ART RECLAIMS HISTORY: ​ART AS TESTAMENT

DIVIDED CULTURE, CONTESTED HISTORY

- Culture includes
- Symbols​: stop signs, red lights (universal)
- Shared heritage​: we share a past ( we can contest on what events mean not
whether the events happened) —> can contest whether people who signed
Declaration of Independence were traitors who deserved to have heads cut off or
patriots who were revolutionary
- Historical symbology can be contested
- Meaning can be conveyed in words​(usually what historians deal with)
- Meaning can be conveyed in images: ​image of woman kissing flag —>
assumption: she’s a widow saying goodbye to her husband at the funeral
- If you are historically fancy, you know that is Nancy Reagan and she is
mourning Ronald Reagan’s death
- Artist put that photo + one of reagan on a cover with the image of a body
of someone who died from aids —> changing symbology, basically
linking Reagan’s presidency with the HIV breakout in the U.S.

WHO CONTROLS HISTORICAL CONTENT?

- historical Discussions in our reading
- David Trend considered this issue in Chapter 1
- Gordon Chang, in ​The Visual Arts and Asian American history
- Campo, in “Haptic Temporalities”
- The essay from ​Smithsonian ​magazine
- This lecture will focus on an episode in American history: internment of
Japanese-American​: a time when the U.S. was at war with Japanese —> idea that they
were not American and should not be part of America since before Pearl Harbor)
- Japs became a slur in the 1940s
- A photo is worth a thousand words —> sometimes when people don’t believe something,
a picture makes them believe

INTERNMENT POLICY
- US Government “relocation” program affecting citizens and non-citizens of Japanese
origin​: “relocation” in quotes because it was the actual word used by the government
because they didn’t want to use the word interment or concentration camps in documents
- Forbidden to live in “military exclusion zones” along the West Coast
- Required to sell property prior to relocation
- Moved as family groups
- Policy began in early 1942, lasts until 1945
 - Image shows people behind a wooden fence with barbed wire —> looks like something
from the Holocaust, but with Japanese people
- Assumptions were people born in Japan and their children born in the U.S. would form
danger in espionage and other forms sabotage
- decided that they should be rounded up and taken away from the West coast
because manufacturing facilities and forts and bases were on west side in pacific
- Pearl Harbor December 11, 1941

WHERE THE CAMPS WERE

- Camps located in seven states,, mostly in desolate areas
- California: Manzanar, Tule Lake
- Idaho: Mindoka
- Wyoming: Heart Mountain
- Utah: Topaz
- Colorado: Granada
- Arizona: Poston, Gila River

WHO WAS INCLUDED

- 112,000 Japanese- Americans in the United States
- Little political power in local affairs
- Clustered together in ethnic communities
- Vast majority lived in the three west coast states
- (Does not include Hawaii)
- “Living in the West Coast Exclusion zone”

LIFE GOES ON
- Issei and Nisei
- Issei: generation born in Japan who immigrated to the United States
- Many had become U.S. citizens
- Some remained (legal) aliens​(alien is legal term —> neutral —> légate
terminology because there are citizens and aliens)
- Immigration had been subject to quota system from the 1920s; so, most
​ ere older by 1942
issei w
- Nissei: generation born in the United States to Issei parents
- Born U.S. citizens
- Regarded by mainstream culture as “unassimilable”
- Sansei is the third generation

WHO WAS NOT INCLUDED

 - Most German, Italian aliens; Italian-Americas and German-Americans
- But, 5,000 German, Italian aliens deemed dangerous were tinkered
- Leftists and Communists not interned
- Japanese-Americans in Hawaii
- Japanese-Americans living outside the exclusion zones
- You could get released early from camp if …
- You were willing to perform agricultural labor in California (furlough for season)
- You were a college student and could transfer to an institution farther east (4300
individuals)
- You enlisted in the U.S. (segregated) armed forces
- 442 Regimental Combat team becomes most decorated unit of the
war​(sent into combat more often/frequently -> accumulated many medals)
- But sent to Europe …

WHO WAS MINE OKUBO?

- Born in Riverside, CA
- BA, M.A. in art from UC Berkeley
- Lived with her brother in Berkeley, in December 1941
- She and her brother included in the Exclusion Order
- Shifted first to Tanforan Relocation Camp
- Then to Topaz

OKUBO’S INTERNMENT
- Interned
- At Tanforan: 6 months
- At Topaz: 2 years
- Observer, artist
- Kept sketched with her
- Taught art in the camps

OKUBO’S MEMOIR
- Released early when hired by ​Fortune ​magazine
- Went to New York
- Inadvertently historian
- Text memoirs common
- Virtually only visual record by an internee
- Dorothea Lange also has a series of photographs, but … ​purpose was to make the
situation look better than it was