Carceral Entanglements: Gendered Public Memories of Japanese American World War II Incarceration(Critical Race, Indigeneity, and Relationality)

Japanese Americans have long contended with settler colonization and mass criminalization by the state, most notably during the WWII era when they were forced into incarceration camps. In Carceral Entanglements, Wendi Yamashita asks, how do narratives of worth and success that make Japanese Americans legible to the state come to be? What are the consequences of such narratives? Carceral Entanglements features interviews, archival research, and texts to explore racial violence and patriotic masculinity and explain how Japanese American history and identity are publicly memorialized. Yamashita examines museums, digital archives, pilgrimages, and student-run and performed plays to understand how Japanese Americans occupy a “contradictory location” produced by the state. She also addresses historical erasure, race relations and the struggle for redress and reparations. Carceral Entanglements is about the interlocking relationship Japanese American incarceration memories have to the prison industrial complex and the settler colonial logics that at times unknowingly sustain it.

About the Author :
Wendi Yamashita is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at California State University, Sacramento. She is coeditor of Asian Americans & Pacific Islanders: A Historical Community Overview.

Review :
“In Carceral Entanglements, Wendi Yamashita shows how narratives of Japanese American incarceration instantiate discourses of gender, sexual, racial, and national/colonial power yet also contain avenues for critique and disruption. By reading cultural performances and practices, such as commemorations, digital archiving, and pilgrimages, through the lenses of queer of color critique and critiques of settler colonialism, Yamashita powerfully argues that critically remembering incarceration can generate understandings and solidarities that decenter racism, patriarchal heteronormativity, and empire.”-Daryl Joji Maeda, Dean and Vice Provost of Undergraduate Education and Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, and author of Like Water: A Cultural History of Bruce Lee “Wendi Yamashita offers an innovative analysis of the ways in which long-standing narratives of Japanese American incarceration during World War II and the subsequent successful redress campaign have resulted in a singular, ethnic-focused analysis of the World War II incarceration as an exceptional event in the history of U.S. democracy. Her deft interweaving of critiques across feminists of color, abolitionists, and black radical thought is truly inspiring. Yamashita highlights the ways in which community and national memories can be weaponized against other groups, even in the name of social justice, and seeks to outline alternative paradigms of community memory and history. Carceral Entanglements provides a much-needed critique against the popular discourse of incarceration and patriotism.”-Karen J. Leong, Associate Professor of History at the University of New Mexico, and author of The China Mystique: Pearl S. Buck, Anna May Wong, Mayling Soong, and the Transformation of American Orientalism "This book is a must read for public historians, community nonprofits, and comparative race scholars. As a public historian, I have experienced similar moments of discomfort as Yamashita around public narratives of Asian American history that reinforce neoliberalism and multiculturalism. How can ethnic studies and gender studies inform public history work? Yamashita demonstrates how to rethink World War II incarceration public narratives carefully and reminds us why the stakes of doing so - solidarity, abolition and care work - are high."-Nichi Bei News "Carceral Entanglements radically ruptures dominant representations of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II.... Yamashita’s thought-provoking new book reminds us that Japanese Americans are well-positioned to continue engaging in ongoing and reciprocal approaches to cross-racial advocacy, both critically reflecting on their familial and/or historical connections to the carceral state and maintaining solidarities with BIPOC communities and other Americans who find themselves continually subjected to state-sanctioned criminalization, exclusion, and violence."-International Examiner