknowledged its wrong- doing and thereby moved on from this shameful history, then subjects who continue to be affected by internment needlessly dwell on the past. Their refusal to leave those barbed wires behind harms only themselves. Against this teleology, many of the testimonies sought to slow the van- ishing of the political present by highlighting internment’s enduring conditions of possibility and persistent afterlife. They spoke to the shal- low graves where rightlessness, like James Okamoto’s shirt, lay buried; to the ways their condition passed on to future generations; and to the inexpressible dimensions of rightlessness that their words could not fully convey. All these witnesses have long been released from the confines of the camps, have lived for decades with the rights of U.S. citizenship, and have even been valorized as model minorities. Yet rightlessness lives on, even if differently than under the explicit confinement, regulation, and violence of imprisonment. Its afterlife is, as Benjamin suggests, “a transformation and a renewal of something living”—lived with in silence for decades, carried in memento mori objects, erupting in panic attacks, manifesting in the paradox of an inability to remember paired with an inability to forget. And, in trying to describe this afterlife through language, “there remains in addition to what can be conveyed something that cannot be communicated.”8 Beyond the inherent slippages between language and meaning that Benjamin discusses, Okamoto and other witnesses gesture toward the limits of language in communicating internment’s afterlife. While their testimonies sought to describe the concrete conditions of camp life, as demanded by the CWRIC’s limits, their words cannot fully grasp the complexities of rightlessness. Further, the afterlife of internment has proved even more difficult to convey. The transformation of rightlessness from its formation in the camps to its afterlife is indeterminate, elusive, and it registers in ways that are barely visible or not visible at all.

Ghosts and the Afterlife of Internment 61

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Testimony in Evidence, Testimony in Aesthetics

How can this afterlife, then, be represented? How can its dimensions— beyond the concrete, visible, and material—be grasped and understood? The state is of little help, since its redress efforts aimed at closure, not exploration. Instead, some witnesses with more to articulate beyond the scope of redress have turned to aesthetic genres of representation that supplement the legal realm of the state. Here I focus on two of these witnesses who dialogue with and critique the state-based redress: the poet Janice Mirikitani and the filmmaker Rea Tajiri. Both artists have family connections to internment, even as neither has a direct memory of the camps. Mirikitani and Tajiri draw on testimony as source material, delving into a past at once deeply personal and deeply embedded in the collective histories of the interned and of the U.S. nation. Unlike the CWRIC report, or the restrictions imposed on the witnesses during the hearings, these artists are not bound to the demands for empirical evidence. Instead, by working within the aesthetic realm, they address audiences that may include but also extend beyond the state. While multiple artists have examined internment, Mirikitani and Tajiri provide particularly illuminating lenses for grappling with the afterlife of internment and for thinking through the uses of testimony as both evidence and narrative.9 A third-generation Sansei born in 1941, Mirikitani was interned in the Rohwer camp as a baby with her parents and released from it when she was three years old. During the 1960s and 1970s, she became an activist working in feminist, antiwar, and antiracist social justice movements, including the Third World Liberation Front and Third World Commu- nications. Mirikitani discovered her activist and artistic voice under the same conditions that would sow the seeds of the redress movement for internment years later. She has continued her community organizing as the executive director of Glide Memorial Church of San Francisco, where she runs programs, especially for women and families, addressing a wide range of issues like domestic and sexual violence, substance abuse, and job development. Her artistic work is interwoven with her social justice commitments. Her poems connect private experiences—like her family’s internment—to the larger issues of racism, sexism, poverty, and violence in which those experiences must be understood. Her work not only attests to but also enacts survival in the face of these broader forces. “Not being able to say what you want . . . that silence is the metaphor of my

62 Ghosts and the Afterlife of Internment

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms poetry, my life,” she stated. “I found that my wounds begin to heal when the voices of those endangered by silence are given power.”10 Her poem “Breaking Silence” (1981) exemplifies this artistic and political purpose. Mirikitani here explores her family’s history of internment, which she had always wanted to know but did not learn until her mother decided to testify before the CWRIC hearings. Engaging in a direct dialogue with the hearings and the political process of redress, she crafts the poem through a call-and-response structure between her mother’s testimony and her own stanzas of poetry. Amerasia Journal first published a version of “Breaking Silence,” alongside selected testimonies from the Los Angeles and San Francisco hearings, in 1981, while the CWRIC was still considering the evidence and formulating its recommendations to Congress. A brief preface to the poem and testimonies, written by the editors, emphasizes the testimonies’ value as evidence, stating that they “demonstrate overwhelmingly that a massive injustice was committed, and that monetary reparations are due.”11 At the same time, the journal’s editors implicitly recognized that a full articulation of the camps was impossible within the structure of the hearings. In creating a dialogue between official testimony and poetry, Mirikitani, like the journal, both values and supplements the testimonies, pointing to their limits while drawing on their knowledge. Incorporating her mother’s words of witnessing, she situates testimony in a work of art unfettered from the confines of the hearings’ structure. The poem is composed of seven stanzas that alternate between the voices of Mirikitani and her mother, with Mirikitani’s voice providing the opening and the closing. As indicated by its title, the poem performs the movement from silence and shame to speech and dignity opened up by the redress movement. Mirikitani draws on camp imagery—barbed wire, barracks, horse stables, and deserts—to articulate the ways in which the collective silence surrounding internment has continued to imprison internees beyond the actual time and space of the camps. She further relates this enduring condition to community silence at the time of the evacuation, implicitly leveraging a critique of the model minority discourse of acquiescence. The opening stanza reads:

We were told that silence was better golden like our skin, useful like

Ghosts and the Afterlife of Internment 63

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms go quietly, easier like don’t make waves, expedient like horsestalls and deserts.

While sympathetic to the fragility and pain from which their lingering silence emanates, Mirikitani critiques how internees were encouraged to submit to their unjust imprisonment without protest. And though the passive construction of this passage leaves unanswered the question of who told internees “that silence was better,” her censure seems directed in part against those community leaders who not only failed to resist internment but ultimately facilitated it. In contrast to this imprisoning silence, her mother’s voice directly addresses the government representatives that once locked her in the camps. Each of her stanzas opens with “Mr. Commissioner.” Her mother’s testimony focused on the details of the injustices committed against her—from the coerced confiscation and “vandalism and ravage” committed against her property to the racism that “singled out” Japanese persons for imprisonment. And while the poem does not idealize her mother’s life before the camps, instead emphasizing the hard work that defined it, the interplay between the testimony and Mirikitani’s poetic verse speaks to internment’s destruction not only of her mother’s material improvements to land and property but also of her “dreams,” “hope,” and creative investments in building a home in “her land” of the United States, dismantled by internment. Poetry and testimony merge in the penultimate stanza, written from her mother’s perspective. Unlike the previous stanzas that begin with “Mr. Commissioner,” this sixth verse is not a direct quote from the mother’s testimony. Rather than relaying the facts and conditions of internment, Mirikitani here writes in her mother’s voice, focusing on the affective dimensions—the feelings of frustration, rage, and grief, and other ghostly residues left by the camps. The stanza escalates into a more trenchantly critical tone:

Mr. Commissioner . . . So when you tell me I must limit testimony, when you tell me my time is up, I tell you this: Pride has kept my lips

64 Ghosts and the Afterlife of Internment

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms pinned by nails my rage coffined. But I exhume my past to claim this time. My youth is buried in Rohwer, Obachan’s ghost visits Amache Gate. My niece haunts Tule Lake.

