Reviewed by Greg Robinson | Reviews | Journal of American Ethnic History, 28.3

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Reviewed by Greg Robinson | Reviews | Journal of American Ethnic History, 28.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews

Historical Memories of the Japanese American Internment and the Struggle for Redress. By Alice Yang Murray. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. xv + 590 pp. Maps, photos, graphs, notes, bibliography, and index. $65.00 (cloth).

In her new book, historian Alice Yang Murray sets forth the "politics of memory" by examining the struggles over the historical meanings and representations assigned to the wartime removal and confinement of Japanese Americans. Her goal is to trace shifts in the dominant narrative of the camps that accompanied the progress of the redress struggle during the 1970s and after. As she explains, this grand narrative produced both by wartime government officials and the Nisei (second-generation Japanese Americans) of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) strategically portrayed Japanese Americans as patriotic citizens and victims of wartime hysteria, thereby obscuring both official racism and conflict in the camps. In contrast, the "revisionists" who came of age in the era of the Black Power movement and the Vietnam War sought to recognize and celebrate resistance in the camps as an extension of a larger history of struggle by Asian Americans against white racism. Rejecting the image of the "model minority" that the previous generation had embraced, the revisionists—led by third-generation Japanese Americans—denounced structural racism and expressed solidarity with other racial groups. The revisionist narrative became a prominent feature of ethnic media, memoirs, and community-based oral histories but did not filter through effectively to the national mainstream. Thus, the campaign for reparative justice in Congress was fought largely by reference to the traditional narrative. As a result, sharp disagreements erupted over the portrayal and meaning of the Japanese American experience, lasting into the 1990s.

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