Power to the People: Documenting Police Violence in Cleveland

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stacie M Williams ◽  
Jarrett Drake
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
State Violence ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Grassroots Organizations ◽  
Internment Camps ◽  
Police Violence ◽  
Community Archives ◽  
Community Organizers ◽  
Community Archive

Archivists have long recognized the inherent historical and social mandate in preserving stories of those who endured violence at the hands of the state. Examples of this responsibility include archivists who recorded public tribunals in post-apartheid South Africa, documented stories of Japanese Americans forced into internment camps during World War II, and acquired collections of 1960s civil rights activists who experienced military intervention while fighting to end segregation. These endeavors align with the historian Howard Zinn's call for archivists to "compile a whole new world of documentary material" about the lived experiences of marginalized populations and communities. Drawing upon Zinn's charge as well as scholarly literature around community archives, social justice, and human rights, this article describes the joint effort of community organizers and professional archivists who collaborated to establish a community archive for victims of police violence in Cleveland, Ohio. The archive, A People's Archive of Police Violence in Cleveland, provides a sustainable, autonomous means for Cleveland residents to share their first-hand accounts of police violence in the region. The authors will narrate the archive's conception and development as well as advance the archive as a post-custodial model for other grassroots organizations protesting various forms of state violence.

scholarly journals Process Drama in the Japanese University Classroom: Phase Three, The Homelessness Project

2016 ◽  
Vol X (1) ◽  
pp. 18-32
Author(s):  
Eucharia Donnery
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Role Play ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Process Drama ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Internment Camps ◽  
Communication Course ◽  
Third Phase ◽  
The Social ◽  
Guest Lecturer

The purpose of this paper is to describe the third phase of a process drama project, which focused thematically on the social issue of homelessness. Two classes of the elective English Communication course took part in this project twice weekly for ten weeks, in which the students examined homelessness from the perspectives of Japanese-Americans incarcerated in internment camps during World War II. The goal of the project was for students to develop an understanding of homelessness, while simultaneously losing awareness of English as a dreaded examination subject, and using the target language as a viable communicative tool instead. The techniques used in this project were manifold: tableau, family role-play, class role-play, writing-in-role, reaction-writing, research online in both Japanese and English to examine the nature of propaganda, online class discussions, as well as a guest lecturer session with a refugee speaker1. The trajectory of this discussion moves along a traditional Japanese Noh theater three-part narrative arc, called Jo-Ha-Kyu , “Enticement・Crux・Consolidation”.

Blackface Behind Barbed Wire: Gender and Racial Triangulation in the Japanese American Internment Camps

2013 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-142 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Roxworthy
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
Internment Camps ◽  
Us History ◽  
Japanese American Internment ◽  
Racial Impersonation ◽  
Blackface Performance

In a dark footnote to a dark chapter in US history, Japanese Americans interned by their own government during World War II performed in blackface behind barbed wire. Exploring blackface performance in the camps raises questions regarding the potential resistance of racial impersonation and blackface's potential for triangulating race.

Asian Exclusion and Enforced Leisure

Mahjong ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 144-161
Author(s):  
Annelise Heinz
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Chinese Americans ◽  
The United States ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Internment Camps ◽  
The Government ◽  
American Children ◽  
Work Family ◽  
Asian People ◽  
Immigration Station

Despite their differences, Chinese and Japanese migrants and their American children occupied a shared location in an American racial framework that placed them outside the possibility of inclusion through cultural and political assimilation, regardless of long residence or native birth. The detention of Chinese Americans at the Pacific border and the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II were physical manifestations of exclusion. Even as social scientists challenged earlier fears about cultural and biological blending, most Americans consistently held Asian people apart as inherently foreign and often threatening. Detention as a measure of national defense, enacted at Angel Island Immigration Station and in wartime incarceration (or “internment”) camps, separated detainees from the norms of work, family, and sociability. Even as the United States screened working-class immigrants for their risk of becoming “public charges,” the government enforced leisure on those incarcerated. Unchosen leisure thus became a problem to be solved.

Christianity, Social Justice, and the Japanese American Incarceration During World War II

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne M. Blankenship
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Church Leaders ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Religious Experiences ◽  
World War ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
The Impact

Anne M. Blankenship's study of Christianity in the infamous camps where Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II yields insights both far-reaching and timely. While most Japanese Americans maintained their traditional identities as Buddhists, a sizeable minority identified as Christian, and a number of church leaders sought to minister to them in the camps. Blankenship shows how church leaders were forced to assess the ethics and pragmatism of fighting against or acquiescing to what they clearly perceived, even in the midst of a national crisis, as an unjust social system. These religious activists became acutely aware of the impact of government, as well as church, policies that targeted ordinary Americans of diverse ethnicities. Going through the doors of the camp churches and delving deeply into the religious experiences of the incarcerated and the faithful who aided them, Blankenship argues that the incarceration period introduced new social and legal approaches for Christians of all stripes to challenge the constitutionality of government policies on race and civil rights. She also shows how the camp experience nourished the roots of an Asian American liberation theology that sprouted in the sixties and seventies.

scholarly journals Comics in Action: A Reflection of the Dominant Narrative in World War II

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (Spring 2019) ◽  
Author(s):  
Spencer Gutierrez
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Comic Books ◽  
Comic Book ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
World War ◽  
Internment Camps ◽  
Book Covers ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Times ◽  
The U.S