Channeling the voice of her mother, Mirikitani criticizes the temporality of the hearings, which, as Reverend Jitsuo Morikawa also emphasized, made it impossible for witnesses to utter “the deep melancholy notes of tragedy and suffering” that have marked their rightless lives.12 Mirik- itani points toward the state’s demands for witnesses to “limit testimony” and defies these constraints by elucidating the emotional and spectral dimensions of rightlessness. She interprets the unspoken emotional content of her mother’s testimony and speaks to the ghosts of her dead grandmother Obachan and of her niece, who continue to haunt with their presence. “Exhum[ing] my past / to claim this time,” Mirikitani layers the time of the camps and the time of the testimonial utterance decades later as simultaneous temporalities. In other words, she brings the past to bear on the present, highlighting how internment continues to be a phenomenon of the contemporary moment. Even as she critiques the limits of the redress hearings and gestures toward the lingering residues of internment, Mirikitani suggests that the Japanese American community has broken through an imprisoning silence through speech acts laden with emotional content—extending beyond “crimes by the government” to include relationships with the self and others, “longings,” “burning humiliations,” “imagined riches,” and, most important, “love that breaks / through silences.” Claiming that “words are better than tears,”13 the poem marks her effort to make legible these immaterial dimensions. As the content of her verse, and even the choice to write poetry, attest, however, some dimensions of internment remain obscure. It continues to be an unresolved question if the complexity of rightlessness can ever become “transparent like glass.” Indeed, the celebratory tone of the poem’s end may speak more to the poet’s desire for resolution than a declaration of its achievement. Insisting that “we must recognize ourselves at last,” the last stanza still gestures toward the future and suggests that unfinished business remains for Japanese Americans beyond their testifying before the CWRIC.

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This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Written concurrently with the CWRIC hearings but years before the Civil Liberties Act passed in Congress, “Breaking Silence” enters into direct explicitly with the redress movement, whose ultimate success or failure was yet undetermined. It draws on the opportunity the hearings created for internees to testify to their internment experiences, echoing their legal testimony on the different representational field of aesthetics and poetry. Mirikitani thereby shows that the expansive value of testimony is not isolated to appeals to the state for recognition. While having this official, public audience proved crucial for internees, the testimonies offered in the hearings travel to reach other audiences beyond the state. Indeed, without the redress movement and hearings, Mirikitani might never have gained even this sliver of access to her own and her family’s internment experience. But she also draws on her imagination to fill in the gaps and silences left by her mother’s words, bringing voice to those dimensions of internment that her mother did not utter before the CWRIC or elsewhere. While valuing testimony as evidence and as narrative, Mirikitani also pushes past its limits, demonstrating how aesthetic works can illuminate dimensions of rightlessness obscured by evidentiary forms.

Following Ghosts

Rea Tajiri builds on this theme and grapples with the enduring legacies of the camps in her experimental documentary, History and Memory: For Akiko and Takeshige (1991). In this ghost story, Tajiri documents her effort to delve into her family’s history of internment, one that she did not endure directly, but that nevertheless possesses and haunts her. While she never explicitly refers to the redress movement, Tajiri created the short video in relation to it, beginning production in the late 1980s and releasing it in 1991, three years after Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act into law. Tajiri also attended the Los Angeles redress hearings several years before beginning production, an experience that she suggests motivated her to make the video.14 Like Mirikitani, Tajiri identified the movement from silence to speech as a startling, dramatic shift shared by many Japanese Americans. As an aesthetic work of testimony, History and Memory relies on the few memories of the camp that her family members, especially her mother, were willing to share with her. Yet the video also testifies to Tajiri’s own experience of internment, though she was born in 1958, years after the camps closed. In documenting her haunting by the ghosts of internment, she faces a conundrum of evidence—representing a ghost whose “absence

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This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms is [its] presence”15—one that she addresses by assembling a variety of sources to stitch together her own story. As she started researching internment—examining World War II media representations of Japanese people and documents in the National Archives, talking with family members, making a pilgrimage to Poston—her focus expanded beyond the speakable to those other dimensions of internment hovering on the edge of silence. The narrative of History and Memory revolves around a paradox of forgetting and remembering. Ironically, while her mother, her closest interned relative, has almost no memory of her imprisonment, Tajiri is possessed by recurring nightmares of it, even though she never experienced this form of rightlessness herself. This intrusive memory drives Tajiri to seek out her mother’s memories of the camp, but she confronts instead her mother’s inability, or refusal, to remember her life inside Poston. Indeed, when Tajiri first approached her mother about her internment experience, her mother responded with complete denial, at first asserting that she had never been in a camp. Only when Tajiri presented her mother with government records of the family’s internment did Mrs. Tajiri slowly open up about her camp life. As Tajiri later reflected: “It was like slowly chipping away at something, some kind of defense.”16 The video marks Rea Tajiri’s attempt to bring her memories and her mother’s experience of the camp together.17 Tajiri encountered throughout the filmmaking process moments that exceeded representation, which she described as “psycho-spiritual,” “unexplainable,” “mysterious,” “metaphysical,” and “strange.”18 Return- ing to Benjamin, she grapples with “what cannot be communicated” due to her mother’s missing memory (she cannot talk about what she cannot remember) and to the inadequacies of language itself to represent internment’s afterlife. These ethereal resonances elude what is already known about internment, a gap that incited Tajiri to attempt the impossible— to represent them. The difficulty of that task is compounded by gener- ational delay. In line with CWRIC witnesses, especially Sansei Japanese Americans like herself, Tajiri meditates on the ways in which even those people who never experienced the imprisonment of the camps firsthand nevertheless felt their impact. As a child of survivors of a deeply painful ordeal, she possesses what the feminist scholar Marianne Hirsch calls postmemory, experiences she “‘remember[s]’ only as the narratives and images with which [she] grew up, but that are so powerful, so monumen- tal, as to constitute memories in their own right.” Although postmemory often emerges within the family across generations, Hirsch insists that

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This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms it is not limited to bonds of kinship. Rather, she defines it as “an ethical relation to the oppressed” that is more broadly available because its “connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through representation, projection, and creation.” Thus postmemory can be understood as “retrospective witnessing by adoption,” 19 whereby a person incorporates the experiences and memories of others as her own, making them a part of her own life story. In History and Memory, Tajiri grapples with these immaterial remains of internment, not only for herself but also for her mother and her family. But ultimately, she expands her realm of concern beyond Japanese people directly affected by this experience of rightlessness. For Tajiri, making History and Memory was intensely personal and simultaneously world-historical, in terms of its content, incorporating both archival materials and personal memories, and in terms of its motivation—her desiring to confront her family’s history in the camps, and to articulate that deeply personal history in “dialogue with the rest of the world.”20 It is these psycho-spiritual dimensions of internment that the dominant narrative of redress could not comprehend. Even the CWRIC admits that, despite its meticulous research and documentation, “the cold statistics fail, even so, to convey the scars of the mind and soul that many carried with them from the camps.”21 The different ways the CWRIC and Tajiri approached the same history speak to the distinction between evidentiary and aesthetic methods and forms. To make its appeal to the state not only comprehensible but also persuasive—to incite all branches of the federal government into meeting demands for redress—the CWRIC had to speak in legible terms, staying within the limits of serious historical research substantiated by its “mountains of evidence and detail.”22 Furthermore, in amending the historical record, the CWRIC affirmed a progress narrative— of the United States reforming its racist past as demanded by civil rights gains. However, “the concept of progress should be grounded in the idea of catastrophe,” Benjamin reminds us. Redress ultimately facilitated, rather than challenged, the continuance of racist governance under the spectacle of color-blind justice. “That things ‘just keep on going’ is the catastrophe.”23 In contrast to the official redress, Tajiri draws on methods of experimental aesthetics to trace the oppositional perspectives and psycho-spiritual dimensions that escape more conventional historical narratives. Her filmmaking reflects a broader practice between the 1970s and the 1990s in which artists from marginalized backgrounds experimented with aesthetic forms to contest both prevailing artistic and political constraints.24 In representing

