Blackface Behind Barbed Wire Gender and Racial Triangulation in the Japanese American Internment Camps Emily Roxworthy THE CONFUSER: Come on, you can impersonate a Negro better than Al Jolson, just like you can impersonate a Jap better than Marlon Brando. [...] Half-Japanese and half-colored! Rare, extraordinary object! Like a Gauguin! — Velina Hasu Houston, Waiting for Tadashi ([2000] 2011:9) “Fifteen nights a year Cinderella steps into a pumpkin coach and becomes queen of Holiday Inn,” says Marjorie Reynolds as she applies burnt cork to her face [in the 1942 filmHoliday Inn]. The cinders transform her into royalty. — Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise (1996:183) During World War II, young Japanese American women performed in blackface behind barbed wire. The oppressive and insular conditions of incarceration and a political climate that was attacking the performers’ own racial status rendered these blackface performances somehow exceptional and even resistant. 2012 marked the 70th anniversary of the US government’s deci- sion to evacuate and intern nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast. The mass incarceration of Issei and Nisei in 1942 was justified by a US mindset that conflated every eth- nic Japanese face, regardless of citizenship status or national allegiance, with the “face of the TDR: The Drama Review 57:2 (T218) Summer 2013. ©2013 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 123 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00264 by guest on 01 October 2021 enemy.”1 While this racist reading of the Japanese (American) face has been widely condemned in the intervening 70 years, the precarious semiotics of Japanese ethnicity are remarkably pres- ent for contemporary observers attempting to apprehend the relationship between a Japanese (American) face and blackface. These precarious semiotics produced international outcry in the 1990s with the exposure of Japanese girls donning blackface on the fashionable streets of Tokyo’s Shibuya district — albeit a postmodern version of the blackface mask created not with burnt cork but with tanning machines. These ganguro (literally, “face black”) girls startled audiences around the world, par- ticularly in Japan and the United States. Vocal spokesmen for the Japanese patriarchy compared the performers to subhuman prostitutes, and US observers expressed alarm at extraordinary objects that seemed to be yet another example of blackface minstrelsy’s transnational immortality. US observers such as John G. Russell, iona rozeal brown, and Joe Wood2 were quick to conflate these late 20th-century ganguro girls with the white American men who made their fortunes impersonating racist caricatures of African Americans during the extended US heyday of min- strelsy onstage and in film (ca. 1830–1930). Such a conflation rested not only on the semiotic precariousness of Japanese ethnicity but also on the assumption of an uninterrupted, continuous performance of whiteness across vast expanses of space and time. At a liminal point in space and time — the wartime internment camps, where the US govern- ment’s suspension of civil liberties suspended Japanese Americans between two nations — Nisei internees, particularly young Nisei women, performed blackface in a manner that calls this continuity into question and calls upon scholars to conduct more nuanced readings of black- face performances that fall outside the black-white binary. Two young Nisei women’s black- face performances were staged in 1942 at California’s Santa Anita Assembly Center and Arizona’s Gila River Relocation Center where the lenses of girls’ subculture and racial trian- gulation reveal these wartime ganguro girls as material subjects that are stubbornly resistant to conflation with dominant blackface minstrelsy. While the white administrators employed by the US government to run the Japanese American prisons may have witnessed this black- face behind barbed wire, these performances were primarily presented to an audience of fel- low internees yoked together by shared persecution. Although, as we will see, these young Nisei 1. “Issei” refers to the immigrant first generation of Japanese Americans, the majority of which came to the United States before the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act that severely limited Asian immigration and prohibited the immigrant generation from becoming naturalized US citizens. These longtime US residents were not allowed to become citizens, and California’s Alien Land Laws forbade them from owning property. “Nisei” refers to the American-born second generation, whose US citizenship did not protect them from imprisonment in the war- time concentration camps; two-thirds of the internees were Nisei US citizens. 2. Joe Wood’s candid essay “The Yellow Negro” (1997) relates his initial conflation of ganguro girls with racist US blackface, and how the time he spent in Japan dispelled this assumption for him. Figure 1. (previous page) Interned Japanese Americans in blackface march in the Harvest Festival Parade, 26 November 1942, at the Gila River Relocation Center, Rivers, Arizona. (Photo by Francis Stewart; courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration) Emily Roxworthy is Associate Professor of Theatre and Dance at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of The Spectacle of Japanese American Trauma: Racial Performativity and World War II (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008), which received the Barnard Hewitt Award honorable mention; and project director of the NEH-funded digital humanities prototype Drama in the Delta (a role-playing video game about the camps). Her current book-length project is tentatively titled Frankenmom: Behind the Spectacle of Celebrity Mothers and examines the Asian influence on contemporary Mother Courage-like media representations of women who mother in public. [email protected] Emily Roxworthy 124 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/DRAM_a_00264 by guest on 01 October 2021 women were often inspired by hegemonic blackface representations circulated by popular cul- ture, their own cultural productions in the camps were far removed from such mass circula- tion. Instead of enacting naïve mimicry of dominant blackface, young women at Santa Anita and Gila River used blackface behind barbed wire to proclaim their own tactical agency and mock the racial traditions of both Japan and the United States. Nuanced, close analysis of these enact- ments also reveals the spectacular failure posed by the performative “products” of the young Nisei women’s blackface processes; as theatre and performance studies scholars we should rel- ish the process of wrestling with these signs at least as much as we relish the analysis of theat- rical remains (such as archival photos) that assault contemporary observers with, in this case, decontextualized images of Japanese (American) faces marked by black makeup. These theat- rical remains often pose themselves — especially across the expanse of 70 years of space and time — as spectacular failures emptied of potential resistance. On the contrary, curiosity about the productivity of this failure encourages a consideration of the ontology and efficacy of young Nisei women’s blackface behind barbed wire in a state of suspension that mirrors the liminal status of Japanese American incarceration itself. Girls’ Subculture While both of the instances of internee blackface I am discussing here starred young Nisei women, the August 1942 staging of a “Southern Jamboree” by the 35 Girls’ Clubs at the Santa Anita Assembly Center explicitly occurred within the context of self-segregated, all-female social groups that offered the opportunity for a girls’ subculture to develop behind barbed wire.3 Before the US government imprisoned them in one of the 10 War Relocation Authority (WRA) camps for what they were told would be the duration of the war,4 Japanese Americans had to report for several months to one of 18 Wartime Civilian Control Agency (WCCA) cen- ters.5 Mainstream media accounts spectacularized this forced exodus and imprisonment as it unfolded over the course of 1942, as if it was a holiday excursion to which a suspicious minor- ity gamely submitted. Perhaps the most infamous of these WCCA assembly centers was the one that imprisoned more than 18,000 people at the famed Santa Anita Racetrack in Arcadia, California, from March through October 1942. Although the military had hastily whitewashed Santa Anita’s horse stalls for conversion to internee housing, the stench of manure and hay remained to remind internees that they were considered an enemy race that deserved the same treatment as animals. In addition, the semiotics of an internationally celebrated horse track were transferred wholesale to the incarceration of human beings at Santa Anita, which the US media again treated as an entertaining spectacle rather than a serious breach of the Constitution. The spectacularization of internees was also evidenced in propaganda photographs that often fea- tured female bodies in nonthreatening and trivializing poses of compliance (fig. 2). On 4 August 1942, US military police declared martial law for three days at Santa Anita after the escalation of internee protests — led in no small part by Japanese American women and chil- dren — over the camp administration’s decision to perform a search-and-seizure operation tar- geting internees possessing so-called contraband. As Brian Masaru Hayashi points out, the 3. Shirley Jennifer Lim has documented