In this paper, I argue that the propagandized use of comic books during World War II promoted views among Americans which contributed to antipathy towards Americans of Japanese and German descent. More generally, the goal of the essay is to highlight the importance of comic books as a reflection of the times – they simultaneously influence and are influenced by society’s dominant ideas – and promote the further study of such material. I examine the text and art from three comic book covers dated from 1942-1943. An analysis of these selections suggests that comic books depicted Axis soldiers as savage and animalistic, while Americans are portrayed as trustworthy heroes with whom the reader may easily identify. These conclusions are confirmed by various government sources, which claimed to have been teaching citizens about the war and the enemy, which in reality meant teaching citizens how to hate the enemy. Even more disturbing, comic books were read primarily by children, so these hateful ideas were spread to the most impressionable of all Americans. These very depictions, I argue, reflected and contributed to the general American sentiment towards the war, specifically in relation to the treatment of Japanese-Americans in internment camps and the use of atomic bombs in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Further, the proliferation of comic books and the sole fact that they were used as a propaganda arm by the U.S. Government demonstrates their importance during the period and suggests that they be studied more to further understand their importance to American society.

The Fight for Asian American Civil Rights

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah M. Griffith
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Racial Difference ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Constitutional Rights ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
Imperial Expansion

During World War II, a group of American liberal Protestants set out to defend the constitutional rights of Japanese Americans interned without trial. The root of their wartime activism can be traced to the late nineteenth century when American imperial expansion and a surge in new immigration from Asia led to heated debates over the meaning of racial difference and the limits of American immigration inclusion. From the early 1900s through World War II, American liberal Protestants stood on the frontlines of these debates. This book explores the myriad religious, social, and political forces that shaped liberal Protestant activism over the first half of the twentieth century and the legacies their initiatives left in the post-World War II era.

scholarly journals Enemy Aliens

2004 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 139-142
Author(s):  
Imad A. Ahmad
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Liberty ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Attorney General ◽  
Ronald Reagan ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Palmer Raids ◽  
The Government ◽  
Enemy Combatants

David Cole, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, is a brilliantconstitutional attorney and an outstanding advocate of civil liberty. InEnemy Aliens, he articulates the case that Attorney General John Ashcroft’sabridgements of the civil liberties of non-citizens and alleged “enemy combatants”in the name of the war on terrorism is at once part of an old strategyof establishing such constitutionally questionable actions against thosepeople least politically able to defend themselves and, at the same time, thefirst step to expanding such incursions against civil rights into the populationat large.Cole writes with the meticulous care appropriate to a legal mind ofthe first caliber and with a graceful and literate rhetorical style. “The linebetween citizen and foreigner, so natural during wartime,” he writes (p.5), “is not only easy to exploit when restrictive measures are introduced,but also easy to breach when the government later finds it convenient todo so.” Cole writes with authority on facts of which too many Americansare completely ignorant: selective detention and deportation based onreligion or national origin, secret trials (or no trials), prolonged interrogation“under highly coercive, incommunicado conditions ... and withoutaccess to lawyers,” and “indefinite detention on the attorney general’ssay-so” (p. 5).Cole presents the historical precedents that justify his thesis. In 1988,President Ronald Reagan signed a bill apologizing for the appalling detentionof Japanese-Americans during World War II. However, that internmentwas an extension of the Enemy Alien Act of 1798, “driven by nativist fearsof radical French and Irish immigrants” (p.7), but still on the books. The“Palmer Raids” of the early twentieth century, wherein thousands of for ...

scholarly journals Voices that Matter: The Attic Echoes Through the House

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Flávia Rodrigues Monteiro
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Internment Camps ◽  
Person Plural ◽  
Women's Voices ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Collective Experience ◽  
First Person Plural ◽  
The Buddha

Abstract: In The Buddha in the Attic, Julie Otsuka explores two main topics: the Picture Bride practice and the internment camps for Japanese Americans during World War II. An analysis of the development of both topics in the narrative reveals parallels with potential issues faced by women and diasporic subjects in contemporaneity, connecting with theoretical approaches on these topics. It is interesting to note that the narrative is mainly developed in first person plural with occasional expansion to other subjects such as “I”, “she”, “he”, and even “you”. The effect of this game between singular and plural is a narrative that describes a collective experience but avoids essentialisms. Even though it focuses on Women’s voices, the novel also explores different subjectivities involved in the diasporic experience. Thus, Otsuka’s narrative gives voice to disempowered subjects long locked in the attic of history and makes their voices echo through the houses of contemporaneity.

PROHIBITING "AMERICAN CONCENTRATION CAMPS"

2005 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
MASUMI IZUMI
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
Internal Security ◽  
Japanese American Internment ◽  
American Experience ◽  
Historical Memories ◽  
National Emergency

In September 1971 Congress repealed the Emergency Detention Act, Title II of the McCarran Internal Security Act of 1950. This act had authorized the President to apprehend and detain any person suspected as a threat to internal security during a national emergency. This article analyzes the Title II repeal campaign between 1967 and 1971, revealing that the public historical memories of Japanese American internment greatly influenced support for repeal in Congress and among the American public. Civil rights and antiwar protesters both feared that such a law might be used against them, but Japanese Americans had been interned during World War II. Their presence in the repeal campaign made the question of detention starkly real and the need for repeal persuasive. Conversely, their work for repeal allowed them to address a painful part of their American experience and speak publicly as a community.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document