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This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms what resists representation, Tajiri refuses a linear, historical account, instead constructing a radial narrative using a distinct, hybrid aesthetic that both draws on and challenges the documentary mode. Tajiri brings different media into tension with and against each other, juxtaposing sources ranging from official U.S. documents and images; Hollywood films from the Second World War and the contemporary moment; family letters, photographs, and testimonies; and scrolling text and new images that she creates. In layering these visual, aural, and textual sources, Tajiri deliberately overloads the viewer’s capacity to absorb their meaning. She challenges the viewer to focus that overload and construct relationships among different media. Tajiri remains critically conscious of questions of representation and demands that her audience question the authority of any single source. Even as she relies on similar sources and draws on similar research methods as the CWRIC—delving into government archives and receiving the testimonies of the commission’s hearings—Tajiri creates History and Memory from the perspectives of those people closely affected by internment’s conditions of rightlessness. Yet even the perspectives of these subjects are insufficient to trace the afterlife of internment beyond the camps’ barbed wire. History and Memory is thus told in part from the perspective of ghosts, whose traces appear in the video through disembodied voice-over and scrolling text. These other witnesses have knowledge about rightlessness that they cannot directly express, but they nevertheless trouble the present and bear witness to internment’s residues.25

Spectral Reckonings

The video opens with a story of haunting: It begins with a black screen, with sounds of owls hooting and birds chirping faintly in the background. Text begins to scroll up the screen, depicting the “View from 100 feet above the ground.” The words describe the view “slowly, very, very slowly” zooming in from this distant perspective to focus on an argument between a man and a woman. The scrolling text continues: The spirit of my grandfather witnesses my father and mother as they have an argument about the unexplained nightmares their daughter has been having on the 20th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the day that changed the lives of 110,000 Japanese Americans who shortly after were forced by the US government to sell their property, homes, cars, possessions, businesses; leave their communities and relocate to internment camp.26

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This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms This opening story suggests that multiple ghosts haunt Tajiri’s family. While the ghost of her grandfather bears witness to this painful scene from a perspective unavailable to the living, hovering one hundred feet above the ground, another ghost has invaded Tajiri’s psyche through nightmares. It is this latter ghost that exerts its power over Tajiri’s character, compelling her to confront the family history that began with the bombing of Pearl Harbor. The haunting of such ghosts rouses a “transformative recognition,” which, as Avery F. Gordon notes, moves from “repetitively stuck explanations, to doing something else.”27 Although Tajiri knows that her family was subjected to internment, this knowledge cannot dislodge her troubled state; stuck with the same explanations, the same silences, and the same nightmares, she needs a different kind of confrontation with the past. Beyond bearing witness and providing a supplemental perspective, the ghosts of internment have stakes in Tajiri’s project of reckoning. And these stakes are high. As Benjamin asserts: “Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.”28 Tajiri attempts to arrest the catastrophe of progress that has tried to assimilate the memory of internment, heeding the call of the dead and responding to their spectral presence. She embarks on her mission to confront the ghosts haunting her, start- ing from her one clear memory of camp. Her voice begins to describe this memory as the scrolling text opening the video reaches its end, leaving a black screen: “I don’t know where this came from, but I just have this fragment, this picture that’s always been in my mind. My mother, she’s standing at a faucet, and it’s really hot outside, and she’s filling this canteen. And the water’s really cold, and it feels really good. And outside the sun is just so hot; it’s just beating down. And there’s this dust that gets in everywhere, and they’re always sweeping the floors.” While her mother is the subject of this memory, Tajiri describes the scene with rich detail, as if she can feel the moment sensually—the heat of the sun, the refreshing chill of the water, the dryness of the air and dusty wind. Though she could not have observed this scene and doesn’t know where it came from, Tajiri has adopted its memory. Even as she describes the scene as an outside observer, she has made the memory so fully her own that she enacts the role of her mother at the faucet. Because she addresses us mostly as a disembodied voice speaking over images, text, or a black screen, this fragment marks the only scene

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This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms in which Tajiri appears, literally in place of her mother. Tajiri becomes a proxy for her mother, the young woman who lived in the Poston camp and who has since virtually vanished, remaining only in the barest of traces like this image held in the mind of her daughter. In contrast to the other proxy figures prominent throughout these pages—the lawyers, doctors, human rights advocates, and family members who speak on behalf of rightless people—Rea Tajiri takes the place of her interned mother not because this rightless person is locked away in a camp and removed from the rest of society. Instead, she channels her mother’s ghost, because this rightless subject is lost in memory. With no recollection of this camps, Tajiri’s mother cannot testify to rightlessness on her own behalf. It is this peculiar situation that provokes Tajiri’s frustration, as well as her hope for making the video: to mediate the distance between her postmemory of something she did not experience, and the absence of memory of those who did. Tajiri’s mother never fully appears in the video, but her voice and ambivalence about her daughter’s project run throughout its narrative. The video shows a single, fleeting glimpse of her. First sitting on low steps, she immediately stands up and walks out of the frame of the screen, briefly smiling and laughing, perhaps uncomfortably. From off screen, she responds to Rea’s pleas.

Rea Tajiri: Mom, come on . . . Mrs. Tajiri: That’s the truth. I don’t remember any of it. You know something? It’s really, you know there’s so many things I’ve forgotten. It’s because, look how many years it has been. All I remember, when I saw a woman who lost her mind. A beautiful woman. And uh, I thought, why did this happen? You could go out of your mind, so you just put those things out of your mind, you know? Sure we could start thinking, you know, how did we get in here and all that. You could. And I thought to myself, I wonder how many people.

Though she asserts that she has no memory of the camps, Mrs. Tajiri immediately contradicts herself by relating the memory of a beautiful woman who lost her mind. Despite her unwillingness to return to the scene of the camp, she does, in fact, help her daughter understand what it means to be rightless by giving her another memory fragment. She explains through this story the seeming paradox of her life—her loss of memory of a defining experience.

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This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Rea Tajiri layers this audio narration with images and text that amplify its meanings. As Mrs. Tajiri begins telling the story, we see the recurring motif of Rea in the role of her mother at the faucet, as she works to put her single (post)memory of internment together with this new fragment offered by her mother. She also overlays this image with written text: “She tells the story of what she does not remember. But remembers one thing: Why she forgot to remember.” The video then splices an overexposed portrait photograph of a woman, just as her mother begins telling the story about the internee who lost her mind. The image is washed out, its features indecipherable, a visual metaphor for the beautiful young woman’s overexposure, the maddening conditions that led to her loss of sanity. For Tajiri’s mother, blocking her life in the camps has served as her strategy for psychic survival in the face of rightlessness. Rather than remember and return to the injustice of internment, Tajiri’s mother forgets, determined to be done with it and move forward with her life. Yet internment refuses to be left behind. However much she has been able to repress this part of her life, her daughter is haunted by it. The ghost overtaking Rea’s nightmares demands to be recognized. As Gordon argues, the ghost “has designs on us such that we must reckon with it graciously, attempting to offer it to hospitable memory out of a concern for justice.” 29 Hoping for a deeper understanding of her mother’s loss of memory, Tajiri attempts to draw forth fragments from her mother like the story of the beautiful woman. At stake is doing justice to internees both living and dead through gracious memory. To coax memories out of their repression, Tajiri presents to her mother historical documents related to her internment experience. In 1989 Tajiri has her mother watch government video footage showing the canteen at the Salinas Assembly Center where she was processed for her desert imprisonment. As we watch the same footage, we hear Tajiri’s mother: “What is this? Canteen? They didn’t have a canteen in Salinas Assembly Center. Did they have it in Poston? I don’t remember this. [pause] Oh, my goodness, I don’t remember this.” Here, Tajiri reveals the vast disjuncture between the historical facts of internment—including the fact that her mother was interned—and her mother’s absent memory. As her mother grapples with her non-recognition of the image, Tajiri’s father interjects, “they had it here,” suggesting that if only she could see exactly what the camp looked like as she watches the video, she might be able to remember. Yet even though Tajiri is “the agent of postmemory, . . . who gives

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This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms narrative shape to the surviving fragments of an irretrievable past,” as Hirsch points out, “the stories do not add up.”30 On its own, the official historical document, the evidence of Mrs. Tajiri’s internment, does not bring her or Rea closer to the camps. Even when illuminated by visual evidence, the camps remain shrouded. Tajiri depends on historical documents like this footage of the canteen, despite their limitations in reckoning with ghosts, because her postmemory is not mediated by direct remembrance but instead depends on images and documents passed down through generations. Because of its evidential force—its seemingly direct capture of what actually happened—photography is the privileged medium of postmemory, offering, Hirsch argues, an “integral link . . . of what has been there and no longer is.”31 However, as Tajiri points out, because internees were prohibited from possessing cameras or radios during their imprisonment, her family owns only a few photos from the camps, which she includes in her narrative.32 Combined with Mrs. Tajiri’s amnesia, this lack of textual sources forces the filmmaker to rely on documents produced by the government responsible for internment. Tajiri maintains a necessarily critical perspective on her sources, recognizing that these photographs and videos can conceal as much as they reveal, despite their seemingly unmediated connection to their referents. For example, she intersperses through her narrative scenes from “Japanese Relocation,” a public service announcement and self- proclaimed “historical record” of the evacuation. Milton Eisenhower, the director of the War Relocation Authority, opens the announcement with the following address: “When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the West Coast became a potential combat zone. Living in that zone are more than 100,000 persons of Japanese ancestry. Two-thirds of them American citizens; one-third, aliens. We knew that some among them were potentially dangerous. No one knew what would happen among this concentrated population if Japanese forces were to invade our shores.” Yet while Eisenhower speaks from behind his desk, we cannot focus on the content coming from his mouth, as the words, “Who Chose What Story to Tell?,” one by one, appear over his talking head. The over- laid text not only obscures Eisenhower’s message; it also unambiguously questions its intent and suggests that there were multiple versions of the truth from which to choose. Tajiri deploys the same critical lens to mainstream, popular images, both from World War II and the video’s present. She includes clips from

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This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), a patriotic musical for which its star, James Cagney, won an Academy Award. Over a scene of black men and women dressed in farming attire and singing “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah,” Tajiri overlays the following text: “1942[.] The same year about 400 miles away. The Office of War Information produces ‘Japanese Relocation’ about the internment of the Japanese-American population in California ‘willingly’ leaving their homes and arriving in camp.” The scene of Yankee Doodle Dandy attempts to smooth over the simultaneous disavowal and embrace of racist governance by professing the United States’ commitment to all Americans, regardless of race. As the black characters congregate around Abraham Lincoln’s statue, his disembodied voice proclaims: “And that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.” Yankee Doodle Dandy suggests that the nation’s violent oppression of black people has been amended with Lincoln’s declaration ending slavery. But, as Tajiri shows, this narrative of racial redemption holds true only with massive disregard for concurrent forms of racist statecraft, not only against the Japanese singled out for imprisonment but also against black people who continued to live as separate and unequal citizens subjected to racist violence under Jim Crow. As she critiques such images, Tajiri reveals the tenuous nature of fact, objectivity, and truth. She remains unrelentingly critical of historical documents like “Japanese Relocation” and Yankee Doodle Dandy, but she nevertheless depends on them in the absence of other resources. Indeed, she finds a way to read such documents against the grain of their original production and re-enliven them by incorporating them into her narrative.

Looking Past

Tajiri’s project was enabled in part by the massive rise in government documentation of Japanese Americans that accompanied internment. As she narrates: “There was a change in attitude towards us. Nothing outwardly hostile. Just a kind of curiosity, wondering what was going to happen to us. Whereas before we were mostly ignored and slightly out of focus, the war brought us clearly into view and made us sharply defined.” While listening to her voice, we see more government images of the evacuation, the alien identification cards of her grandfather and grandmother, and a wooden bird carving, whose significance is not immediately apparent (see figure 1).

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This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms figure 1 “My mom used to have this bird.” Rea Tajiri’s childhood memory of a carved bird in her mother’s jewelry box unexpectedly emerges in the archive. History and Memory: For Akiko and Takeshige. Directed by Rea Tajiri. 1991. New York: Women Make Movies, 1991. DVD.

As John Tagg argues in his analysis of documentary photography, people photographed as the objects of knowledge are “subjected to a scrutinizing gaze, forced to emit signs, yet cut off from the command of meaning[;] such groups were represented as, and wishfully rendered, incapable of speaking, acting, or organizing themselves.”33 Furthermore, “when we confront perpetrator images, we cannot look independently of the look of the perpetrator,” Hirsch contends; “any potential resistance of the look is severely impaired.”34 Yet in the absence of family material records and memories, Tajiri needs these documents. Against claims that such images lock the perpetrators’ perspective in place, she demonstrates how to read them from an alternative point of view, as she reveals the meaning of the carved bird: “My mom used to have this bird, this little wooden carved bird that was inside her jewelry box. I used to ask her if I could play with it, but she would say no, no, no, grandma gave me that, put that back. Twenty-five years later I was sitting in a room in the National Archives, going through a box that contained hundreds of pictures. Suddenly, I came across a picture of Grandma seated in a classroom, taken while she was in camp. I turned the picture over and the caption read: ‘Bird carving class, Camp 2, 1942.’” As she tells the story, Tajiri vis- ually simulates her experience of discovering this photograph—singling

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This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms figure 2 The Punctum. Tajiri simulates discovering her grandmother’s image while searching through boxes of photographs in the archives. Exemplifying Barthes’s notion of the punctum, the image of her grandmother shoots out of the photo, filling her sight by force. History and Memory: For Akiko and Takeshige. Directed by Rea Tajiri. 1991. New York: Women Make Movies, 1991. DVD. out her grandmother’s image, then gradually lifting the black screen cov- ering the rest of the photo, which depicts a full class in pose, smiling for the camera (see figures 2 and 3). In Camera Lucida, his seminal work on photography, Roland Barthes names this type of detail the punctum of the photograph: “It is the element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.” With a punctum, “the Photograph is violent: not because it shows violent things, but because on each occa- sion it fills the sight by force, and because in it nothing can be refused or transformed.”35 Out of the hundreds of pictures Tajiri was quickly skim- ming, this photograph—with the image of her grandmother meeting the gaze of the camera’s lens and her granddaughter’s eyes decades later— immediately, unexpectedly seized her attention. She later described this discovery as an act guided by the hand of fate: “I don’t understand how that happened, but I really did have one of those [gasp] moments. . . . And I was like, ‘Well, obviously, this was meant to be. I was supposed to be here at this moment.’”36 As her gasp suggests, this moment lies beyond description in language or empirical knowledge. It marks what Benjamin describes in terms of the flash, shock, or moment of arrest, “where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions” in which there is a “revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past.”37

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This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms figure 3 “Bird carving class, Camp 2, 1942.” When Tajiri recognizes her grandmother in this photograph, she turns it over to read the caption, “Bird carving class, Camp 2, 1942.” This photograph provides a bridge between her childhood memory and her family’s history of internment. History and Memory: For Akiko and Takeshige. Directed by Rea Tajiri. 1991. New York: Women Make Movies, 1991. DVD.

This photograph’s punctum addresses Tajiri in a way that it cannot address anyone else. As Barthes asserts: “Its mere presence changes my reading, that I am looking at a new photograph, marked in my eyes with a higher value.” While she remains highly critical of images that emerged from the same web of power that imprisoned her grandmother, this state-authored image allows Tajiri to confirm that her family was in the camp and gives her a trace of what their life was like inside its confines. Just as her family was never able to discuss their life in the camps, her mother never told her the value of the carved bird, but only prohibited her from playing with it. Only Tajiri can bring what Barthes calls a blind field, “a whole life external to the portrait,”38 to the official document, a life that is contained within it, but that also presses in from outside the picture’s frame, a sign of the ghost haunting her. Through the punctum Tajiri finds a transformative perspective that resists the state power that produced this image. In his discussion of photography’s other, or postcolonial, histories, Christopher Pinney argues that

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This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms colonized people can reinterpret colonial images in empowering, transformative ways through the discovery of family members within them. Tajiri draws on the strategy that Pinney calls “looking past” the power that tried to dominate her grandmother—not only making her a rightless subject but also making her a subject of photographs showing the camps as a benevolent project of liberal governance, complete with recreational craft classes. Looking past “suggests a complexity of perspectival positions or a multiplicity of layers that endow photographs with an enormously greater complexity than that which they are usually credited.” Even as Tajiri openly casts doubt on the notion that photographs provide unmediated access to the truth, as seen in her readings of “Japanese Relocation,” it is the evidential character of the photograph that makes looking past possible. As Pinney argues, “the inability of the lens to discriminate will ensure a substrate or margin of excess, a subversive code present in every pho- tographic image that makes it open and available to other readings and uses.”39 This capturing of whatever lies before the camera’s lens, including the punctum, opens space for recoding the photograph. Tajiri is able to unlock the image of her grandmother from its fixed location in the past and give it a life in the future—the carved bird is released from the camp and passed down to future generations.40 On the one hand, the photo demonstrates how, following Benjamin, such “a document of civilization” is also at once “a document of barbarism.”41 As the photograph records, the state manages camps and rightless people not only through brute force but also through liberal means. Displaying a moment of leisure, it was taken to recast imprisonment as benevolent care by the state and to occlude the internees’ daily reality—removed to the empty time of the camp. On the other hand, while not ignoring the social and historical conditions that gave rise to the photo, Tajiri also looks past them. This discovered photo, even with its ethnographic and clinical gaze, gives Tajiri what her mother and other family members cannot—a material trace of the ghosts that haunt her. And this trace reveals the resilience of internees like her grandmother, who managed to eke out a life even under confinement, one that did not submit entirely to misery and oppression. Tajiri transforms the photograph and reads this document of barbarism against the grain of power that produced it. In addition to redeploying existing documents, Tajiri creates new images to fill the gaps left by her mother’s amnesia and the absence or limitations of other images. For example, she splices scenes from Hollywood films against government footage of the train station in Parker, Arizona,

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This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms where her mother must have disembarked during her transfer to Pos- ton. Yet these attempts to understand by assembling existing images are insufficient; eventually, Tajiri must create an image herself:

Rea Tajiri: You don’t remember getting off the train? Mrs. Tajiri: No, not quite, except that I remember kind of trucks and stuff, and I remember going after our mattresses and stuff, and I thought, oh, how awful. . . .

“On July 5, 1942, my mother went on a train to Poston . . . She didn’t see the view.”

Mrs. Tajiri: I don’t know how we got there, because we had to sell our car and everything. All I know is a brief train ride as we got to Poston, you know, and the blinds were down. . . . And the shades were drawn. Rea Tajiri: You couldn’t look out? Did you know where you were going? Mrs. Tajiri: Noooo. I had no inkling. No one would tell us.

In addition to the voice-over and captions, the video shows a succes- sion of existing and newly created images—a 1942 archival photograph of Parker Station with Japanese people standing around; a video clip taken by Rea of a deserted Parker Station in 1988 and a panoramic shot of the surrounding area; the overexposed photograph representing the woman who lost her mind; and a brief clip of the opening credits of the filmBad Day at Black Rock showing a diesel train running through desert mountains. This 1955 Hollywood film, about the collective cover-up of a World War II–era murder of a Japanese American man, is a recurring motif in History and Memory, as Rea identifies with its main character, an outsider who “makes the town remember something they would rather forget.” But even as these existing images provide some access to Mrs. Tajiri’s arrival at camp, they still leave a chasm. Thirty seconds of a desert landscape, shot from the windows of Rea’s moving car, uncover this once suppressed perspective, as the caption reads, “On April 22, 1988, I went to Poston in a rental car / And filmed the view for her.” This scene marks an encounter between Mrs. Tajiri’s memory—riding the train to Poston with the shades drawn—and Rea Tajiri’s image-making that performs restorative work. By filming the view from the train more than four decades after the fact, Tajiri attempts to suture this gap in her mother’s memory and gestures toward living with the wounds of the past.

Ghosts and the Afterlife of Internment 79

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms This scene exemplifies the achievement of History and Memory. Tajiri narrates at the video’s end: “My sister used to say how funny it was. When someone tells you a story, you create a picture of it in your mind. Some- times the picture will return without the story. I’ve been carrying around this picture with me for years. It’s the one memory I have of my mother speaking of camp while we grew up. I overhear her describing to my sister this simple action. Her hands filling a canteen out in the middle of the desert. For years I’ve been living with this picture without the story, feeling a lot of pain. Not knowing how they fit together. But now I’ve found I could connect the picture to the story. I could forgive my mother, her loss of memory. And could make this image for her.” As we listen to her voice, we watch the scene of Tajiri at the faucet; yet unlike other moments when she splices fragments of this memory into her narrative, often when the partial truths of U.S. cultural and historical narratives contradict her family’s histories and memories, the entire scene shows Tajiri (in the role of her mother) filling the canteen, washing her face, and smiling as she drinks water from her hands. Tajiri created History and Memory via a reciprocal process: her mother provided her with the few memories of internment she still had, while Rea in turn not only for- gives her mother but also makes “this image” for her. Even as Rea interprets the final video as the result of a mutual project and as an offering for her mother, it remains unclear by the video’s end whether her mother ever desired to reckon with her internment experience. As she expresses in the story of the woman who lost her mind, Mrs. Tajiri has repressed this encounter with rightlessness as a means of protecting her psyche. The difference in dealing with internment’s past—between the mother’s forgetting and the daughter’s need to remember—speaks to the afterlife of internment. The direct experience of becoming a rightless subject through camp imprisonment is so overwhelming that, for Mrs. Tajiri, it must be kept at bay. But the past seethes in the present. Its memory can never be completely suppressed; rather, it reemerges in the following generation, where its inaccessibility proves no less overwhelming for the descendants. By offering the few scattered memories she does have, responding to her daughter’s urging and persistent need to reckon with the family’s history of the camps, Mrs. Tajiri gives Rea a means to follow the ghost’s bare, nearly invisible traces. Through this shared, if not quite mutual, endeavor, Rea has come to understand why she has been occu- pied by this (post)memory, why and how her mother could have passed down such a painful memory without its story.

80 Ghosts and the Afterlife of Internment

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Living With

By following the ghost and exploring the afterlife of internment, Tajiri shows how the release from camp and the restoration of rights do not solve the problems of rightlessness that internment created. Rightless- ness and the camps permanently change the subject, far beyond the time and space of imprisonment, and far beyond the imprisoned. Tajiri copes with her postmemory by integrating her mother’s few memories and historical sources into her narrative, but the compiled images and texts can only document what remains of her loss. They cannot fill that loss. Making peace with the ghost of internment does not mean the ghost has vanished. In tracing what remains of rightlessness, Tajiri has documented her desire to represent what ultimately exceeds representation, what remains impossible to represent. The afterlife is a potent example illuminating how no simple opposi- tion exists between having and not having rights. Rather, a far murkier spectrum of variegated rights falls between the rightful and rightless— like the released camp inmate or her descendant, who both remain afflicted by rightlessness, even if not confined to the camp. Witnesses to the CWRIC and Mirikitani testified to the camp’s enduring effects, to permanent losses that resist reparation—losses of family members, personal dignity, and belief in the nation of their citizenship and supposed belonging. And as Tajiri reveals, rightlessness seeps into the lives of people who have never been subjected to the camp’s removal from political community, to the right to have rights, but who have no choice but to grapple with its enduring effects. Nevertheless, internment’s past can be lived with. Tajiri’s ghost story shows how contesting rightlessness, even decades after the event, can generate ways of being that neither fully transcend it by becoming rightful subjects nor fully submit to its damage. Instead, it is possible to live with rightlessness in ways that insist on remembering its legacy while reminding us of the critical work that remains to be done to thwart its future. Tajiri transforms a painful past into a project of the present. In the same way that she manages to recuperate images authored by the perpetrator state, to look past and find new meaning, she shows that rightlessness does not end solely in damage, even as its residues remain. It is not only possible but necessary to perform this kind of work, unhinging the seeming equivalence between the state’s perspective that captured the image and irrefutable authority. It is a mistake to simply ally ourselves

Ghosts and the Afterlife of Internment 81

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms with the perpetrator’s point of view, for such an interpretation ultimately colludes in the state’s stripping of rights and dignity from the subjects of the images and documents, equating their identities with their rightless condition and robbing them of their futures. Tajiri’s interpretive methods and engagement with broader questions about the writing of history prove instructive. She cannot afford to disregard any source, regardless of its original purpose, authorship, or perspective. But she also does not take any source at its face value. By questioning existing narratives and incorporating obscured or repressed perspectives formerly out of focus, she addresses the silencing of the past that generated the ghosts’ haunting presence and the afterlife of internment. And, as the historian Michel Rolph-Trouillot argues, this silencing is an issue of power: “The presences and absences embodied in sources (artifacts and bodies that turn an event into fact) or archives (facts col- lected, thematized, and processed as documents and monuments) are neither neutral or natural. They are created. As such, they are not mere presences and absences, but mentions or silences of various kinds and degrees. By silence, I mean an active and transitive process: one ‘silences’ a fact or an individual as a silencer silences a gun.”42 Tajiri is ultimately less interested in producing an authentic history of internment than in elucidating history as an unsettled, complex process imbued with power. But this power to write history also produces silences that reemerge to haunt the present. Through both her persistently self-reflexive eye and experimental methods, Tajiri reveals the constructed nature of any historical narrative and refuses any resolution of internment’s history. This insistence on internment’s presence in the present diverges from the progress narrative of the official redress, which attempts to bring closure to internment’s history. But as I argue in chapter 1, redress marks a shift, not an ending, in how the United States continues to deploy racism, a shift that requires historical amnesia of the exclusions of (racial) others from illusive promises of U.S. freedom and rights. This forced denial is mirrored in Mrs. Tajiri’s coping strategy of amnesia, which marks her need not to actively inhabit the subjectivity of rightlessness. And yet, just as the damage inflicted by the camps endures in the haunting and possession of the daughter, the amnesiac disavowals of the United States enable the recurring production of new forms of rightlessness. The U.S. state continues to develop and refine its strategies of racist statecraft, producing ever-widening domains of vulnerability, while proclaim- ing adherence to the principles of rights. As I argue, while the rightless

82 Ghosts and the Afterlife of Internment

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms subjects on whom I focus exist at the far end on the spectrum of rights, others are also subjected to the strategies of U.S. racist governance that produce rightlessness, even if they do not ultimately end up in a camp. Rightless camp prisoners emerge from well-established practices and discourses that distance certain people from inclusion in the political community that could guarantee their rights. Legal immigration exclusion and bars to naturalization and land ownership, as well as social discrimination and fears of economic competition, preceded Japanese internment. Put differently, you do not have to be imprisoned in a camp to be made vulnerable. Interpreting internment through the lens of redress reveals the afterlife of the camps, as well as the state’s ability to adapt to the ascension of rights, elucidating how far U.S. productions of rightlessness can extend. As U.S. citizens and residents, Japanese American internees were made rightless by the government of their home. What the U.S. state could give, it could take away. And even as the United States has become a potent symbol and self-proclaimed defender of rights, it has been able to render people rightless via camp imprisonment. As the detention of the Haitian refugees and enemy combatants at Guantánamo reveals, the U.S. state’s reach can capture not only those unwanted subjects who travel too close to its shores but can also extend to ensnare people on the other side of the globe. Moving to the Guantánamo camps highlights another crucial development, but for the rightless. The ascension of rights that made the redress movement possible in the four-decade interval after the closing of internment camps also means that the prisoners of Guantánamo can draw on the language of rights to testify to rightlessness and make claims for justice from within the camp’s confines.

Ghosts and the Afterlife of Internment 83

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:26 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Notes

Abbreviations

CWRIC United States Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians

HCC I Haitian Centers Council, Inc. v. McNary, 789 F. Supp. 541 (E.D.N.Y. 1992)

HCC I Haitian Centers Council, Inc. v. McNary, 969 F. 2d 1326 (2d Cir. 1992) Appeal

HCC II Sale v. Haitian Centers Council, Inc., 509 U.S. 155 (1993)

HCC III Haitian Centers Council v. Sale, 92 Cv 1258 (Sj) 823 F. Supp. 1028 (E.D.N.Y. 1993)

OMCW Office of Military Commissions Website

PJD United States Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians

RCWRIC Records of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, 1981–1983

TA-DNSA The Torture Archive, the Digital National Security Archive

TD-CSRT Testimony of Detainees before the Combatant Status Review Tribunal, The Torture Archive, the Digital National Security Archive

TLS Uncatalogued papers of Touro Law School

TTP Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel, ed., The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib

Introduction

1. Rose, Guantánamo, 22. France imprisoned Sassi following his release from Guantánamo for “criminal association with a terrorist enterprise,” but French courts overturned his conviction on appeal in February 2009 because the evidence against him was gained through Guantánamo interrogations and therefore inadmissible. Erlanger, “Terror Convictions Overturned in France.” 2. Schumacher, “Nizar Sassi.” Like other detainees, Sassi wrote a memoir of his detention. Sassi, Prisonnier 325.

231

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:44 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 3. Beverley, Testimonio, 82. 4. While I draw on the terms of Giorgio Agamben, his stark interpretation of the camp as a space where the law is permanently suspended and its inmates are “stripped of every political status and wholly reduced to bare life” cannot account for the ways in which these prisoners persistently assert their personhood and refute their representation as bare life. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 171. 5. Arendt, “We Refugees,” 111. See also Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt. 6. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 297 7. In addition to the camps of the Philippine-American War and the Indian Wars mentioned below, the history of U.S. spatial exceptions also includes spaces of confinement like those used during Cherokee Removal and postbellum forced labor camps, as well as more contemporary iterations, like foreign trade zones within U.S. borders. See Kramer, “Power and Connection.” 8. Kramer, “Power and Connection,” 1356–57. 9. Rodriguez, Forced Passages, 41. 10. Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 242. 11. Rodriguez, Forced Passages, 47. 12. Gordon, “Methodologies of Imprisonment,” 652. 13. Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 28. 14. While the term “enemy alien” may correctly describe first-generation Issei, who were citizens of a country at war with the U.S., the accuracy of this term is strictly tech- nical and legal. In the years before World War II, the U.S. government found Issei to be “good neighbors,” who, like their U.S.-born children, posed no threat to the United States. I argue that casting ethnic Japanese persons who built their lives in the United States (and, as the government noted, would become citizens if not legally barred based on their race) as “enemy aliens” is based in racism and constitutes a racial def- amation. I further use the term “Japanese persons” to refer to ethnic Japanese people, including U.S. citizens of Japanese descent. Munson, “Japanese on the West Coast.” Throughout this book, I rely on terms whose meanings are contested. “Prisoner,” “imprisonment,” and “incarceration” imply confinement resulting from criminal justice proceedings that at least nominally recognize due process. “Internment,” “evacuation,” and “relocation” are obfuscating euphemisms when used to refer to the mass imprisonment of Japanese people during the Second World War. Internment is an internationally and nationally recognized legal process that authorizes and regulates the imprisonment of civilian enemy nationals in a formally declared war. The mass detention of ethnic Japanese people from the U.S. west coast does not fit this legal process. While “detention” and “detainee” allow for the broadest meaning, the George W. Bush administration deployed these terms and, as I discuss in chapter 5, invented the category of the enemy combatant specifically to refuse legal recognition and rights to the men imprisoned under the War on Terror. While these terms are imprecise and even distorting, I nevertheless draw on them for two reasons. I follow the lead of my sources, but more important, my use of these terms highlights the contradiction between the confinement of the subjects of this study and their status as rightless people who were removed to the camp without recognition of their rights like due process. See Daniels, “Words Do Matter.” Ahmad, “Resisting Guantánamo.”

232 Notes to Pages 3–8

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:44 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 15. As legal scholar Leti Volpp argues: “September 11 facilitated the consolidation of a new identity category that groups together persons who appear ‘Middle Eastern, Arab, or Muslim.’ This consolidation reflects a racialization wherein members of this group are identified as terrorists, and are disidentified as citizens.” Volpp, “The Citizen and the Terrorist,” 1576. 16. Paul Gilroy, Against Race, 85–86. 17. Gordon, “Methodologies of Imprisonment,” 651. 18. Following Foucault, I examine power “at the points where this power trans- gresses the rules of right that organize and delineate it.” Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 27–28. 19. See, for example, Cacho, Social Death. Alexander, The New Jim Crow. 20. Hussain, “Beyond Norm and Exception,” 737. 21. The roots of this notion of “human” in Western Enlightenment discourse and its continuing violent exclusions of racial and sexual difference are well-documented by scholars. For example, Joseph R. Slaughter argues that human rights trace their origins to the specifically French nationalist origins of the Rights of Man. Slaughter, “A Question of Narration,” 415. 22. United Nations General Assembly, “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” 23. Moyn, The Last Utopia, 8. As Moyn argues, these political utopian visions “promised a free way of life, but led into a bloody morass, or offered emancipation from empire and capital, but suddenly came to seem like dark tragedies rather than bright hopes.” Moyn, The Last Utopia, 4. 24. Through programs like the Marshall Plan and the Allied occupation of Japan, the United States opened vast new export markets, amassing tremendous wealth, and asserted itself as a primary architect of the postwar order and as the leader of the democratic, capitalist West. See Williams, The Divided World; and Douzinas, Human Rights and Empire. 25. The United States is the largest financial contributor to the United Nations’ regular budget and to its peacekeeping operations. It contributes 22 percent of the United Nations’ regular budget. For 2013–2015, the U.S. government contributed 27 percent of the $7.33 billion UN Peacekeeping budget. Human Rights Voices, “UN 101: U.S. Contributions to UN Regular Budget.” United Nations Peacekeeping, “Financing Peacekeeping.” 26. President’s Committee on Civil Rights, “To Secure These Rights.” 27. See Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights. 28. Douzinas, Human Rights and Empire, 177. Douzinas refers to human rights as the “lingua franca of the new world order” (32). 29. Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom, xii, xi. 30. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 110. 31. See Brown, States of Injury. 32. Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 27. 33. Ahmad, “Resisting Guantánamo,” 188. 34. Williams, The Divided World, xxviii. 35. Gilroy, Against Race, 87. 36. Foucault, “Society Must be Defended,” 7, 8.

Notes to Pages 8–14 233

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:44 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 37. Gordon, “Methodologies of Imprisonment,” 654. 38. I draw from the rich scholarship on testimonio, a Latin American genre of first-person writing by subaltern subjects, which George Yúdice defines as “an authentic narrative, told by a witness who is moved to narrate by the urgency of a situation (e.g., war, oppression, revolution, etc.). . . . The witness portrays his or her own experience as an agent (rather than a representative) of a collective memory and identity. Truth is summoned in the cause of denouncing a present situation of exploitation and oppression or in exorcising and setting aright official history.” Yúdice, “Testimonio and Postmodernism,” 17. 39. Beverley, Testimonio, 41. 40. Gilroy, Against Race, 87. 41. Rodriguez, Forced Passages, 73, 110. 42. Rodriguez, “(Non)Scenes of Captivity,” 21. 43. As philosopher Avital Ronell argues: “Testimony, while never abandoning the effort to scope veracity and say what it knows, . . . has no reliable test to back it up or make it back down.” Ronell, “The Testamentary Whimper,” 498. See also Lowe, Immi- grant Acts, especially chapter 7. 44. For example, in A Documentary Companion to Storming the Court, a legal text- book, the authors emphasize: “Unclear testimony can cause all manner of problems, [including] questions about witness’s credibility.” They continue: “A lawyer’s questions need . . . to arrange the pieces of the witness’s testimony into a coherent, persuasive story for the fact-finder.” Goldstein, Citron, and Land, A Documentary Companion to Storming the Court, 137, 181. 45. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights, 11, 8. 46. Foucault, “Society Must be Defended,” 7, 8. 47. See discussions of the Rigoberta Menchú controversy, in which U.S. anthro- pologist David Stoll discredited the reliability of Menchú’s testimonio, I, Rigoberta Menchú, by pointing out inconsistencies in her story. See Beverley, Testimonio. Arias, The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy. For more on the stakes on rightless testimony, see Paik, “Testifying to Rightlessness.” 48. Douzinas, Human Rights and Empire, 178. 49. Lowe, “The Intimacies of Four Continents,” 196. Lowe quotes Ann Stoler’s definition of the colonial archive. 50. “To doubt referentiality in testimonials would be an irresponsible luxury,” literary scholar Doris Sommer asserts, “given the urgency of the call to action.” Quoted in Gugelberger and Kearney, “Voices for the Voiceless,” 11. 51. Beverley, Testimonio, 24. 52. Cacho, Social Death, 32. 53. Ibid, 33; emphasis in the original.

Chapter 1

1. The act also invested in public education concerning internment. The Civil Lib- erties Act. 2. Quoted in Maki, Kitano, and Berthold, Achieving the Impossible Dream, 195.

234 Notes to Pages 14–21

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:44 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 92. In addition to the 442nd unit, the 100th Battalion was composed of Japanese American soldiers from Hawai‘i, and the U.S. military also employed Nisei soldiers for military intelligence. When Roosevelt authorized the 442nd unit, he stated: “Americanism is not and never was, a matter of race and ancestry.” Quoted in Daniels, Concentration Camps, North America, 113. 93. See Iijima, “Reparations and the ‘Model Minority’ Ideology of Acquiescence,” 408. 94. Such acts of resistance include a strike at Poston protesting the detention of two men who allegedly beat a suspected WRA informer and a riot at Manzanar during which guards injured nine internees and killed two others. Those involved with the Manzanar Riot and other “troublemakers” were eventually sent to “Citizen Isolation Centers,” more heavily fortified and repressive WRA camps located in Moab, Utah, and Leupp, Arizona. CWRIC, Personal Justice Denied, 176–80; Kashima, Judgment without Trial. 95. Iijima, “Reparations and the ‘Model Minority’ Ideology of Acquiescence,” 395. 96. Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 25. 97. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in 1983 demonstrated that Black families, whether poor or affluent, “suffered a decline in disposable income and standard of living since 1980”; that Black poverty rose to its highest level since 1968; and that long-term unemployment for Black people ballooned by 72 percent since 1980, whereas it increased by 1.5 percent for whites. Wilkins, “Smiling Racism,” 437. 98. Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 245. 99. As Stuart Hall et al. argue: “In a class society, based on the needs of capital and the protection of private property, the poor and propertyless are always in some sense on ‘the wrong side of the law,’ whether they actually transgress it or not.” Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, 188. 100. Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 24. 101. Perkinson, Texas Tough, 15. 102. Black and Latina/o people are imprisoned at a rate six times greater than white people and compose 60 percent of the U.S. prison population. Women are the fastest growing prison population and were three times as likely to be imprisoned in 2001 than they were in 1974. Similarly, immigrant detention has massively expanded in the last forty years. The average daily population of immigrant detainees grew stead- ily from 54 in 1981 to over 32,000 in 2011, a nearly 700 percent increase. Austin et al., Unlocking America, 1; Fenton, Rentz, Baksh, and Hill, “Map: Immigration Detention Facilities, 1981–2011.” 103. Best and Hartman, “Fugitive Justice,” 1. 104. Hearings Los Angeles, 4 August 1981, p. 27, RG 220, Box 74, RCWRIC.

Chapter 2

1. Benjamin, “The Task of Translator,” 71. 2. Hearings Chicago, 22 September 1981, pp. 271, 273, 274, RG 220, Box 71, RCWRIC. 3. Hearings Chicago, 23 September 1981, p. 772, RG 220, Box 71, RCWRIC. 4. The Manzanar Riot erupted over internee resistance to the alleged black-market sales of camp food supplies and to JACL cooperation with the camp administration.

Notes to Pages 53–60 239

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:44 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Though James was only a teenager and not a lead organizer or resister to camp author- ities, military police shot him in the back when they discharged their weapons into the crowd of protesters. For more on the Manzanar Riot, see, for example, Hansen and Hacker, “The Manzanar Riot.” 5. Hearings Los Angeles, 4 August 1981, pp. 22, 26, RG 220, Box 74, RCWRIC. 6. Ibid., 121. 7. Hearings New York, 23 November 1981, pp. 257, 258, 260, RG 220, Box 70, RCWRIC. 8. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 79. 9. Mirikitani and Tajiri mark a pivot between the epistemological difference Asian American film scholar Glenn Mimura identifies between redress and post-redress aesthetics, with the former focused on extending and amending dominant historical narratives about internment and the latter characterized by a more introspective perspective and concern over problems of memory. Mimura offers a reading ofHistory and Memory as a work of post-redress aesthetics. Mimura, Ghostlife of Third Cinema, 82–83. 10. McManis, “Freeing Verse”; David, “Revisiting the Poets of 1960s.” 11. “The Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians,” 57. I cite and analyze a later version of the poem published in Mirikitani’s collection, Shedding Silence, which slightly elaborates on the original version published in Amerasia. 12. Hearings Chicago, 22 September 1981, pp. 195, RG 220, Box 71, RCWRIC. 13. Mirikitani, “Breaking Silence.” 14. Tajiri stated: “I was very moved by a sense of a real break in terms of really watch- ing people from the Japanese American community speak very openly and honestly about a situation where they had had their rights taken away and how shocking that was, because my family had been very silent about their experience.” Rea Tajiri, interview with the author, New York, 11 March 2007. 15. History and Memory, dir. Tajiri. 16. Tajiri, interview with the author. 17. For an analysis of History and Memory and its relation to psychoanalysis and race, see Eng, The Feeling of Kinship. 18. Tajiri, interview with the author. 19. Hirsch, “Surviving Images,” 9–10. Hirsch’s emphasis. 20. Tajiri, interview with the author. 21. CWRIC, Personal Justice Denied, 252. 22. Civil Liberties Public Education Fund, “Prologue,” in Personal Justice Denied, xii. 23. Benjamin, “N [Re The Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress],” 64. 24. Other filmmakers and artists experimenting with filmmaking techniques and aesthetic practices include Trinh T. Minh-Ha, director of Reassemblage (1982), Naked Spaces (1985), and Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989); Arlene Bowman, director of Navajo Talking Picture (1985); Janice Tanaka, director of Memories from the Department of Amnesia (1989); Tony Cokes, director of Fade to Black Color (1990); and Isaac Julien, director of Looking for Langston (1998). 25. “I would feel that there were witnesses to this that couldn’t speak but that knew,” Tajiri stated. “There was some other kind of witness.” Tajiri, interview with the author. 26. History and Memory, dir. Tajiri.

240 Notes to Pages 60–69

This content downloaded from 128.112.200.244 on Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:51:44 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 27. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 8, 202. 28. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 255. 29. Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 64. Her emphasis. 30. Hirsch, Family Frames, 248 31. Hirsch, “Surviving Images,” 14. 32. As Jasmine Alinder notes, the WRA did eventually lift the outright ban on cameras. See Alinder, Moving Images. However, internees were prohibited from bringing them to camp during the evacuation and transfer to and from the assembly centers. When cameras were no longer prohibited, internees had to petition to find them out of storage and have them delivered to camp. Furthermore, the collective memory of many internees still remembers the prohibition against cameras and photography, suggesting that it is the experience of the camps as spaces of control that endures in memory, not the shift in policy. 33. Tagg, The Burden of Representation, 11. 34. Hirsch, “Surviving Images,” 26. 35. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 26–27, 91. Barthes’s emphasis. 36. Tajiri, interview with the author. 37. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 262–63. 38. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 42, 55. 39. Pinney, “Introduction,” 4–5, 6. 40. As Tajiri later remarked: “That was one of those moments of a photograph that has reverberations across many psychic planes. It was obviously taken to serve one narrative for the government, where everything is ok; we have the evidence; these are all the people, we have them all lined up in order, like specimens in a box. But on another level, it was a way for me to connect with an image of my grandmother and history and to prove to myself in a way that she really was there, even though it was sort of hard to get anyone in the family to say that she was there. What did she do there? What was her life like there? What did that look like?” Tajiri, interview with the author. 41. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 256. 42. Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 48.

Part II

1. Seventy-five percent were male, and 68 percent of the refugees were between twenty and forty years old. Centers for Disease Control, “Health Status of Haitian Migrants,” 138–40. 2. Marine Corps Association & Foundation, “Operation Guantánamo.”

Chapter 3

1. HCC III. 2. Farmer, Pathologies of Power, 66. 3. Deposition of Fritznel Camy, 26 February 1993, TLS. 4. Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 82–83.

Notes to Pages 70–89 241

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